Miss Saigon, you so hot.

3rd of July, 09, we fly into Ho Chi Minh City/Sai Gon. Having grown up learning about the war, hearing stories about the war and with some of my favourite movies being about the Vietnam War, Nam has always held a special allure in my mind and is a big reason why I chose to relocate there. Tan Son Nhat airport certainly held up to that ideal. Taxiing in on the plane, we rolled past giant military helicopters and fighter planes in giant 70's style hangers, looking like they came straight out of Apocalypse Now. The city was overwhelming. None of the glitz and glamour of the bigger Asian cities I'd been to, but with the same amount of people, motorbikes and pollution. We headed to Pham Ngu Lao, the backpacker district. We checked into our cheap and seedy hotel and set out to explore. The area buzzes with the sound of money to be made and is filled with locals mostly looking to exploit ignorant travellers. After walking around for a while, we sat at a streetside stall for our first bowls of authentic pho. Much simpler than the restaurant fare found back home, it was sweet and cinnamony and very satisfying. We spent a night hanging around here, sampling the local nightlife before we decided to get some culture. The obligatory tourist destinations were visited. Reunification palace, the sombre and awe-inspiring war museum and a day trip outside Sai Gon to the Cu Chi tunnels, a gigantic network of underground tunnels built by the Viet Cong during the American War. We crawled through the same tunnels they did and marvelled at how small Vietnamese people really are. We were on the trip with a group of Americans, who felt pretty bad about marvelling at blown up American tanks and watching short films about "great American killer heroes" on the 4th of July. Suck shit, yankee. Our time in Sai Gon was an eye opener to life in Vietnam. We got ripped off, we got drunk, we got scared crossing the roads, we rode three grown men on a motorbike, we got hassled incessantly by hawkers and we had a pretty good time. We hung around trying to find some action for another 2 days before deciding to catch a plane up to our ultimate destination, Ha Noi.