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I thought I might be with other tourists on this 2-day tour of Saigon and the surrounding areas – but it's just me and the tour guide, Phuong.  She's quite nice - 1 year older than me and sweet and talkative.  I wanted to have something organized set up when I first got here so that I had a little time to get my bearings in my jet-lagged state.  After this, I'm on my own.
Phuong showed me around Saigon a little this morning.  The city isn't that interesting in itself - not very pretty, not many old historic buildings, not very clean, etc.  But, the people make it interesting. There is lots of hustle and bustle and interesting street markets and stores.  The traffic chaos here puts Boston to shame.  Everyone is on motor bikes (more like scooters) - sometimes whole families on one and they just zip and weave around everywhere with no respect for lanes, traffic lights, larger vehicles, pedestrians, etc.

It was interesting to hear her opinions on things.  I don't know if they're representative, but they were at least one Vietnamese person's thoughts.  She had a lot of positive things to say about the government - building this new road, improving that neighborhood, etc.  It seemed that in a lot of areas the government was moving squatters out of areas and putting in large apartment buildings to beautify the city.  Phuong had nothing but positive to say about that.  The squatter neighborhoods certainly didn't look very hygienic - bamboo and plastic shacks, dirt alleys, and dirty dogs running around.  Some of them are periodically flooded by the Mekong River.  On the other hand, I wondered where the squatters would go. 

The government is also cracking down on roadside vendors because they cause traffic jams.  At one point, our car got stuck in a huge jam.  When we finally reached the cause of the slow-down, I saw an old woman wearing the typical conical hat and pyjamas crying frantically while police put her bike and vending equipment into a truck to be destroyed.  I imagine that equipment constituted the woman's livelihood, so it was really heart-rending to see the panic on her face. 

All over the city and countryside, there were huge billboards with government propaganda, inspirational messages and communist symbols.  They always featured brawny looking Vietnamese people with triumphant expressions.  On the other hand, nothing else about the landscape suggests government control.  People work in their own rice fields and their own farms.  We passed hundreds of shiny new buildings obviously built for private companies with signs like: 'Nguyen Happy Glass Factory' (in English too).  There were fancy new homes everywhere bristling with satellite dishes and antennae and, across the city, endless construction. 

I didn't put Phuong on the spot by asking her what she thought about government corruption and the 1 party system since, from what I've read, people can get in trouble for talking about politics, especially to foreigners. 

In the afternoon, we went to see the Cu Chi tunnels - the remaining tunnels from a huge Vietcong base about 30 mi outside of Saigon. There are more than 100 miles of tunnels, most of them only big enough to crawl in.  They made them that small on purpose so that American GIs would be too big to fit inside.  Imagine crawling miles on your belly in a dark worm hole!  They also showed us a bunch of different types of mantraps made for the American soldiers.  See below 'klipping armpit trap' 

and sharpened bamboo stick impalement trap: 

It was absolutely gruesome.  I started to feel dizzy and couldn't go into one of the tunnels that they had open for tourists.  The guide had a lot of fun with that one:  'look even that old man went in!'  Not very tactful here.  

I could just barely fit inside an escape hole:

Me on an American tank which had seen better days: