The plane ride from Delhi was pretty short, only 3 hours to Bangkok, ad then just a little over a hour from Thailand to Saigon. But we had an awful five-hour layover at the Bangkok airport. So we left our house a little past 6 in the evening Friday, and didn't get to our hotel in Saigon until noon the next day. We tried to get a dayroom at the airport, so we could nap a bit during the wait, but they were all booked. Next time, we'll book one ahead.

To kill the five hours, we had massages. First a head-and-foot massage. An hour long, and you get two masseuses. Then we had a snack, then an oxygen massage. You sit in a special chair and get a massage while breathing pure oxygen through a nose plug. Weird, but fun. I ate some sushi. Tricia had two KFC chicken sandwiches, with french fries instead of chicken.

I read on the flight, and dozed off briefly. Hard to get any quality sleep, though. I'm almost done with my latest book, Skinny Dip by Carl Hiassen.

Dave and Darryl were waiting for us at the airport. Their flight from Malaysia landed about 20 minutes before ours. They didn't count on how long it would take us to get out of the airport, though. They got lucky and got out in 5 minutes. Our flight landed at the same time as 4 others, so we were in line at immigration and customs for over an hour. Originally, they had planned only to wait until 11AM, but once they knew we were on the ground, they must have figured it'd be any minute. Nice of them to wait -- we shared a taxi to the hotel and got a chance to catch up on the ride.

Saigon is a really wonderful town. It has all the Asian charm you'd expect -- pointy hats, pagodas, and people wearing silk pajamas while riding bicycles. But it also has great French colonial grandeur. Our hotel is fantastic: a 1930's art deco masterpiece, maybe a little run-down in places, but overall tres cool. The location is perfect, too -- right in the middle of everything you'd want to see or do. We swam a bit in the pool, took naps, and had a few Vietnamese beers. Nice to relax a bit the first day. We also found a travel agent down the street who hooked us up with our internal flights (much cheaper to buy them here than in India) and a minivan to take us to the Cu Chi tunnels tomorrow.

For lunch, Dave and Darryl had Phô, the famous local specialty of noodle soup in a broth made from beef marrow. Tricia and I (ever the non-meat-eaters) opted for a cute restaurant called the Underground, which is decorated like a British subway station. Nachos and burritos. Yum! They used Tricia's nacho recipe: Doritos with melted cheese and salsa on top.

For dinner, we went to a hip place Genta had recommended: the Temple Club. It's in a sweet old French building, with sleek Asian minimalist decor. And afterwards, hit the town looking for live bands and fun bars. First a long, narrow place with a DJ and great artwork. They have such talented artists here, and the streets are filled with perfect oil-painted reproductions of famous paintings. This bar had apparently hired one of those artists to do canvas paintings of album covers from cool chillout and lounge albums. Great idea for a DJ bar. Then a place for live music, which turned out to be a duo with keyboard and guitar, playing bad versions of American songs. We stayed briefly before leavings to find another live music place we'd seen earlier, but got there after the band had already packed up. Things close early here. Last call was around midnight, and we were home by one AM.

I love how the bars in Vietnam look so tropical. All ceiling fans and rattan thatch. This one place had bamboo wineglass holders. There's Dave with a giant beer mug. Get a few beers in him and he'll do anything for the camera. Speaking of giant beer mugs, Saigon has a couple of excellent German-style beer halls that brew their own beer.

This cute (but drunk) old man was wearing the same shirt Tricia was!

Today we got up pretty early and hit the museums. The Reunification Palace was where the President of South Vietnam lived, until the North took over. It's still exactly the same -- a 1964 postmodern architecture classic, like a bank or library designed by Mike Brady. But unlike any similar building in America, this one still has all the groovy Danish modern furniture and wall decor. There are conference rooms and grand chambers that look like sets from a James Bond movie. The entertainment room is straight out of a 60's Playboy magazine, with a circular conversation pit and a round wooden bar. All it needed was a white shag rug.

Dave helps Tricia do a yoga headstand in the middle of the Presidential ballroom. This was the room on the roof where diplomats were entertained in the 1960s and 70s, and also where the helicopters landed to rescue the survivors after the Fall of Saigon.

This room is some sort of firing range in the basement. It might be for practice, or it might be for getting rid of dissidents. There wasn't a sign.	We figured that this sign says "please do not climb on the tank to have your photo taken." Good thing they didn't take these kids down to the "firing range."

The Jade Pagoda was a cultural moment. It's very different from Chinese or Japanese Buddhist shrines. We burned joss sticks at the altars for good luck. You can also buy a cage of birds to let go, or a baby turtle to put in a sacred pond full of big turtles. The statues looked more Hindu than Buddhist, which I found interesting.

The Ho Chi Minh City museum was interesting, if a little hokey. Some of the exhibits were great -- a collection of oil lamps made out of used hand grenades or rockets, political posters and signs, a whole exhibit on stone-age artifacts from the region.

The real sobering moment will come in a few days when we go to the War Remnants Museum. Tricia got tired of museuming, so we headed back to the hotel while Dave and Darryl did the War museum. We took cyclos back -- bicycle rickshaws that give you a great photo-taking viewpoint. There's a cute French deli across the street, so we got cheese sandwiches on French bread.

Wednesday, Dec 22nd
We leave Saigon in a few hours for a flight to central Vietnam. Yesterday we had a relaxing day of sightseeing. Monday we did a day trip to the Cu Chi tunnels and the Cao Dai temple.

The Cao Dai religion is fascinating in the way that new religions can be, like Ba'hai or Mormonism or Scientology. Sure, it's quirky and even humorous, and since it's less than a hundred years old, it almost assuredly isn't the one true gateway to heaven -- but as long as you're in town, might as well stop by the seat of worship and take a few photos. There are Cao Dai temples all over, but the one in Ty Nhan is the big head honcho temple, wherein lives the Cao Dai pope.

Now, if I ever invent a religion, I'm going to avoid the word "pope" to describe the big guy in charge. It's already pretty well established as a Catholic word. But that's what the Cao Dai call they leader. He wears a yellow robe, and then the also-important people who sit near him wear red and blue robes, and the masses in the back of the church wear white robes. The church itself is a standard-sized churchlike building with an open floor plan, dragon-covered pillars holding the roof up, and painted more colors than the carousel in Mary Poppins. Painted, but less like the ceiling in the Vatican and more like the carpet in a Vegas casino designed by Liberace's tailor. I won't go into too many details about the religion itself, but if you are into comparative religions of the world, it's one to look up. It's a blend of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, with Victor Hugo as their main prophet. Their holy writings were not passed down through word of mouth, like older religions are. They were written down directly during channeling sessions with famous enlightened dead people. Wackiness!

Still, one more spot on our list of big religious sites. Dome of the Rock, Bethlehem, Vatican, Varanasi, the Wailing Wall at the Temple Mount, Kamakura, Golgotha, Sarnath. The Golden Sikh Temple in Amritsar. Mount Popo, home of the Nats of Burma. Not to mention ancient religions --Luxor, Angkor Wat, Alexandria, Petra, the Temple of Venus in Rome. Since they don't allow agnostics into Mecca, I'm going to have to count the Blue Mosque in Istabul, which was the seat of Islam for centuries before the Saudis lobbied to have it moved. Not many other religions headquarters leftover, now. Salt Lake City, Bodhgaya. The main Ba'hai temple is in Jaffa, but I'm not going to make a special trip out there anytime soon. We still haven't made it to the Dalai Lama's home in Dharamshala, but we will someday soon.

Now, where was I?

After the noon mass, we headed to Cu Chi to visit the tunnels. Creepy, but historically interesting. You get to crawl through underground tunnels that were used by the Viet Cong to smuggle supplies across the heavily patrolled Cambodian border. All the stuff you read about but don't quite understand: punjee traps, claymore mines, the hidden bunkers with escape tunnels and rifle holes -- all of it means so much more when you see it in person.

They have a number of displays of VC uniforms and food, how they made shoes out of old tires, how they made hand grenades out of whisky bottles. Then you get to shoot a machine gun. I chose the AK-47. Dave went with the M-16. A dollar a shot. Even with the ear protection, it's loud. I can't imagine actually being in the jungle firing one of those guns. You wouldn't be able to hear anything afterwards. And if you wore earplugs, you wouldn't hear footsteps behind you. It was eerie walking through the area -- all of the displays are outside, so you walk on trails in the same jungle that the war was fought in. Nothing clean and easy like the battlefields in Jackson Mississippi, no rolling green hills with visible lines of soldiers. Jungle and foxholes and tunnels and landmines. Horrible stuff.

We saw this buffalo on the way to the tunnels, not at the firing range. We didn't shoot it. (You can do that in Cambodia, if you want.) That middle photo is a giant crater from a B-52 bomb. You can't really tell from the picture.

There's a tunnel you crawl through, which has been widened for tourists. Not wide enough for me, but if it were wide enough to fit through easily, it would just be a cheesy simulation, and not a scary historical experience. If you were short, you could duckwalk in them. Our guide walked through bent halfway over. I couldn't fit while walking bent -- my spine and hips jammed on the roof of the tunnel. So I ended up on my hands and knees crawling. At least I made it out. I was worried about getting stuck.

Speaking of stuck, here's the funny part (oh man, Warren -- you're visiting the site of gruesome deaths from a horrific war, and there's a funny part? Oh yeah. It's funny.) They have this photo op tunnel -- don't know if it's an entrance or an exit. But it's tiny. Like the size of a notebook. You get in the hole and they take your photo for you, but there's no way you could jump down through in and crawl around down the holes. I don't think my shoulders would even go through it. So the plan is, you hop in the hole up to your butt, your friends take your picture, and it looks like you're popping out of a Viet Cong trap door. Now that by itself isn't funny. What's funny is that after Dave had his "in the foxhole" photo done, Tricia crawled in. The hole is smaller than her butt, which stopped her from getting too far down in the hole, which meant that her feet weren't touching the ground below. I was about to take the photo when she popped all the way in -- like a barbed fishhook or something, her thighs and butt squeezed though the opening, her feet hit the ground, and she was securely stuck with a concrete bunker wrapped tightly around her tummy.

She put her hands on the ground and tried to push out but couldn't get enough leverage. The tunnel opens up at the bottom, so there's no place to step. The guides tried to pull her out but their hands were slipping on her lotioned-up arms. Dave and I tried to grab her by the hands or elbows and couldn't pull hard enough. Plus we were afraid if we pulled hard enough, we'd dislocate her shoulders before we pulled her out. Luckily, she was laughing as we tried. I knew we had about thirty seconds to free her before the humor wore off and the claustrophobic nightmare screaming began. Of course, I had enough time to take a couple of photos before we got the big rescue effort underway.

I convinced her to hold her elbows down tight to her side and we grabbed her elbows and pulled. Our guide Binh kept telling her to "wiggle your ass" and demonstrated with a "shake your tailfeather" dance. He was behind her, so she couldn't see the motions, but we all laughed about him afterwards. Once we had pulled her up enough that her waistband showed, I managed to grab it and pull her up by the pants. She's still sore in the armpits from all the tugging, but at least she didn't spend the night trapped in a Vietnamese foxhole. We joked afterwards that we could have told her to go down further into the hole and crawl forward to the exit. "It's just 30 meters, be sure and turn left -- we'll wait for you at the other end."

Now that I've written it all down, it doesn't sound so funny. But really, we all laughed about it for hours.

Dec 23rd

We're in Hoi An, a lovely quiet river village in Central Vietnam. We flew in from Saigon yesterday. The nearest airport is Da Nang, very close to the old DMZ. We were originally only going to be here 3 days, but we heard so much great stuff about it that we cut a couple of days off of Saigon and extended our time in Hoi An. Good thing, too. The food is amazing and the city is wonderful.

But I didn't finish the Saigon story yet. The War Remnants museum was moving. Mostly photos, though. I was hoping for displays and exhibits. There is a whole display on American anti-war activism, which went into Kent State and flower power, but also showed these three American young people who burned themselves to death in protest. I had never heard of that before - maybe it wasn't famous in America? Maybe I just didn't read enough about late 60's America? Or maybe the Vietnamese made it up? Don't know. I searched a little on the internet to see if there was much news about them. Roger LaPorte, Norman Morrison, and Alice Herz. Couldn't find much.

There is a noodle dish in Vietnam called Phô which Dave has eaten about 4 times now. The broth is made from boiled beef marrow, so I'm not all excited about it. But I thought it would be great if someone opened a vegetarian Vietnamese restaurant and called it Faux Phô. Darryl tried to order it in Nha Trang, but couldn't get anyone to understand what he was asking for. Turns out, "Phô" is pronounced Fa'ah, not Fo. In Saigon, when a foreigner asks for a bowl of Fo, they know he's talking about Fa'ah. If I were in charge, they wouldn't spell it Phô. How silly is that!?!

The coffee is great here. The beans are roasted in butter, and it's served so strong you can feel the caffeine hit your bloodstream while you drink it. Instead of cream, they use sweetened condensed milk, like Eagle Brand. It's made with a little metal filter that sits on top of your coffee cup. Fun!

Saigon is about half Vietnamese Buddhist and half Catholic. Well, that's according to tour guide Binh, who may have been making everything up. But there are lots of people celebrating Christmas. It looks even more Christmassy than America does. Lights everywhere, decorations galore. People bring their children out for the family Christmas photo, so they dress the kids up in little Santa suits. Every other 3-year-old kid in Saigon looks like Santa's Little Vietnamese Helper. Like the elves are outsourcing their manual labor to Southeast Asia sweatshops.

When they go out for the photo, lots of people go to the city center, or the fountain, or near a big decorated tree. That makes sense. But the vast majority fight for a good position in front of the department store window on Dong Khoi street. It's just down from our hotel, so we saw this every evening. Shop windows decorated with toy Santas selling giant stuffed Tweety Birds next to a manger scene where Joseph and Mary are modeling Hugo Boss suits, and four thousand young Vietnamese familes posing in front of the windows, holding up their little elf. Some of them have a friend take the photo, but most hire a professional. There's a guy hanging out with a nice camera -- actually, more like 3 or 4 guys. And they take your family photo for a fee. In retrospect, it would have been kind of fun to get our photo taken by one of these guys. Instead I just took photos of the crowds. Crazy!

We rode cyclos a few times. That's my favorite part. I like Asian cyclos much better than Indian bike rickshaws. You're right out in front, close to the ground, full view around you. Such a fun way to travel!

Oh, we got a free upgrade at the hotel. I forgot to mention that earlier. We wanted 2 double rooms, but they gave us a big suite with 2 rooms instead. That was great, because we were able to all hang out in the living room together. Darryl and I got massages in the hotel spa. I like Vietnamese massages more than Thai. Less poking and prodding, no arm twisting. Gentle and relaxing. Plus they walk on your back. There are rails on the ceiling that the masseuse uses to hang onto while she walks up and down on you. Cool!

I couldn't get on the roof across the street to take a really good photo of the hotel, but there was a hotel-shaped cake in the lobby.

We've eaten some interesting stuff. Rose-apple, pomelos, Vietnamese pears. We had manioc a few times. It's like white-colored sweet potato. You dip it in ground peanuts for flavor. I think it's the same as cassava.

The traffic in Saigon is absolutely nuts. And no red lights. When you want to cross the street, you just jump into it boldly and hope they stop. Usually they do. But then eventually, I suppose if you do it often enough, you get creamed by a motorcyclist who wasn't looking. Just hordes of scooters and motorcycles.

We searched out a vegetarian restaurant called the Bodhi Tree, after reading in the guidebook how great it was. We didn't have the same positive experience. In fact, it was probably the worst meal we've had in Vietnam. They should call it the Grody Tree. From now on, we'll just go to regular restaurants and ask for vegetarian recommendations.

On the last day in Saigon we went to Chinatown, to the covered market. Great photo opportunities there.

Oh, almost forgot about our last night on the town. Darryl headed North a day before us, because he wants to do some war tourism before Christmas. So on his last night, we hit the town. Tricia wasn't feeling so good, so she went back to the hotel early while we hit the clubs. We had drinks at the Rex hotel, which was the Officer's Club during the war. Nothing's changed. All the decor, tile, signs, it's all still late-60s Chinese restaurant mother-of-pearl inlay, with a band that supposedly used to play for the officers. They looked a little young, but maybe if they had been late teens it would have been possible.

After the Rex, we tried a couple of bars. The Rain Forest Disco is not so much a disco. It's more of a strip club, except the girls have clothes on while they dance. I guess you pick up on them and pay to take them home or something. We weren't flirting with the girls enough, so they sent some boy dancers over in case that's what we were after. We decided that scene wasn't what we were into, so we headed back to the hotel. On the way, we passed a club that was still open (one of the few that doesn't follow Saigon's silly midnight last call) and heard live music coming out. How cool was this -- a taxi dancer club! Live band playing foxtrots, and unattractive older Vietnamese men dancing for a dollar a dance with elegant ladies in ball gowns. Nothing inappropriate, just salsa and waltzes. It was totally a scene from a fifties movie.

Saigon - Hoi An - Hue - Hoa Lo Prison - Hanoi