It's Great Being a Kid

Because that's exactly how I felt yesterday when we hit up the water park here in Ho Chi Minh City with some friends, Sean and Luke (England), and Kris and Yvette (Holland). We arrived thinking there were only two slides in the whole park, but soon discovered that it was a huge park with a ton of slides in it. They're all insane too, the most intense water slides I've ever been on! Every one of them is built around speed, and today my tail bone and hip are feeling the effects of that. It was just like being a kid again, running around, full of energy and with no regard for personal safety. A couple weird experiences came out of that day too, one of them was me having to drag a Vietnamese girl that couldn't swim back to the shallow end of the pool (not serious, but still weird), and having a Vietnamese father ask Sean and I if we would take one of his baby boys down on the tandem tube slide with us, because him and his wife were only allowed to take one with them. We politely declined. Taking responsibility for a strangers baby on a water slide where two hours earlier Sean and Luke flipped their tube is not in my definition of a good idea.



Today I went on a tour to the Chu Chi Tunnels, about two hours outside of Ho Chi Minh City. I figured I would have a great time since the tunnels were used by Viet Cong fighters in the war, but it was very disappointing. Incredibly touristy (our group had around fourty people) and overly lame, the tour failed to impress me. The only semi-cool thing was crawling around a fourty meter stretch of the tunnels. Apparently you can go one hundred meters, but I made the mistake of following some people and ended up at the exit, unable to turn back. Then we watched an old propaganda film from the war that profiled the tunnels and fighters. It was really funny to see the video glorifying the fighters, one of which was a sixteen year-old girl, when I knew that if she was killed by American soldiers, it would be viewed as an atrocity. This is the funny world we live in.

Tomorrow I stay in Ho Chi Minh City for another day of sightseeing, then the next day it's off to Dalat, a highland city, for some hiking and calm. Then back to Nha Trang, where I go pick up my passport from the travel agent that has caused some delays with it, concerning my Chinese visa. Hopefully within a week all that will be sorted out and I'll be heading north.