Halfway around the roundabout we heard a 'BuMP, sssscRRRRAAAAaaatch-scrAAAPE' signalling that, yep, we'd arrived in Saigon, and yep, the twat in the Merc had tried to swing past us.
Trying to remain as cool, calm and collected as possible whilst everyone else rushed to the port side of the bus to have a look at the reasonably irate and veritably rotund Vietnamese chap, I realised that we were only about three minutes from our destination. We'd nearly made it without a crash. But not quite...
If there is a statistic that Vietnamese people - especially tour guides in buses - enjoy sharing it is Vietnamese 'Road Incident Fatalities'. Apparently there are upwards of 60,000 'accidents' a year (a figure which has been consistently on the up for a decade), with a horribly large amount of these being the last accident that the poor bastards will have. But for some reason, they love telling you this.
Jumping off the bus into the warm rain of Ho Chi Minh City, Helen and I walked down through a maze of backstreets and found a great little family-run hotel. It had hot water, white tiles EVERYWHERE and free internet. Super. We liked the fact that we'd found a place that was in the middle of a residential area as it gave us the impression that we were finally starting to see a bit of indigenous culture and lifestyle.
The fact that our room was roughly the same size as the couple of rooms that the average resident would sleep, eat and shit in was irrelevant. Palin was a pussy.
The next day we went on an exploration of the city, watched England play in the evening, and organised a tour for the following day to the Cu Chi tunnels. These were the tunnels that the guerrillas used in the Tet offensive. They're pretty staple for the backpacking hordes that visit Saigon every year, evident by the hundreds of people that were in our group alone. (Sort of an exaggeration.)
This trip was interesting and infuriating in equal measure. First off, there was a small group of Irish girls that were sitting behind us on the coach on the way there. They had obviously only rolled back from a nightclub about an hour prior to the journey, and they were like the Seven Dwarfs of Stink.
There was Sicky, who had obviously been doing some serious throwing up, and presumably using her t-shirt as a bucket. Sweaty, who had, it would seem, been at a rave for a year and boasted the armpits of Andre the Giant. There was Boozy, who unquestionably stored whiskey in her cheeks like some kind of well-prepared hamster tramp, and finally, and most potently, there was Shitty.
Shitty would, without warning or remorse, release silent wafts of gas unlike anything I have ever smelled before, with the moxie of mustard gas and the longevity of a year 8 changing room's quantity of Lynx Africa.
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Here's me, without irony, complaining that other people were there
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These fuckers, completely uninterested in the tour, would join the rest of the motley crew of stupid fucking tunnelees in, quite literally, pushing and elbowing you to get a better view of the holes in the ground just so they could ignore it to a greater degree.
Even with all of my famous patience with the general public, I soon gave up and waited until the tour had moved on before having a look at what we were meant to see. This also meant that I could make up my own uses for the series of ditches, flaps and traps, rendering the Viet Congs's (sic) set up with a gym, heated swimming pool and table tennis room. Like a militarised Butlins camp.
Our tour guide, the pushiest proponent of the seemingly fantastic amount of crash-deaths on Vietnamese roads, seemed to be personally hurt when we informed him that we had absolutely no interest in going to the shooting range that was also 'part of the trip'. So much so, that he wouldn't allow us to just walk around the rest of the tour on our own and make our way back to the bus. We had to wait for an hour so a load of stupid wankers could fire AK47s.
Why anyone would want to do this, let alone in that particular setting, is utterly beyond me.
Resuming the tour, after two Cornettos, we got to actually crawl through some 25 metres or so of the original tunnels. This was really good, made even more amazing by the fact that they have actually heightened and widened the tunnels so that fat tourists like us can do it too. How the guerrilla armies navigated around them is astonishing.
Helen, to her delight, realised that she would have been quite a handy little tunneler too. She could almost touch the ceiling of them...
This trip is recommended, but I'm sure there must be a way of getting around the tour without having to be in a group of fifty people, which is a waste of time unless you're a selfish prick that's prepared to stamp over everyone else to use your little camcorder.
The next day we went to the War Remnants museum, which I personally thought was the most interesting museum we've been to so far.
It had a whole exhibition on journalists that were present during the war, and contained some amazing photography too. Once again, my patience was tested by the general - non-indigenous - public. Most notably some American lads laughing at the pictures of deformed babies as a by-product of the Agent Orange 'experiments'. There was also a bell jar containing a foetus that one of them commented on, saying it was 'like a retard aquarium'. Words fail me.
Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon - which pretty much everyone still calls it, was probably our favourite city in Vietnam, and maybe in the whole trip so far. This was despite the ever present drug dealers (I was offered one form of contraband or another 21 times in 8 minutes over 500 yards - we counted) and general hawkers that would try and rip you off at every turn. It's to be expected though. I would if I was in their position.
We even had fun sitting outside of a bar that blasted hardcore German rave music whilst dirty old men would try and chat up the owner, who looked like one of those mums that tries just that liiittle bit too hard.
It was in Saigon that we finally put our finger on the downside to South East Asian hospitality; people would rather tell you the wrong answer rather than not being able to tell you anything at all.
A tip, never suggest a direction that something might be in if you don't know for certain, as they'll just agree with you and you could keep walking for hours. This sort of thing was evident when we went on the search for Ed and Nicky's hotel.
After finding what we thought was it, we entered and, giving their names, nationality and describing Ed and Nicky, asked if they were staying there, which the hotel manager confirmed. We subsequently left a message for them to meet up later on. We didn't see them, and they didn't get the message, as they weren't staying at the hotel.
Before we left I did see one more crash.
A moped buzzed across a crossroad and got clipped by a car, scattering his cargo and careening off into a shop-front full of fruit (it was only missing two men carrying a pane of glass). Luckily no one was hurt, the tragedy was that the cargo of twelve crates (on a fucking moped!) of beer was lost forever to the thirsty hot tarmac of Saigon’s quietest crossroads. A tear I did shed.
So, after a very enjoyable few days in the capital of Vietnam, we ventured North to a place called Mui Ne, home to red sand dunes, white beaches and half of the Russian mafia.
