Southern Vietnam

From Hoi An it was a murderous 30 hours bus ride down to Ho Chi Minh City(HCMC) (the inner city is famous Saigon). I can highly recommend the Reunification Palace in HCMC, the architecture and interieur is hard to find in South East Asia, truely impressive 60s style.
Christmas was strange, or let me say different; cultures merge! Continental European retail industry has discovered Halloween as a promising market gap so do Vietnamese celebrate Christmas. On Christmas Night, people with their scooters populated the streets of Saigon, making a crossing slow and nerve wrecking. Turning around the whole Father Christmas story the kids are dressed up as Father Christmas. Call it globalization: Same same but different.


We joined another one day tourist tour to visit a Chao Dai Tempel and the Vietkong tunnels (what a genious mix!). The tunnels gave me an impression of the horrors of the Vietnamese war and though truely tempting I think its SICK to shoot around with AK47s at such an occasion and in general and anyhow... (please refer to my Lebanon war post).

Another tour (I am sufficiently tour tortured for long time to come) got us around the Mekong Delta. It was terrific countryside, photo objects and foreign things to see. With all the other tourists (you never walk alone...) we had a look at floating markets and the djungel of the Delta!


My travelling group split at this point and we left Leila and Choralie in Vietnam and continued with three: Jaquim, Sophie and me. By boat we left Vietnam to Cambodia on the Mekong. I said good bye Vietnam but the Mekong I revisited again thousands of kilometers up its stream weeks later.

In conclusion: This Post and my stories do not sufficiently reflect Vietnams most important feature: its people. I saw impressive things and got a grip on the geography of Vietnam. I learned about the history, saw the living standards and realized some of the problems. I did not sufficiently get in touch with the people and the Vietnamese society, but in my own defense - on a holiday its hard to achieve that.