Now we're in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. It's quite the contrast from the serenity of Mui Ne. The traffic here is incredible, I've never seen a mass of steel and people quite like I have on the streets of this city. It's literally a constant tide of motorbikes, which make up about 90% of the traffic. Crossing the street can be an endeavour, and I'm a little more weary of it than I was in India. The selection of restaurants looks good, I'm eager to head out for some good cuisine tonight.
We hit up the War History Museum today, which features old equipment and exhibits from the 'American War', which is the Vietnamese term for the Vietnam War. There were a lot of cool machines there, like an old Huey helicopter, a couple M41 tanks, and an old Thunderchief fighter-bomber. The exhibits themselves were pretty cool, the best of them all I thought was the War Correspondent Photography exhibit, which features a ton of photographs from combat photographers killed during the war. There was also an exhibit featuring the use of Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant used during the war. It was pretty graphic, with a collection of pictures of birth defects resulting from exposure to the chemical. An interesting part of it was seeing the perspective of the war from the other side, being the Vietnamese people. The generality of the museum was a little biased, showing the atrocities of the Americans but not really recognizing the casualties inflicted on the South Vietnamese Government.
Less beach + less drinking at beach bars = a happy liver!
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