Vietnam #1 (Ho Chi Minh)
(The next few blogs will be about my trip to Vietnam, I will try to make them as interesting as possible and have a lot of information and pictures, these will be much longer than other blogs)
Thursday the 22nd of March was my last day of school before the 2 week spring break. I was going to Vietnam with my Oma, Mom and Brother. I finished packing Thursday night, and we were packing very lightly so that we could get around easier in Vietnam. Each of us had 1 backpack only, no checked bags. Thursday night I went to sleep around Midnight, and the next morning we all woke up around 4 AM, so that we could leave the house at 4:15 AM.
(The next few blogs will be about my trip to Vietnam, I will try to make them as interesting as possible and have a lot of information and pictures, these will be much longer than other blogs)
Thursday the 22nd of March was my last day of school before the 2 week spring break. I was going to Vietnam with my Oma, Mom and Brother. I finished packing Thursday night, and we were packing very lightly so that we could get around easier in Vietnam. Each of us had 1 backpack only, no checked bags. Thursday night I went to sleep around Midnight, and the next morning we all woke up around 4 AM, so that we could leave the house at 4:15 AM.
Other than clothes, the only things I was bringing to Vietnam were my phone, my laptop and headphones. I also packed my piano books just in case there was a piano, and I had the chance to practice. We got to the airport around 4:45 AM, our flight was at 6:30 AM. We got to our gate fairly easily, and flew to Paris. The flight was only about 2 hours long, but it felt much longer for me because I was so tired. Our layover in Paris was about 4 hours, so my Mom and I walked around. There was a piano in that airport, so I practiced piano for about 30 minutes.
On the next flight, it was straight to Vietnam. It was about 11 hours in total flight time. I had 2 meals on that flight, the first one being Lunch, and the second one being Breakfast. Once we would arrive in Vietnam, it would be around 7 AM, so my Mom advised us all to sleep, but I did not sleep much on that flight. I spent most of the time on the flight watching a Spanish TV show called "la casa de papel" which is about a group of people who planned a heist, and how they go about this huge robbery and print a lot of money. Its really interesting, plus it is in Spanish so I can try to improve my Spanish watching it.
This was one of my meals on the plane, it was very good. It had chicken, noodles, bread and a mushroom also. Once the plane landed in Vietnam we all got off and walked to submit our Visas. That went smoothly and we got outside and grabbed a taxi to go to our Air B&B which was in Ho Chi Minh, the largest city in Vietnam. It has a gigantic population of 8.5 million people. The city is named after Ho Chi Minh who was a Vietnamese Communist Revolutionary leader and chairman for the first workers party of Vietnam. When we got there, it was quite early so we couldn't check in straight away, so we left our bags with the mother of the person who's room we would be using to stay in.
We went swimming, there was a pool at the top of the building we were staying in. It was a very tall building and you could see in all 4 directions from where the pool was.
We also walked around to try to find some place to have Lunch. We found a person selling some food on the sidewalk and got some food from her. It was rice, chicken with onions and pork. The chicken tasted a bit weird compared to the chicken I was used to eating, but they were very nice. The chicken and onions came in a bag.
After swimming and lunch, we got a text saying that we were able to check in now, which was nice because we were not supposed to have checked in until 2 PM, but it was about 12:30 PM at that point. We were lead to our living space, and it was very nice, very clean which I was happy about because walking among the streets, it was very dirty and crowded.
We stayed in our apartment until about 5 PM, then we started to walk to a place to get dinner. It was about a 20 minute walk away from our apartment, but it was quite an adventure. In Vietnam, nobody on the street seem to follow any laws of the road whatsoever so trying to cross the road is a bit of a challenge.
There are some cars, but everybody rides mopeds or small motorcycles. Once we got to the place, there were many people there and people cooking strange foods, at least for me.
There was a women that was cooking octopus, chickens feet, and prawns.
We sat down at a table for the four of us. It looked like a very local place people went to eat at, not a very touristy type of place. We ordered some food, we got some octopus, some prawns, some noodles and crab.
It was probably one of the most messy meals I have ever had.
After we finished eating, it got dark very quickly. We started to walk to a main square, but we decided to just go home and do another adventure tomorrow.
Day #2 in Ho Chi Minh City, we all woke up around 7:30 AM. I was awoken by my brother and mother around 7:40 AM and I didn't want to get out of bed, but I got out of bed. By 8 AM we were down waiting for our tour guide. We were going to have a tour guide all day that had a car and would drive us around to different places around Ho Chi Minh City and to the Cu Chi District to see the Cu Chi tunnels used during the Vietnam war.
Our first place that we went to visit was the Cu Chi tunnels. Cu Chi is pronounced "Kuu Chee" tunnels. We left around 8 AM and got to Cu Chi at 10 AM so it took us about 2 hours to get there. Once we got there, we had to step outside into the hot air from our air conditioned car. It was a very nice day out, and our tour guide waited for us to visit the tunnels.
We went up to a window to purchase tickets, they were not that expensive. Things here are not as expensive as they are in Ireland, obviously. The currency that they use here is called the 'dong', and it is about 23,000 dong to 1 USD. That means if something costs 100,000, it is about 5 US dollars. After getting our tickets, we walked to the start of our tour. We had a nice tour guide who spoke english and guided us through everything. The first thing that he brought us to was a wooden lid covering up a hole in the ground. He had Levi sit and then drop down into the whole to see how small the entrance was but how people could fit inside of the hole:
Levi and my Mom both tried it, and said there was a large space underground for people to fit into. We next were lead to see a trap that the Viet Cong used against the United States when fighting the Vietnam war.
Info:
The Vietnam war was from 1955-1975 and was the South vs the North part of Vietnam. The North Vietnamese army was supported by the Soviet Union and China, and the South Vietnamese army was supported by the United States, South Korea and Australia, as this side was anti-communistic, fighting the North who were pro-communism. The United States were involved in this war because they believed in a 'domino theory' which said that if one country came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow in a domino effect. The Viet Cong were supporters of the North and fought guerrilla warfare against the United States. Guerrilla warfare is an entirely different way of fighting, ambushing US soldiers using surprise attacks, setting traps and landmines, planting bombs in towns. The US had trouble identifying the enemies as many would mingle within peasants, wearing ordinary clothes.
Here is the first trap we were shown, and I remember learning about these traps in school:
The grass would look normal, but if somebody stepped on it, it would turn and they would fall into spikes. Here are many more traps we were shown:
This trap has a metal plate below it, the Viet Cong would set these by pushing the spikes into the wall, then if somebody fell on the plate, it would pull the spikes back all into a + like shape, spiking whoever fell on the metal plate.
This 'rolling trap' was made so that if somebody fell into this trap, they would fall onto the spikes, and then be stabbed and fall into a pit below. The tour guide said they would be alive and yelling afterwards, so it would lure more people and more people would fall into the trap.
This trap is named the 'clipping armpit trap' because when it is set, the spikes go to the left and right, but when somebody falls, the spikes go up towards the sky and the person will fall and the spikes would impale them under their arms.
This 'see-saw' trap would be set with spikes pointing upwards, then when somebody fell on it, it could spin in either direction depending what side the person fell on it. The axis is in the middle so it can turn both ways.
This trap is also set with spikes up right, but it works as a window and if you step into one, the spikes open as shown as in the picture, while your foot goes down with it, impaling spikes into your foot.
This door trap is somehow triggered so that it swings down onto a person if they walk into a certain doorway.
We continued after seeing those traps to go and see some more about the tunnels. He said there was and still is about 250 km of underground tunnels, used during that war. As I remember learning in school, there were different types of rooms connected to the underground tunnels such as kitchens, sleeping rooms, and also rooms where you would make weapons. Our guide told us that they would re-use any metal from exploded bombs or shrapnel and make new weapons or bombs.
Relating to the Kitchen Room, we were shown these things that looked like ant hills, but they were actually places where the smoke from the kitchens would exit from, so they would not give away their position. They had to have these as far away from the actual kitchen as possible so that even if they saw the smoke, they would not be found. The holes above are where the smoke exits.
We also got to see people making sandals out of tires, and they told us that they would wear those in the tunnels because they were easy to make, and you could make them from tires.
We then had the option to go down into the tunnels. The tunnels were very small, only one person at a time, and you had to be crouched down or else you would not be able to fit into them.
They were very fun to go through, but I cant imagine living underground and having to go through these tunnels every day or for a long period of time. The ones we went in, we went in one way, and came out about 60 meters away at a different exit.
This is a really cool picture I found, I took it not knowing what the top right flag was, but I was able to find what it was with some research. The top left flag is the flag for the Communist Party of Vietnam, and the top right flag was the flag of the Viet Cong. The bottom is a picture of Ho Chi Minh, who was a Communist Revolutionary. Saigon was the name of Ho Chi Minh city up until 1975, when it was renamed after Ho Chi Minh, the first leader of North Vietnam. It was in 1975 that the North took over the city from the US and South Vietnamese Government, and was renamed by the Government of Hanoi.
Here is an image of a huge crater in the ground, it is from a bomb back during war time. At one point during that tour, tourists had the chance to try out some of the guns that were used during the war time, including machine guns and AK-47s. Kids of-course were not allowed to.
After we were finished visiting the Cu Chi place, we went back to our tour guide for the day, and hopped back into the car. It was nice to be cool again, and we drove 2 hours back to Ho Chi Minh City.
After a couple of hours, we continued our journey in Ho Chi Minh City and visited a Pagoda. A Pagoda is usually a sacred Buddhist building, temple. There are many in the city, and still used today, people come in and pray, and use incense also. They pray for luck, good health, to find a job and things like that. It is of-course free to enter. It was very interesting looking inside.
This is where the people stand with the incense and put candles down and pray.
After visiting the Pagoda, we stopped by the Notre Dame cathedral. We could not go inside, but it was beautiful to look at. It was established by French colonists while Saigon was under French conquest. It was established by the Roman Catholic Church. It was being worked on so we could not enter, but we got photos.
Right across the street from that was the General Post Office. It was constructed between 1886-1891 and is still a main post office to this day, and a main tourist attraction.
We went to the souvenir shop inside of the General Post Office. There were also little souvenirs that you could buy around the middle of the post office. I looked for magnets for Mr. Reidy (my English teacher) because he has a ton of magnets in his classroom that different students had brought back for him. I got 3 magnets that I could bring to him.
We next went to the Independent Palace, a major landmark of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. It was the working place and home of the President of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It was the ending place of the war also during the Fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). On April 30, 1975 the North Vietnamese Army's tanks crashed through its gates, and was where the ending of the war took place.
It was very modern and cool looking on the outside and inside.
There were many rooms in this Palace, including meeting rooms, and there was also a bunker under the Palace for protection.
There was also a Helicopter parked on the 3rd floor outside on the roof of the palace.
This is what we found in the bunker. It was just filled with rooms with chairs, and some radios. There was also a kitchen we found some where. The bunker was not that interesting.
Before getting back into the car, Levi spotted a tank and a fighter jet that we had to visit.
Our next stop was the War Remnants Museum which contained exhibits relating to the Vietnam War. It contained artillery, armor and aircraft collections as well as depictions of how South Vietnamese people were treated if caught and put into prisons. They had a ton of US helicopters and tanks and weapons.
These pictures were all only of outside which had all of the weapons, tanks and helicopters. Inside, there were many rooms that talked about how Agent Orange was used against Vietnam during the War. The articles I read said that it was used for deforestation mainly, but the inside of this museum stressed how much it hurt the Vietnamese and how it caused diseases and deformities in the people exposed to the chemical. It was dropped on forests during the war, mainly by planes and it was Orange. Here are some pictures drawn by children that were in the museum.
As I read online, one person who has visited many museums around the world said that many museums do a good job of telling both sides to the story and not giving an opinion, but this museum did not hesitate to tell their opinion on the matter.
We stopped by the Saigon Opera House just to take a picture. It opened January 1, 1900 and was built by the French.
It was around 4:10 PM, and we were all pretty tired from the adventurous day as you can tell from above. We decided to go to a walking street which is a long street where the cars or scooters are not allowed to go, and people walk. There are many places to eat along the street and we stopped to have dinner in this one nice restaurant who had a lot of organic food. They had beef nachos, so Levi and I both got that. They tasted different than what we were used to, but they were still good, we also both got a strawberry banana smoothie.
We started to walk back to our house after we were done eating. It took us a while to cross some of the roads since the cars and scooters never stop coming and never stop for anyone. We got back home, and Levi and I went swimming on the rooftop pool. The city below us looked very pretty during the night time. My Mom went down to the 1st floor to work out while we were swimming. We swam for about 70-80 minutes then went back down to our room.
Day #3 of Ho Chi Minh began Monday morning when I woke up at 7 AM. My Mom made us scrambled eggs and we ate them then went downstairs by 8 AM to meet our tour guide for the day. It was a new guy, not the guide we had yesterday. His name was Victor and he was very nice. We drove about 2 hours to get to the Mekong Delta. The Mekong Delta is a massive region in southern Vietnam that has a ton of rivers, swamps and islands. It has a population of 17.5 million in total. Here is a map of the region:
The white in the left picture is Vietnam, and the red is the Mekong Delta Region. The main way of transportation in that region is by boat, and its elevation is 0 cm above sea level. It has an area of 40,000 km squared, while Ho Chi Minh City has an area of only 2,000 km squared.
Once we got deep into the region, we arrived at this place that gave boat tours to people. My mom was debating and negotiating with them for about 1 hour before we finally agreed on a tour and price. The boat that Oma, my Mom, Levi and I got on was a long and skinny boat. The motor was very loud, and they had these chairs that let you recline and lay on your back. They were pretty nice chairs. It took 1 hour to get to our first stop which I will call Island #1.
On the ride to Island #1, I saw on the sides of the large river houses, and maybe floating warehouses.
After 1 hour, we arrived at Island #1 and the driver guy of the boat parked the boat and we got off. Our Mekong Delta guide brought us through what seemed like a small community with a couple houses. We came upon a cage filled with a lot of alligators. They were all just chillin in the cage and in the water.
After that we walked further into the village and Levi and I got to hold a python. They are snakes that are found a lot in Africa, Asia and Australia. They are nonvenomous and are generally considered not harmful to humans.
We continued to walk through the village and it slowly became bigger and bigger. We were led to a place where they made things out of coconuts such as candies, dried coconut shavings and skin care products. Our guide showed us how they would take the coconut water out and boil it to increase the % amount of sugar in it.
After the process is finished, what is left is a thick gooey substance that is put on the table. They let it cool down for a bit, then they can take it and cut it into squares. They then wrap them in rice paper, and then regular paper. There are many flavours of these candies including coconut chocolate, coconut peanut, and just regular coconut. My favorite was the regular coconut flavor, and we also bought some dried coconut shavings. They were delicious!
We continued to walk through the village and we stopped by the river at one point, and our guide showed us this certain plant that if you put the seed in your mouth, it would pop open within a few seconds. The seeds had to be black, and he even just poured water over it for 1 second, and like 6 seconds later, it popped open in his hand. They were funny little plants. Here are some pictures to give you an idea of what the village looked like. It was in the middle of a lot of plant life, and there were many rivers, but we were in the Mekong Delta so it makes sense.
Our guide told us how this certain big leaf from a tree could be used to pull other kids around in, so I pulled Levi around on the leaf.
We walked until we found a main road, where we took a "Mekong Taxi" as he called it, down the street. It was a donkey that was pulling us in a cart with wheels on it.
We got off at another place down the street. We walked into a village like restaurant place where we had a break and had some tea. The place had some shops along the path, and had roofs made of leaves and some plastic. It was very shady and a good place to cool off.
We had tea brought to us by some of the people working there, they put honey in the bottom, then put the tea over it. The tea was very good, it tasted like a flower, it was very sweet. We also got to eat a big tray of fruits including jackfruit, which is a fruit that looks like this.
We saw it a lot around the Mekong Delta area on trees. It is very plentiful around that area. The pineapples that they had were smaller than the ones that are usually bought in the US, that is probably because they genetically engineer the pineapples in the US to grow bigger, but I could be wrong. Here is our fruit plate.
Also I forgot to talk about the bananas they had which are seen in the picture above. They are really small and short, but they taste exactly like bananas so they are just mini bananas.
While we were drinking our tea and eating our fresh fruits, a band came and played some traditional Vietnamese songs for us. There were 3 musicians playing stringed instruments, and 3 women singing in total. I was really intrigued by this one certain instrument I had never seen before. I found a picture of it.
The cool thing is, it only has 2 strings but when he was playing it, he could hit a lot of notes on the scale. He was playing this instrument with the bow in-between the 2 strings, and kept switching between the 2 strings with his bow, and he used his other hand to change the pitch of the strings.
After all of that was done, our guide showed us the mini bee hive that they had behind their small restaurant. It is what is used to make the honey for the tea.
After looking at the bee hive, we followed our guide to the river and boarded a small skinny long boat. We proceeded to row down a very green canal with all of the plants to the right and left of us.
The lady who was paddling us down the canal was standing up in the back of the boat. While we were going down this canal, we saw many other boats pass us going the other way, all of them were the exact same style boats as the one we were riding in. Some of them did have motors on them, but not very fast ones though.
We traveled for about 30 minutes on this boat, until we got back to the original boat that brought us to Island #1.
We got back on our boat, and started to travel to the second island we would be visiting on our Mekong Delta tour. It took us about 25 minutes to get there from Island #1. Once we arrived at Island #2, we parked and got off. The second destination is known as the Con Phung area. The first thing that our guide told us about this island is about a man who only drank from coconuts for 30 years, from 1945-1975. We saw pictures on the wall of him, and we were told his body was skinny, because he did not eat food, only drank coconuts. He did this to protest the war that was going on at the time. There was a picture of this man with 2 cats and 3 mice right next to the cats, and was there to show how he had the power to bring 2 rivals together to be friendly. There was a pagoda / temple there for worshiping him. The entrance to it was very colorful and orange.
We followed our guide after we were done looking at the pagoda and got into the touristy area. There were ropes to climb, and a bamboo thing that we walked that went over a small pond. There were also these 2 ropes close together that went over the pond, but it was harder to do than it looked.
Some other people came along and tried to do the same 2 ropes. They got farther than Levi, but they turned back also.
There was another pit of alligators, but this one was deeper and you could also feed them meat off of what looked like a bamboo fishing pole. All of the alligators were stacked up on one another and looked like statues because of how still they were being.
Another tour guide was showing his group how to feed them, he was kind of teasing the alligators with the meat, and the other tourists tried also. Here is a link to the video of the alligators:
Here are some other pictures from that place:
After seeing all of that cool stuff, we headed back to our boat, and went back to our original starting point. It was a really fun tour of the Mekong Delta in about 4 hours.
We got back to the starting point, and hopped back in the car. From there we started our 2 hour drive back to Ho Chi Minh City. We did stop for Lunch on the way back though. It was a restaurant recommended to us by our guide for the day, we were a bit skeptical at first because it was just on the side of the road and quite random, but it actually had very good food.
I forgot to take a picture before we started to eat, but here is the aftermath of our delicious lunch:
We also stopped at 1 final pagoda before going back to our apartment. It was a pagoda that had 3 gigantic statues of buddha, one of them being a reclining buddha.
Day #2 in Ho Chi Minh City, we all woke up around 7:30 AM. I was awoken by my brother and mother around 7:40 AM and I didn't want to get out of bed, but I got out of bed. By 8 AM we were down waiting for our tour guide. We were going to have a tour guide all day that had a car and would drive us around to different places around Ho Chi Minh City and to the Cu Chi District to see the Cu Chi tunnels used during the Vietnam war.
Our first place that we went to visit was the Cu Chi tunnels. Cu Chi is pronounced "Kuu Chee" tunnels. We left around 8 AM and got to Cu Chi at 10 AM so it took us about 2 hours to get there. Once we got there, we had to step outside into the hot air from our air conditioned car. It was a very nice day out, and our tour guide waited for us to visit the tunnels.
We went up to a window to purchase tickets, they were not that expensive. Things here are not as expensive as they are in Ireland, obviously. The currency that they use here is called the 'dong', and it is about 23,000 dong to 1 USD. That means if something costs 100,000, it is about 5 US dollars. After getting our tickets, we walked to the start of our tour. We had a nice tour guide who spoke english and guided us through everything. The first thing that he brought us to was a wooden lid covering up a hole in the ground. He had Levi sit and then drop down into the whole to see how small the entrance was but how people could fit inside of the hole:
Levi and my Mom both tried it, and said there was a large space underground for people to fit into. We next were lead to see a trap that the Viet Cong used against the United States when fighting the Vietnam war.
Info:
The Vietnam war was from 1955-1975 and was the South vs the North part of Vietnam. The North Vietnamese army was supported by the Soviet Union and China, and the South Vietnamese army was supported by the United States, South Korea and Australia, as this side was anti-communistic, fighting the North who were pro-communism. The United States were involved in this war because they believed in a 'domino theory' which said that if one country came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow in a domino effect. The Viet Cong were supporters of the North and fought guerrilla warfare against the United States. Guerrilla warfare is an entirely different way of fighting, ambushing US soldiers using surprise attacks, setting traps and landmines, planting bombs in towns. The US had trouble identifying the enemies as many would mingle within peasants, wearing ordinary clothes.
Here is the first trap we were shown, and I remember learning about these traps in school:
The grass would look normal, but if somebody stepped on it, it would turn and they would fall into spikes. Here are many more traps we were shown:
This trap has a metal plate below it, the Viet Cong would set these by pushing the spikes into the wall, then if somebody fell on the plate, it would pull the spikes back all into a + like shape, spiking whoever fell on the metal plate.
This 'rolling trap' was made so that if somebody fell into this trap, they would fall onto the spikes, and then be stabbed and fall into a pit below. The tour guide said they would be alive and yelling afterwards, so it would lure more people and more people would fall into the trap.
This trap is named the 'clipping armpit trap' because when it is set, the spikes go to the left and right, but when somebody falls, the spikes go up towards the sky and the person will fall and the spikes would impale them under their arms.
This 'see-saw' trap would be set with spikes pointing upwards, then when somebody fell on it, it could spin in either direction depending what side the person fell on it. The axis is in the middle so it can turn both ways.
This trap is also set with spikes up right, but it works as a window and if you step into one, the spikes open as shown as in the picture, while your foot goes down with it, impaling spikes into your foot.
This door trap is somehow triggered so that it swings down onto a person if they walk into a certain doorway.
We continued after seeing those traps to go and see some more about the tunnels. He said there was and still is about 250 km of underground tunnels, used during that war. As I remember learning in school, there were different types of rooms connected to the underground tunnels such as kitchens, sleeping rooms, and also rooms where you would make weapons. Our guide told us that they would re-use any metal from exploded bombs or shrapnel and make new weapons or bombs.
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| Depiction of burning metals and reusing them to make new weapons. |
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| Kitchen room. |
Relating to the Kitchen Room, we were shown these things that looked like ant hills, but they were actually places where the smoke from the kitchens would exit from, so they would not give away their position. They had to have these as far away from the actual kitchen as possible so that even if they saw the smoke, they would not be found. The holes above are where the smoke exits.
We also got to see people making sandals out of tires, and they told us that they would wear those in the tunnels because they were easy to make, and you could make them from tires.
We then had the option to go down into the tunnels. The tunnels were very small, only one person at a time, and you had to be crouched down or else you would not be able to fit into them.
They were very fun to go through, but I cant imagine living underground and having to go through these tunnels every day or for a long period of time. The ones we went in, we went in one way, and came out about 60 meters away at a different exit.
This is a really cool picture I found, I took it not knowing what the top right flag was, but I was able to find what it was with some research. The top left flag is the flag for the Communist Party of Vietnam, and the top right flag was the flag of the Viet Cong. The bottom is a picture of Ho Chi Minh, who was a Communist Revolutionary. Saigon was the name of Ho Chi Minh city up until 1975, when it was renamed after Ho Chi Minh, the first leader of North Vietnam. It was in 1975 that the North took over the city from the US and South Vietnamese Government, and was renamed by the Government of Hanoi.
Here is an image of a huge crater in the ground, it is from a bomb back during war time. At one point during that tour, tourists had the chance to try out some of the guns that were used during the war time, including machine guns and AK-47s. Kids of-course were not allowed to.
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| This is a US tank that was at the Cu Chi tunnel place, the tour guide told us that it went over a mine and got exploded, and there are no tracks on it anymore. |
After we were finished visiting the Cu Chi place, we went back to our tour guide for the day, and hopped back into the car. It was nice to be cool again, and we drove 2 hours back to Ho Chi Minh City.
After a couple of hours, we continued our journey in Ho Chi Minh City and visited a Pagoda. A Pagoda is usually a sacred Buddhist building, temple. There are many in the city, and still used today, people come in and pray, and use incense also. They pray for luck, good health, to find a job and things like that. It is of-course free to enter. It was very interesting looking inside.
This is where the people stand with the incense and put candles down and pray.
After visiting the Pagoda, we stopped by the Notre Dame cathedral. We could not go inside, but it was beautiful to look at. It was established by French colonists while Saigon was under French conquest. It was established by the Roman Catholic Church. It was being worked on so we could not enter, but we got photos.
Right across the street from that was the General Post Office. It was constructed between 1886-1891 and is still a main post office to this day, and a main tourist attraction.
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| Outside view of the General Post Office |
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| Inside the General Post Office |
We next went to the Independent Palace, a major landmark of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. It was the working place and home of the President of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It was the ending place of the war also during the Fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). On April 30, 1975 the North Vietnamese Army's tanks crashed through its gates, and was where the ending of the war took place.
It was very modern and cool looking on the outside and inside.
There were many rooms in this Palace, including meeting rooms, and there was also a bunker under the Palace for protection.
There was also a Helicopter parked on the 3rd floor outside on the roof of the palace.
This is what we found in the bunker. It was just filled with rooms with chairs, and some radios. There was also a kitchen we found some where. The bunker was not that interesting.
Before getting back into the car, Levi spotted a tank and a fighter jet that we had to visit.
Our next stop was the War Remnants Museum which contained exhibits relating to the Vietnam War. It contained artillery, armor and aircraft collections as well as depictions of how South Vietnamese people were treated if caught and put into prisons. They had a ton of US helicopters and tanks and weapons.
These pictures were all only of outside which had all of the weapons, tanks and helicopters. Inside, there were many rooms that talked about how Agent Orange was used against Vietnam during the War. The articles I read said that it was used for deforestation mainly, but the inside of this museum stressed how much it hurt the Vietnamese and how it caused diseases and deformities in the people exposed to the chemical. It was dropped on forests during the war, mainly by planes and it was Orange. Here are some pictures drawn by children that were in the museum.
As I read online, one person who has visited many museums around the world said that many museums do a good job of telling both sides to the story and not giving an opinion, but this museum did not hesitate to tell their opinion on the matter.
We stopped by the Saigon Opera House just to take a picture. It opened January 1, 1900 and was built by the French.
It was around 4:10 PM, and we were all pretty tired from the adventurous day as you can tell from above. We decided to go to a walking street which is a long street where the cars or scooters are not allowed to go, and people walk. There are many places to eat along the street and we stopped to have dinner in this one nice restaurant who had a lot of organic food. They had beef nachos, so Levi and I both got that. They tasted different than what we were used to, but they were still good, we also both got a strawberry banana smoothie.
We started to walk back to our house after we were done eating. It took us a while to cross some of the roads since the cars and scooters never stop coming and never stop for anyone. We got back home, and Levi and I went swimming on the rooftop pool. The city below us looked very pretty during the night time. My Mom went down to the 1st floor to work out while we were swimming. We swam for about 70-80 minutes then went back down to our room.
The white in the left picture is Vietnam, and the red is the Mekong Delta Region. The main way of transportation in that region is by boat, and its elevation is 0 cm above sea level. It has an area of 40,000 km squared, while Ho Chi Minh City has an area of only 2,000 km squared.
Once we got deep into the region, we arrived at this place that gave boat tours to people. My mom was debating and negotiating with them for about 1 hour before we finally agreed on a tour and price. The boat that Oma, my Mom, Levi and I got on was a long and skinny boat. The motor was very loud, and they had these chairs that let you recline and lay on your back. They were pretty nice chairs. It took 1 hour to get to our first stop which I will call Island #1.
On the ride to Island #1, I saw on the sides of the large river houses, and maybe floating warehouses.
After 1 hour, we arrived at Island #1 and the driver guy of the boat parked the boat and we got off. Our Mekong Delta guide brought us through what seemed like a small community with a couple houses. We came upon a cage filled with a lot of alligators. They were all just chillin in the cage and in the water.
After that we walked further into the village and Levi and I got to hold a python. They are snakes that are found a lot in Africa, Asia and Australia. They are nonvenomous and are generally considered not harmful to humans.
We continued to walk through the village and it slowly became bigger and bigger. We were led to a place where they made things out of coconuts such as candies, dried coconut shavings and skin care products. Our guide showed us how they would take the coconut water out and boil it to increase the % amount of sugar in it.
After the process is finished, what is left is a thick gooey substance that is put on the table. They let it cool down for a bit, then they can take it and cut it into squares. They then wrap them in rice paper, and then regular paper. There are many flavours of these candies including coconut chocolate, coconut peanut, and just regular coconut. My favorite was the regular coconut flavor, and we also bought some dried coconut shavings. They were delicious!
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| Here is Oma standing in front of the little shop where they sold the Coconut candies and products. |
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| Here's what the things we purchased looked like. Our guide told us that the kids that work to package the coconut candy get paid per each package that they wrap. Above is one package, which contains 40 pieces of candy. |
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| These are the coconut dried shavings. |
We continued to walk through the village and we stopped by the river at one point, and our guide showed us this certain plant that if you put the seed in your mouth, it would pop open within a few seconds. The seeds had to be black, and he even just poured water over it for 1 second, and like 6 seconds later, it popped open in his hand. They were funny little plants. Here are some pictures to give you an idea of what the village looked like. It was in the middle of a lot of plant life, and there were many rivers, but we were in the Mekong Delta so it makes sense.
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| The water is only green here because many small seeds off of plants are floating on the water. |
Our guide told us how this certain big leaf from a tree could be used to pull other kids around in, so I pulled Levi around on the leaf.
We walked until we found a main road, where we took a "Mekong Taxi" as he called it, down the street. It was a donkey that was pulling us in a cart with wheels on it.
We got off at another place down the street. We walked into a village like restaurant place where we had a break and had some tea. The place had some shops along the path, and had roofs made of leaves and some plastic. It was very shady and a good place to cool off.
We had tea brought to us by some of the people working there, they put honey in the bottom, then put the tea over it. The tea was very good, it tasted like a flower, it was very sweet. We also got to eat a big tray of fruits including jackfruit, which is a fruit that looks like this.
We saw it a lot around the Mekong Delta area on trees. It is very plentiful around that area. The pineapples that they had were smaller than the ones that are usually bought in the US, that is probably because they genetically engineer the pineapples in the US to grow bigger, but I could be wrong. Here is our fruit plate.
Also I forgot to talk about the bananas they had which are seen in the picture above. They are really small and short, but they taste exactly like bananas so they are just mini bananas.
While we were drinking our tea and eating our fresh fruits, a band came and played some traditional Vietnamese songs for us. There were 3 musicians playing stringed instruments, and 3 women singing in total. I was really intrigued by this one certain instrument I had never seen before. I found a picture of it.
The cool thing is, it only has 2 strings but when he was playing it, he could hit a lot of notes on the scale. He was playing this instrument with the bow in-between the 2 strings, and kept switching between the 2 strings with his bow, and he used his other hand to change the pitch of the strings.
After all of that was done, our guide showed us the mini bee hive that they had behind their small restaurant. It is what is used to make the honey for the tea.
After looking at the bee hive, we followed our guide to the river and boarded a small skinny long boat. We proceeded to row down a very green canal with all of the plants to the right and left of us.
The lady who was paddling us down the canal was standing up in the back of the boat. While we were going down this canal, we saw many other boats pass us going the other way, all of them were the exact same style boats as the one we were riding in. Some of them did have motors on them, but not very fast ones though.
We traveled for about 30 minutes on this boat, until we got back to the original boat that brought us to Island #1.
We got back on our boat, and started to travel to the second island we would be visiting on our Mekong Delta tour. It took us about 25 minutes to get there from Island #1. Once we arrived at Island #2, we parked and got off. The second destination is known as the Con Phung area. The first thing that our guide told us about this island is about a man who only drank from coconuts for 30 years, from 1945-1975. We saw pictures on the wall of him, and we were told his body was skinny, because he did not eat food, only drank coconuts. He did this to protest the war that was going on at the time. There was a picture of this man with 2 cats and 3 mice right next to the cats, and was there to show how he had the power to bring 2 rivals together to be friendly. There was a pagoda / temple there for worshiping him. The entrance to it was very colorful and orange.
We followed our guide after we were done looking at the pagoda and got into the touristy area. There were ropes to climb, and a bamboo thing that we walked that went over a small pond. There were also these 2 ropes close together that went over the pond, but it was harder to do than it looked.
Some other people came along and tried to do the same 2 ropes. They got farther than Levi, but they turned back also.
There was another pit of alligators, but this one was deeper and you could also feed them meat off of what looked like a bamboo fishing pole. All of the alligators were stacked up on one another and looked like statues because of how still they were being.
Another tour guide was showing his group how to feed them, he was kind of teasing the alligators with the meat, and the other tourists tried also. Here is a link to the video of the alligators:
Here are some other pictures from that place:
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| They had chicken fighting at that place, our guide said that it was illegal, but people watch it anyways. |
After seeing all of that cool stuff, we headed back to our boat, and went back to our original starting point. It was a really fun tour of the Mekong Delta in about 4 hours.
We got back to the starting point, and hopped back in the car. From there we started our 2 hour drive back to Ho Chi Minh City. We did stop for Lunch on the way back though. It was a restaurant recommended to us by our guide for the day, we were a bit skeptical at first because it was just on the side of the road and quite random, but it actually had very good food.
I forgot to take a picture before we started to eat, but here is the aftermath of our delicious lunch:
We also stopped at 1 final pagoda before going back to our apartment. It was a pagoda that had 3 gigantic statues of buddha, one of them being a reclining buddha.
We got back to Ho Chi Minh City around 5:15 PM. It was the end of our day, and it was a great day. We got dropped off at our place. Levi and I went swimming again, it was our last night in Ho Chi Minh City, we would be flying out the next morning. After we were finished swimming, we were hungry. We did not have dinner, we had lunch around 2 PM though. We wanted dinner, so we went down to the store attached to the building and bought a frozen pizza along with some little other things. We forgot if we had an oven or not, but once we got back upstairs we found out we had no oven. I had to cook the pizza in the microwave, I microwaved it for about 4-5 minutes, then I put each slice individually on a pan over the burner to harden the dough a bit more. It was basically like I cooked it in the oven, just that the cheese and toppings were not as attached as sturdy as if they would have been cooked in an oven. Levi and I did eat the entire pizza though, and it was pretty good.
(This will be the first of my 3 blogs about Vietnam. I will do 1 blog for the south of Vietnam, 1 for the middle, and 1 for the north of Vietnam)
March 23 - 26, 2018
