Three wolves™

I just couldn’t resist writing that title…

Vietnam is cool. Super hot, but very cool. We’ve just stayed a few days in Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon), where we all had various suits and tops made by the many many tailoring shops around town. I got a few shirts, a jacket & a nice charcoal suit made - all for around $600NZD! So awesome…

While in Saigon we visited the Cu Chi tunnels - a massive network of underground tunnels the Vietnamese used in the war to elude the Americans and generally cause mayhem (they would wait until dark, then pop up from underground and pick off a few yanks, then duck back inside). The Americans even built one of their military bases right over top of so of the tunnels, so expertly dug and camouflaged were they (thank you, yoda).

About 150m of the tunnels are viewable by tourists, and they have been widened for our bigger size. The actual tunnels the NLC used are tiny, and it’s quite hard to believe that they fit themselves into and around them.

They had everything underground: Kitchens (the smoke from the wood burning fire being dispersed about 20m away so that if the Yanks found the smoke they would blow up where the smoke was coming from, but never actually blew up the kitchen - genius), living quarters, command centers, sleeping quarters, storage rooms, bunkers, the lot. There were three levels - one 3m down, another (the one they used to move from place to place in) 6m down, and then still another 12m down which they used for escape in case of emergency. They had tunnels going all the way to the saigon river so they could go there and wash, and then head back to the front to fight.

The tunnels brought out the little kid in me as I remembered building tunnels with my buddies years ago. It was a lot of fun crawling through the little spaces - sometimes on your hands and knees, and sometimes in complete darkness. Every 10m they have ventilation holes too, so they could basically stay down there for as long as they wanted.

Alana and the rest of the girls weren’t too keen on getting inside, but they came along anyway. Al got out after 15m as she gets a bit claustrophobic, but Beth carried on with me till the end. I could have crawled around that place all day it was so cool, but the others weren’t too keen so we left, and jumped back on the bus to the city.

Kicked around Saigon for another day - and I spent it hanging around the electronics quarter of the city. In Vietnam, as well as most other SE Asian countries, all similar business are grouped together in one massive area. So here there are a lot of motorbikes, and you’ll see a whole street full of motorbikes shops - all identical to one another, all selling the same bikes, all competing for your dollar. Guess it makes for competitive business…

Anyway, being the gadget geek that I am I amused myself at these places for over half the day and almost…… almost brought some nice hifi speakers from one of the shops (about half the NZD price), but didn’t quite have time to get to the bank to get out the required money, so I got the guys details and I reckon i’ll get back to NZ and wire him the money and get him to ship them over - with shipping they are still insanely cheaper than I could get them in NZ! It’s such a good time here for electronics, clothes, etc. We pay waaaaay too much in NZ and i think now my motto when buying anything in New Zealand will be that I can fly to SEA, buy what I need, come back, and it will still be cheaper.

Today the girls all went and got facials, waxes of various kinds in various bodily areas and had paint and other things slapped to their bodies. After my “waxing” experience in Cambodia, I decided to give all that a wide berth and went down to the waterfront to book a dive trip.

So tomorrow, i’m off scuba diving with a local outfit here. We’ll go out for 2 dives which will take half a day. I’m told the fish life around here is awesome, and there is some nice coral reefs at the island we’re heading too as well. I tried to find a waterproof camera housing for my Lumix in the electronics shops, but they had none so I don’;t think i will get any pics from tomorrow, but believe me it will be a good time.

Day after tomorrow we’re off to Hanoi in the north (flying business class no less!) - spend a couple days there, then sadly it’s off back to good old welly town.