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The Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the naked girl fleeing down the highway after a US napalm strike was taken on the road near Cu Chi - To the west of Saigon a few kilometres from the Cambodian border. Our guide on the bus showed us the strip of highway and further along the dirt track to where her folks supposedly still lived. The girl herself now in her fifties, an icon of the Vietnamese horror of “The American War”, had fled the workers paradise as soon as she could and now lived in Canada. Her book, “The Girl in the Picture”, was now a standard component of the street vendors that infested the cities throughout Vietnam - A snapshot that summed up why the Commies won the war. Now like everything else here it was merely a commodity to be sold in the market place. Local dumb ideas can trump foreign arrogance, but sooner or later every one realises the mistake and tries to save face.  The end result is euphemism smoke screens. Capitalism – No. Market Economy – Yes.

The guides name was Minh the same as “Uncle Ho’s”. Trained in a seminary he became an interpreter when the war came. Yarns about US Secretary of State MacNamara and Bob Hope filled in time on the drive out of Saigon. He had moved in the upper echelons of power until he found himself on the wrong side in 1975. Eight years in a re-education camp were his reward following the “Liberation”. He was lucky, some of his mates didn’t get out until the nineties. He is still a marked man and has strict limits on his employment and travel. It was sobering. All is not Tiger beer and skittles it seems in Vietnam beneath the tourist veneer.

We crossed the aptly named Black River, with Minh reminiscing about swimming in his youth. You could walk across it now so filled with garbage and filth it has become. Environmental controls and post 19th Century sanitation apparently a bourgeois indulgence. Out the window the dirty suburbs gave way to rice paddies and water buffalos as we headed for the Cao Dai temple.  In front the driver jostled for position in the Vietnamese version of Rollerball. I half expected for blades to suddenly pop out of the hub caps and rip into the vehicles we overtook like Charlton Heston in Ben Hur.  The preferred overtaking method seemed to be to tail gate whoever was in front, blaring the horn, until they reluctantly edged over to let you through an inch at a time. Eventually the driver loses patience and guns it past. Swerving onto the wrong side of the road in the process, and seemingly into certain head-on death only to escape by centimetres. I remember my rule about the front window and turn back to the buffalo.

Cao Dai seems to be a very pragmatic religion. Not content to settle for one lot of iconography and set of prophets they take a mixed lollies approach to worship and embrace an all star cast. In the Cao Dai spiritual footy team God must squeeze Mohammad and Jesus into the same forward line, presumably relegating Gary Ablett to the bench. Having picked the “all seeing eyes” out of the world’s great religions their temple is understandably breathtaking. A kaleidoscope of colour greets visitors to the service as the white clad congregation file into the great hall that combines the sparse furnishings and tiled floors of a mosque with the grandiose splendour of an altar crammed with gold and silver adornments like a spiritual Sale of the Century gift shop.

We watch the spectacle from the viewing gallery feeling a little like intruders. Men enter from one side and women from the other. Colourful priests up the middle. Gongs, chants and singing Vietnamese voices complete with the pop of flash bulbs. The multi colour dragons curled around the pillars seemed to glare disapprovingly but the parishioners smiled on. Tourism it seemed was a vital component in all this.  I dropped a handful of coins in the donation box on the way out to keep the stone Godzilla’s away.

Rod was from North Sydney and had just crossed the border from Cambodia on his South East Asian odyssey with tales of the splendour of Ankor Wat and a river trip from the Viet border in a much more civilised fashion than that favoured by Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now.  We chatted outside the bus as we waited for a German couple who had missed the scheduled rendezvous time and were putting the tour guide’s nicely timed schedule out of kilter. Fifteen minutes later the sheepish Berliners appeared with mumbled apologies - So much for German precision.

Over lunch we pondered how at times the most surprising thing about Vietnam is how connected to global pop culture and trends it is. Third world sanitation and plumbing perhaps but blanket mobile phone coverage, cable tellie and internet cafes on every corner ensure that waiters and street vendors alike sport the latest Nokias and the sound of rock classics as ring tones echo across the rice paddies. We finished our rice and spring rolls and boarded the bus for our next stop – The Cu Chi Tunnels.

The black and white video on the TV at Cu Chi provided the background story for the tour of the tunnels. Told in pure propaganda style the voiceover spoke of the vital role the tunnels played in the eventual glorious victory over the “traitor puppet government” of the South and the American Imperialists who backed them. Over the top rhetoric - It seemed you had to go to the museums to hear the official party line.

During the war Cu Chi was one of the most heavily bombed and shelled spots on the planet. It had been declared a free strike zone and any US planes with any left over bombs or napalm after a mission were given free reign to drop them here. The target was insurgent’s creeping over the border from Cambodia and carrying out raids around Saigon. They would strike and then vanish into the ground. So Cu Chi became a moonscape.

We followed the guide into the bamboo jungle, weaving through saucer sized depressions with 15 metre diameters covered in foliage. These Minh identified as bomb craters from B52s. Rosie made the comment that these holes seemed to be regularly whipper-snippered to keep them visible for the tourists – Something that we would find elsewhere in Vietnam as well - Keeping the war accessible for the tourists.

We paused at a chained off area with a flat board covered with dry leaves. As we gathered around Minh hit the board with a stick and it swung on a well oiled pivot to reveal a nasty pit filled with metal spikes. Tiger trap – Man trap – Ouch! He then proceeded to take us through a procession of booby traps and other nasties that the Viet Cong left for unsuspecting victims, with a fascinated passionate intensity like a presenter off The Curiosity Show. One particularly nasty door way device was hinged mid way so that if you got your arms up in time to stop the top bit the bottom would swing into the goolies. Not many Jehovah’s Witnesses or Foxtel salesmen go door knocking in Cu Chi I suspect. I made a mental note not to piss off the Vietnamese.

The bamboo jungle and the traps of various sizes were scary enough without the added realism of the staccato chatter of the machine gun range somewhere through the trees. The Cu Chi museum complex is apparently the only place in Vietnam where tourists can fire a machine gun, under controlled circumstances of course - Whereas in Cambodia they practically give you an AK47 as soon as you clear customs – Or so Rod’s story went.

When Minh asked our group if anyone was interested in loosing off a few rounds on the firing range Rosie and I glanced at each other out of the corner of our eyes - 10,000 Dong a bullet - Something that we might never get a chance to do again. We hesitated and remained silent as a few vehement no’s and shakes of the head from other members of our group seemed to seal the decision making for all. Rosie whispered in my ear that she was really keen to do it but didn’t want to be the only one who put her hand up. I got an immediate mental image of her with criss-crossed cartridge belts and a smoking M16 letting loose like a curly haired Lara Croft. At least that would be one way to get past the cyclos at the hotel steps unmolested.

The tunnels themselves were tiny. The guide explained that the ones we were entering were actually reconstructions and in fact nearly double the size of the originals so that fat westerners like us could actually get through them. The originals has been dug so small deliberately to stop the Americans from being able to follow the Viet Cong inside – Your average Vietnamese being more likely to ride a Melbourne Cup winner than play centre for the Melbourne Tigers. Nevertheless five metres inside the opening with no choice but to inch forward in a squat shuffle in pitch darkness, the claustrophobia sets in. To put this in perspective there is more legroom under the desk I am sitting at whilst I write this, than there was in the tunnel which had a ceiling less than a metre high and a width that would make it difficult to turn around even if you didn’t have a conga line of tourists behind you forcing you forward.

Every now and then a small electric light had been set in the wall giving enough light to show you the bends in the tunnel and keep your nose out of the butt of the person in front, as bottle necks ahead periodically paused the line. Hot and stuffy and full of stale air. You could fully imagine the terror of being inside whilst the bombs were going off outside. It did not take too much of a leap to imagine it as a grave. We travelled 80 metres before the first exit emerged through the dark. We exited relieved to be through and declining the guides offer to continue for another 150 metres.

Beers over dinner - Saigon and Huda tasting mighty fine with the local cuisine - Weather seemingly designed for consuming beverages. Knocking back brews watching the faux communists sell faux brands to tourists playing millionaire with monopoly money. Pass go and collect five million Dong. Bullshit never tasted so good. After declining the offer of yet another jar of Tiger Balm we reflected on the sales strategies of the Vietnamese street. The silent beggar who cap in hand illustrated his plea with a mimed tear down his cheek was a classic but it was the family of beggars we watched the previous night from our elevated restaurant vantage point that took the cake.

Two women and three kids under six including what appeared to be a toddler of two or three. The mother laid the kid down on one of the few bits of pavement not covered with cooking pots, parked bikes or vendors wares and coaxed her into playing dead like a puppy. The adults then vanished into the crowds and the kids wandered out into the traffic as it slowed begging and pointing to the apparent corpse on the sidewalk. Some of the locals wise to the scam laughed on approach others fell victim. The performance was so convincing it was not till we saw the group again in a different part of town with the toddler very much alive that we appreciated the extent of the production. Vietnamese street theatre.

Snake wine is not really wine it tastes more like cheap whiskey. Sold everywhere in Vietnam it consists of a large bottle of yellow liquid in which is displayed an annoyed looking cobra and often several smaller snakes and other critters such as scorpions. Together with a couple of Pommy tourists we each had a swig of the offered taster at the gift shop.  Supposedly great for all that ails you including potency and sweat of limbs. Given the number of bottles of the stuff that we saw throughout the country there must not be many snakes left in the wild. I wondered if you were supposed to scoff into the reptile when you were finished like the Agave Worm at the bottom of a Mescal Tequila bottle. It gives new meaning to the rhyming slang “going for a snakes hiss.”

Part 1 - Saigon
Part 2 - Cu Chi
Part 3 - The Reunification Express
Part 4 - Nha Trang
Part 5 - Hoi An
Part 6 - My Son
Part 7 - Hue
Part 8 - The Dee Em Zee
Part 9 - Hanoi
Part 10 - Ha Long Bay