Took a quick flight from Dalat to Ho Chi Minh City early this morning. I got to the hotel in HCMC at the perfect time because I met up with 3 other solo female travelers who were finishing breakfast and we went exploring together. We went to the War Remnants Museum, the post office and a Cathedral during the day and thnI went to a water puppet show and dinner at night. The water puppet show was way cooler than the one in Hanoi because it was a smaller theater and had nicer puppets. I also understood the stories a bit better at this one. At one point, these two birds were dancing around each provocatively and the girl next to me and I turned to each and said "is this getting sexual?" And sure enough, a baby bird egg popped out of the water a few seconds later.

Making friends with other travelers is a bit funny, because everyone's personalities and travel intentions are so different from my own. There's heaps of people on the 'gap year' track (like the 19 year old Brit who threw up on me in Sapa) but they're usually way younger, much more budget-conscious than I am and more interested in partying than seeing the sites. There's some older backpackers (old meaning my age or early/mid 30s) but they're usually in couples and a bit less keen on making friends. I've met a few young professionals on day tours who I get on with quite well, but since they have real jobs and limited vacation time, they're usually on tight pre-planned schedules and aren't looking to pick up friends. It's also funny because personalities come out so much stronger when traveling. One of the girls I met on the first day in HCMC seemed like a hit, because she was my age, from the UK and doing a few months of travel but she turned out to be a basket case. She couldn't handle ordering dinner because she didn't have her Lonely Planet list of foods to try in Vietnam so she didn't know what to order... I ended up telling her to order bahn xeo (a rice pancake with pork & shrimp inside) and that I'd give her 200,000 dong if it wasn't on her Lonely Planet list . (Naturally, I was right). She's staying in the same dorm room as me but I've been avoiding her because her stress about everything stresses me out...

On my 2nd morning in HCMC, I did a half day tour of the Cu Chi tunnels. The Cu Chi village is about 1.5hrs outside HCMC and being part of the South, they were assumed to support the split Vietnam/capitalism/Southern Vietnamse Army/America side of the war, but a lot of the villagers sided with communism. So they were passive farmers by day and secret Viet Cong fighters by night. They built a system of tunnels in the jungle outside the village to do their fighting in secret. In theory, there were over 120km of tunnels, most of which have now collapsed. Our guide said he didn't believe there was ever that many tunnels, but since "they won the war, they write the history books." There's now two big tourist destinations which are supposed to give travellers an idea of what the tunnels were like. You watch a 25 minute propaganda video, then walk along a few set up stations which explain how the tunnels were built, what the different rooms were used for, what the Viet Conf ate and explanations for the traps set within the jungle. They had 100m of tunnel recreated at "western size" so the tourists could walk through and get a feel for the tunnel system. It was cool, but dirty and hot.

It's interesting, exhausting and somewhat frustrating to get so many different views of the war and "communism" today. The War Remnants museum was very one sided, referring to the war as the "war of American aggression". Meanwhile, our tour guide for the Cu Chi tunnels (who is a retired teacher, born & raised in North Vietnam) referred to it as a civil war, which America, France, Russia and China helped with. Not to get overly political, but it's hard to find an unbiased source of information about the war.