Saigon

Day 4 (I think) in Saigon and it is like Hanoi on steroids, more people (ca. 5 million) more bikes (ca. 10 million), more pollution, more skyscrapers, just more of everything.

The only touristy thing here is the War remnants museum (formerly called "The American War crimes museum", recently changed to be a bit more PC) which was tough on an empty stomach at 8am - photos of agent orange victims, napalm victims, mine victims, the massacre of women & children in My Lai etc. There are still new UXO (unexploded Ordnance) victims in Vietnam every week and this is 30 years after the war ended.
The other big attraction is the Cu Chi tunnels, which the Viet Cong started building in the 40s (against the French) and by the end of the Vietnam American war there were literally hundreds of kilometers of tunnels all over Vietnam. You could actually travel underground from Saigon to the Cambodian border (ca. 150km). They are brilliantly designed - the entrances are only about 40 cm by 20 cm (remarkably, I managed to get in), the air holes were built into ant hills, so that when it rained the water didn't flow down, the kitchens had three sucessive smoke chambers so that the smoke was only barely visible when it reached the surface and there was an emergency exit which went underground into a river.
Basically the Viet Cong used brain & manpower to defeat the vastly better armed Americans - unexploded B52 bombs were reused to make homemade bullets, old tyres were used to make shoes and every bit of metal they could find was used to make fiendish booby-traps in every size & shape imaginable.

Other than that Saigon is just a place to sit at a Cafe, drink coffee and watch the world go by.

Off to Cambodia tomorrow for new year in Phnom Penh.