You have to have a visa to enter Vietnam, and you can go about it 2 ways... getting it from an embassy, or, if you enter via Hanoi or HCMC, you can get a visa on arrival. It's not the same as when we went to Turkey, though... I got in contact with one of the hundreds of Vietnamese travel agencies you find online, a reputable one called "My Vietnam Visa". Apparently there are "fake" ones out there, but our process went very smoothly and I have no complaints! You send them your passport info, arrival date, and a processing fee, and they send you , via email, a letter with a happy red stamp on the bottom. It's all in Vietnamese, but it worked! Once you get off the plane, with the visa approval letter, cold hard cash (dollars are preferred), your passport, and a 4x6 cm photo in hand, you march up to the "Visa on Arrival" window and hand it all over to the ray of sunshine dressed in green military getup behind the counter.
And thats when you realize, we're not in Thailand anymore. Goodbye land of smiles, hello Kim Jung Il from "Team America". I had read horror stories about the Visa on Arrival waiting times in HCMC, but lucky for us, we waited maybe 15/20 minutes max. The immigraton officer who processed the VOA forms was like a chihuahua, barking at people and talking down to them. One poor British guy had been waiting for 4, yes 4 hours because they had misplaced his passport and when he asked the first time about what was taking so long they shooed him away from the counter. When he went back and explained how long he had been there, they dug through some paperwork, found his passport and handed it to him. While he studied it over to make sure he had the right visa, the little angry green man yelled "You got your visa! What are you waiting for?" The poor guy walked past and all he could do was give a little chuckle.. ah the joys of travel.
Thankfully, since our airport welcome wagon, every other Vietnamese person we have met so far has been extremely nice, the weather has been warm and breezy, the pho has been steamy and delicious, and life has been good. We booked a room smack in the middle of the Backpacker area of District 1, where we could walk to all the sights nearby. It was also right across the street from a really nice park, which I always like to do because it gives a safe place to go for a run.. Only problem in Saigon is the pollution.. There are so many motorcycles, cars, and buses... lots of fumes and smog, so you have to go early in the morning or late at night. Only problem was that the locals start their days often at 5:30 AM and unless I am catching a early bus, train, plane, or somehow made my way to another ashram and have to go sit in satsang I am not getting up that early! I am sure Paul appreciates that too ;)
I saw a guy running with a surgical mask on, but, I don't think that it's THAT bad.. Loads of locals here wear all kinds of masks, decorated with patterns, a sort of fashion statement to help their lungs while sitting in traffic around thousands of other motorbikes. Someone is making mega bucks out of the face mask industry in Asia, that I know for sure. As I sit writing this post in our beach town hotel room, where the air is fresh and clean, people still wear those masks! I guess after a few crazy bird flus, swine flu, SARS, and whatever else plagued the area along with the fumes, I'd wear a pretty face mask too.
Back to Sai Gon-
We got in pretty late, and after being on the go in Thailand, we didn't do much the first night. We always say we will give ourselves a day to relax and not do much, but it rarely happens.. Our first full day we had planned to do just that and ended up walking all around district 1 in search if of a decent bookstore.. We got a pretty good tour of the center of town during our search, despite it not being fruitful. The one funny thing about Vietnam is that there are tons of copied versions of books...Lonely Planet guides, Fifty Shades of Grey, Tom Clancy, Pol Pot books, Breaking Dawn, Harry Potter, you want it, they have it in a counterfeit version. Ladies walk around with a stack of books about as tall as they are and show you their selection while you enjoy your meal outside... I hadn't planned on buying one of these books, but at the place we had dinner that night had a selection of used books and I picked up the Kite Runner, which I had been meaning to read.. It was clearly photocopied, but had every page, even though it had 3 different fonts used. I managed to read it in 24 hours, so it was a good purchase. Thanks, Vietnamese book copy people! It only cost me like two bucks! I have a feeling I will be a much better reader when we are done traveling-- meaning finding time to do something productive, like read a book, instead of watching whatever crap is on TV. I've read more books cover to cover in the past 4 months that I've read in like 2 years. That's sad!
Our second full day in Saigon we made our way to the War Remnants Museum, which was all about the a Vietnam war.. I knew it would be tough to see and learn about horrible things that my high school history classes left out and college courses touched on briefly.. And it was. It was also hard to gauge what was propaganda and what was fact.. All I know is that the atrocities that took place at the hands of American soldiers was disgusting.. Villages burned, farmers executed, women and children killed, napalm bombs, and agent orange. Not a proud segment of US history... I felt sick walking around the museum and seeing all the photographs of the war.. It was hard to take in.
The thing I couldn't get over, was the fact that the producer of agent orange was Monsanto, the same stupid company that is ruining American crops by creating super seeds and making everything genetically modified! How can that happen? It is insane! I don't know how that company still exists after the damage it has caused the Vietnamese people. For years they had no crops or vegetation due to agent orange, and there are people still to this day who suffer from deformities and health problems from the chemical warfare. It got in the food and water system, mothers and fathers who were exposed had children who then had crazy deformities.. It is so sad to see first hand. Most people have no idea that generations later, people here are still toiling from the war, but they are, and they are receiving no kind of aid from anyone.. And they need help.. Especially the kids who were born long after the war and had exposure through their parents who were around it when they were younger.
I could go on and on about what I saw in the museum, but one really needs to see it in person to understand.. Most of the artifacts were photographs taken by journalists from all over the world, images I had never seen before or thought to look into. The museum was 3 floors of these items and a whole room was dedicated to agent orange and it's effects.. Definitely not a feel good place, but it was interesting to learn about the war from a different perspective.
The museum was kind of mentally draining, but totally worth it, and I'm glad we went.
Our last full day in Saigon we booked a half day tour to go visit the Cu Chi tunnels. Cu Chi is about 30KM outside of Saigon, and is famous for the underground tunnel system built by the Viet Cong or the "guerrillas" back during the war.. My only visual of the Vietnam war up until our time here was from movies, mainly "Forrest Gump" or "Born on the Fourth of July", two very different representations of the war. At Cu Chi, we got a new spin on the war, thanks to the propaganda movie we saw telling all about the tunnels. It was a movie from 1964, and told the history of Cu Chi, the "tranquil village where city dwellers came for picnics.." It also spoke of the "American enemy" and the brave warriors who received the "American killer hero award". It was hard to hear American killer over and over again, I have to say.. I can't say I don't blame them for making a propaganda video, especially after what I learned in the museum. Cu chi was devastated by the chemical warfare and became uninhabitable, and there were already tunnels built from previous wars in Vietnam, so they just expanded the tunnels from 200km to 250km and made a village under the ground. Some of the people in the village fled, but those who stayed fought with the Viet Cong against the US, as they were determined to keep their land.
Some of the tactics used were very barbaric, such as boobie traps...we saw some pretty gruesome representations of what they used... 
Yikes!
Apparently before the area was bombed, there were 3 levels of tunnels, which included rooms for weapons, areas to eat and sleep, places to crawl and pop out at the surface...
Yikes!After learning about the guerrilla warfare tactics, and bypassing the offer to shoot a machine gun (yes you could do that there, for a price!), we finally made our way to the tunnels. We entered through one place, and you could go 10,20, 30, 40 meters, or as far as you could make it.. As you made your way farther and farther into the tunnel, the smaller it.. Our guide compared it to an ice cream cone.. Starts big and ends small.. Paul and I made it 30 meters.. After that we would have been on hands and knees and I wasn't up for crawling in the dark...
A level where they kept the "enemy", and a level of tunnels that went almost all the way to the Cambodian border... It was a very intricate system that zigzagged, so it was hard to pinpoint exactly where the Viet Cong were hiding.. Very interesting. Our tour guide was pretty amazing, a Vietnamese guy who had given himself the nickname of "John Wayne" so westerners could remember it.. He was hilarious, yet informative.
After the bus ride back to Saigon, we took it easy and began to get our stuff together in preparation for our 12 hour bus ride we had at 7 the next morning. We made one last walk through the busy backpacker road, which I would had enjoyed way more if I hadn't come down with a little cold.. It seems all the travel and moving about in Thailand wore on me more than I thought it had..luckily we get to go back to Saigon at the tail end of our trip because we fly out from there to Taiwan! It's a really fun place with a great energy, and I am looking forward to spending more time there. Now we have gotten all the "war stuff" we felt we should learn about out of the way, we can enjoy everything else this beautiful place has to offer! And why not begin beach side in Nha Trang?
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