Saigon!

Motorcycles, crowded streets, flashing lights and people galore were my first impressions of Saigon. The first night we found a nice guest house on the sixth floor, which was really the 8th floor--their motto "you get free breakfast, free internet and free exercise!" We had a great view of Pham, also commonly referred to as "District 1" or the backpackers area. The streets were crowded with foreigners and sellers, we were wandering the streets trying to take it all in when we found a popular street bar, sat down, had dinner of anything that was being sold by the women and children (peanuts, bananas, some sort of banana flavored rice cake), and had a coke for about 20cents. The next day, we went to Cu Chi Tunnels (almost sounds like Gucci) about 60km NW of Saigon where the Vietcong held their position during the "American Agression War," as it is referred to here. We saw the booby traps they made, metal spikes underneath a grassy trapdoor, but we decided the worst was "the armpit trap," where when if you walked over the trap, you would fall down and be caught by the rusty spikes in your armpit. Ahhh...
We were able to crawl through a 150m tunnel, which was made larger because, as our tour guide said, "of those large American tourists asses." It was tiny, hot, dark and right when I started crawling there was an exit--I crawled about half way through the tunnel! There was also shooting range with Ak47s, M16s, M30s, frankly, those are all the ones I remember, not much of a gun person. I was way too nervous to go any where near the shooting range, but many people in our group jumped at the chance. As for prices, to shoot an AK47 with ten bullets was about $20.