After a good day and a half of shopping in Saigon, we wanted to see some of the city's sights. Our short list included the Reunification Palace, War Remnants Museum, Jade Emperor Pagoda, Cu Chi Tunnels, and Mekong Delta. We did pretty well checking most of these off our list.

First we took a walk to the Reunification Palace, but it was closed for the day. A motorcycle driver was driving slowly along with us, knowing full well that with the Palace closed for the day he was apt to get some business from us. After a couple blocks of being followed by him, we relented and asked how much it would cost to take us back to the hotel. He gave us a fair price, but suggested instead a 1-hour tour of a few sights around town including the Pagoda, so it sounded like a good enough deal. Mike and I both hopped onto the back of his motorbike and off we went. Neither of us had ever been on a motorcycle with 2 other persons before, so it was quite interesting. I was sandwiched in between the two of them; the driver let me rest my feet on the front pegs while Mike got the rear pegs. We made sure we didn't burn our legs on the exhaust pipe.

Our first stop was supposed to be the spectacular Jade Emperor Pagoda on the edge of downtown Saigon, but our driver was sneaky and took us to a different Chinese pagoda nearby. We didn't want to make a fuss, so we explored the small pagoda and took some pictures. Next we visited Notre Dame Cathedral (late-19th-century) near the center of town. Mike snapped a few photos while I got suckered into buying some postcards from a street vendor. We walked across the street to the Central Post Office to buy some stamps for my newly acquired postcards. Our last stop was the Saigon riverside where we snapped photos of boats and explored the docks. Finally the driver took us back to the guesthouse, and asked for much more money than we were willing to pay for the tour. We had been warned about this in the guide books, so we paid him what we thought was a fair price and went inside the hotel, ignoring his protests.

The next day we took a minibus tour to the famous Cu Chi Tunnels. There was a cheaper tour of about 30 passengers in a full-size bus, but we opted for the smaller tour (only 7 people) for a slightly higher fee. During the American war, the villages around the district of Cu Chi supported a substantial Viet Cong presence. Faced with American attempts to neutralize them, they literally dug themselves out of harm's way, and the legendary Cu Chi tunnels were the result. The vast, 3-level network of tunnels includes meeting rooms, living quarters, kitchens, dining areas and storage rooms - all underground. Narrow air-holes were drilled down to the tunnels to allow a fresh supply of air; these, along with the tunnel entrances, were cleverly hidden, disguised or boobytrapped. They even constructed underwater portals in the riverbed for emergency entrance or exit. We crawled through a tunnel that had been widened for big, fat Western tourists and it felt a little claustrophobic at times. It was hard to imagine how the VC lived in these tunnels for months at a time without going insane. They only cooked once a day in the morning and diverted the cooking smoke using multi-stage chimneys; from above, the enemy mistook the smoking pile of leaves for morning fog.

One of the most interesting parts of Cu Chi was the black-and-white propaganda film they played prior to the tour. The film starts out with beautiful young Vietnamese maidens going about their daily chores in the village; they are peaceful lambs without a threat in the world. Then the big, nasty devil called America attacks their district, inflicting Terror and Evil on these poor, meek souls. America bad, Vietnam good! This is the underlying message. There is no mention of the other countries involved - like France and Australia, for example. The American tourists in the room felt awkward, guilt-tripped.

Were we really welcome in Vietnam? Or was it just a facade? Prior to the tour, we had asked a cabbie how the Vietnamese felt about American tourists. He had answered, "Vietnam and America used to be very angry before...but now we friendly". I suppose that's just a nice way of saying we bombed the crap out of their country, but now their trade relationship with the US is crucial to their economic growth.

On the way back from Cu Chi, we asked to be dropped off at the War Remnants Museum. It probably wasn't the wisest idea to do two war-related activities in a row, as we soon learned. The War Remnants Museum is crammed with very graphic images of the pain and suffering inflicted on the Vietnamese during the war. There are photos of mine victims, people wounded from shrapnel, piles of dead children, and people whose skin had been burned off by napalm. There were deformed fetuses on display, demonstrating the ill effects of exposure Agent Orange. There is no mention of the fact that 55,000 Americans lost their lives in the war, nor that Australia lost 15,000; it is a one-sided depiction of the war, focusing blame on the USA. It evoked an entire range of emotions in me - anger that our country was involved in the war; contempt that the Vietnamese would convey such a blatant anti-US message in the exhibit; and sadness for the innocent civilians who died. Mike and I decided we had had enough, and departed for our hotel room.

The next day we embarked on a one-day boat tour of the Mekong Delta - a much happier affair than the day previous. Once again, we opted for the smaller tour; as luck would have it, there were only two other people on the tour with us, a fun couple our age from Australia. Nicole and Chris had traveled from the north (Hanoi) to the south (Saigon), so they passed along many tips and suggestions for our upcoming journey north.

Our minibus took us two hours southwest of Saigon to the town of My Tho, where we boarded a wooden motorboat. We motored through narrow canals with tall palms arching overhead, towards the town of Ben Tre. At our first stop we walked through the jungle to a family's home. We tasted a variety of locally-grown tropical fruits, along with sweet rice paper crackers and honey tea. Afterwards we were treated to some live folk music; a woman sang while one man accompanied her on a banjo-type instrument and another played guitar. On the way back to the dock we each tried a shot of homemade Vietnamese rice wine (i.e. moonshine), which was extremely potent! We all donned traditional conical hats and boarded a sampan boat for the short trip back to our motorboat.

Our next stop was to a fruit orchard where we had a simple homemade lunch of noodles and soup. After that we motored across the waterway to a coconut plantation where coconut candy was being produced. We watched as they extracted the juice, cooked it down to a syrupy consistency, and then formed it into individual caramels. We each sampled some, along with another type of candy called soursop.

Finally it was time to depart, so we got back into the boat to motor back to our starting point. When we were almost back to our minibus we were blocked by a very large boat that had run aground in the shallow canal. Our captain turned our boat around and motored to an alternate dock. The minibus picked us up and we chatted with the Aussies on the way home.