Friday in Vietnam

Thursday night we spent the night in Ho Chi Minh city after another long day of touring...we saw Vinh Long, which had a fantastic market with all kinds of food and fruit. According to Huy, almost all of the fruit that is exported from VN will pass through that market. We saw snakes, frogs, the infamous snakehead fish, pigs, ducks, chickens, you name it.

Then we ate lunch at the restaurant owned by the prime minister's wife. It's another reminder of how the political parties here have lots of money. The place was beautiful, and the solid teak table pictures come from there.

I think I mentioned this before, but the same thing happened in Cambodia. Here's a picture of the outside of one of the People's Party of Cambodia offices:

Yes, that's a Porsche Cayenne. There are several decent cars in the area, but this Phnom Penh seemed rather impoverished in large part. Yet, the party has a nice car.

It seemed that this was the case in both countries--the people with the power controlled the wealth and had access to more opportunity. Not surprising, but more blatant than I expected to see.

Back to Friday in Vietnam. We had an evening flight, but we set up a day that included Vietnam War history and tours. We'd been warned to expect a different perspective. J and C went along for the tour as well.

We all rode together in a van with Huy as our guide. Before we hit the Vietnam War stuff, we did a Saigon tour which included a stop at Notre Dame and the Central Post Office. The Church was really pretty, but needs a lot of work. As we've found with a lot of landmarks here, there was restoration under way. Tourism is becoming more and more important to the economies here, and fixing the points of interest is very much part of the plan to increase tourism. They have collection boxes at a lot of these places asking you to donate.

We may have done one other thing, but then we went on the War Museum. The war in Viet Name is called a war of American aggression. It's important for you to remember who's writing the history--the "victorious" group who wants to be sure that we're not painted to be all that great and that the war was unnecessary and evil.

The museum had an array of weaponry, as you would expect, and a lot of pictures that made us look pretty bad. Of course, remember the source....

From there, it was on to Cu Chi tunnel, which was a network of tunnels in the hills that the VC used to confuse and hide from the US troops. Very primitive and very amazing. Hard to fathom how they thought of these things, except that in the beginning they were used to avoid being "enslaved" by Michelin rubber company and later they were used and expanded during the war. These tunnels were something else. Very well thought out and planned.

So from there it was farewell to our friends J and C and onward to the airport, where we boarded a plane for Thailand. You saw my first post when we arrived here, and now I'm almost caught up.

I've missed breakfast the last two days, so I'm going to go do that now.

Here are links to the VN pics one last time:

http://picasaweb.google.com/John.Purcell.3rd/VietNam

http://picasaweb.google.com/John.Purcell.3rd/RiverTripFromCambodiaToVietNam