Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and Phnom Penh

After a rather sucky time in Nha Trang we excitedly boarded a bus to Saigon to spend our last few days in Vietnam there. It’s official name is Ho Chi Minh City but we heard that the locals prefer to call it Saigon, for either political reasons or cause it’s easier to say. So Saigon it is! We asked a few other travellers what it was like before arriving and a lot said it was similar to Bangkok and Hanoi (really busy, as you’d expect from a big city) so we weren’t sure that we’d like it so much. However, when we arrived we didn’t find it was too busy at all, by far one of the more quieter and peaceful big cities we’d been.

We arrived from the sleeper bus at about 6:30am and had planned to get a couple hours sleep before we ventured into the city! But we weren’t allowed in our room yet so we had to start the day there and then. Saigon has 3 large parks through the city so the first thing we did was stroll through them, watching elderly women dance with swords and do what appeared to be a morning yoga. One of the parks included the independence palace, where presidents would stay and work. This was kind of a museum too, showing us where it was bombed in the war and telling us about all the different presidents. After that we wandered the city and stumbled across some cool sites! Including the Central Post Office building and (their own version of) The Norte Dame Cathedral.

We booked a tour for the next day to the Cu Chi Tunnels. We stopped on the way to a ceramic workshop where all the art was made out of eggshells and made by disabled people! The Cu Chi Tunnels are a series of tunnels built by the Vietnamese Army to surprise American Soldiers during battle. The tunnels were less than a metre wide and tall, and we got to in them to see what it was like. We didn’t stay in for long, it wasn’t cool. We were also shown a lot of Vietnamese traps used in the area which was pretty gruesome. There was a shooting range on site where visitors could buy bullets and shoot at a target! You could shoot with any kind of guns you wanted including machine guns! I thought it was a tad crazy (and too darn loud) but Kieran thought it was pretty cool. We visited a lot of places to do with the Vietnam war while we were here but this was probably the most interesting.

That night the atmosphere in Saigon was incredible! Vietnam’s under 23s Football team got into the final of the Asia Cup and the people in Saigon were blummin ecstatic. It was so sweet to see everyone so patriotic and celebratory (and they hadn’t even actually won anything). The streets were filled with mopeds with Vietnamese flags and people were lighting off fireworks in the street! (It probably wasn’t the safest of evenings but the atmosphere was awesome). We didn’t get anything on the GoPro for this because we don’t tend to take it out at night, but we have a few photos. Kieran also met someone from a little village near Filey, where he used to play cricket when we has a junior, small world!

The next day we got a 6 hour bus journey across the border to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. This is the first place that we have been really seriously warned about bag snatchers and motorcycle thieves. There was signs up everywhere and the staff at the hostel were constantly telling us to watch out bags and not have our phones in our hands. For that reason, we didn’t feel like risking Gill’s (the GoPro’s) life, and we left him locked away. However, other than the Royal Palace, we wouldn’t have filmed much anyway. The Royal Palace in the centre of town was huge and grand and beautiful! It was full of temples and Buddha statues and even some ill-looking monkeys. We walked along the huge riverside and relaxed by our hostel pool for the rest of our first day.

The next day we visited the S21 Museum (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum) and The Killing Fields. The S21 Museum was formally a prison where the Khmer Rouge regime kept approximately 17,000 prisoners, with only 7 survivors. We didn’t know too much about the museum but I’m really glad that we went there before going to the killing fields so we knew more about what we were seeing. The Killing Fields was where most of the prisoners were taken and executed, and put in mass graves. The whole experience was very informative and I’m really glad we went to see it; something everyone should do if they visit Cambodia.

Much love, Kieran and Rachel x