James and Jo’s south east Asia adventure

I woke up with a cold (possibly Covid), potentially caught from our tour guide at the Ho Chi Minh museum who should’ve taken a sick day, with a long day ahead of this as we were going to visit the Cu Chi tunnels and take a boat trip down the Mekong.

We skipped breakfast after our food tour the previous evening. The minibus arrived early and proved that legally you are allowed to write ‘luxury travel’ on any vehicle. The interior was grubby, the seatbelts broken and the aircon lacklustre. Our fellow tourists were six Filipino women c.60 years old who enjoyed listening and singing along to modern pop songs, and were apparently trying to set a collective record of most photos, videos and phone calls made by a single tour group. They were very friendly and insisted we have some of their dry and flavourless Filipino snacks. They did also send us off with a bag of bbq flavour peanuts which were actually quite moreish.

Our guide, Tom, was diligent and knew his stuff, even if he wasn’t exactly Billy Graham. We had a whistle-stop tour of the tunnels which included which included the opportunity to travel through up to 100m of tunnels with the opportunity to exit every 20m. Jo got through approximately 4m before deciding it was too claustrophobic and forcing a reverse. I went through 60m and decided that was enough as I’d started to drip with sweat and the hunched position was tough on the knees. There were up to 250km of tunnels built, staggering that this was done by hand often under the cover of darkness and with up to 3 levels in places.

Following this we had a decent lunch and travelled for a couple of hours to our location we took a sampan to an island on the Mekong where we had a number of opportunities to buy souvenirs and tip locals. We tasted some honey tea (delicious), bought some candies ginger, listened to some Vietnamese throat singing whilst enjoying tropical fruits. The Vietnamese art form of ‘Ca trù’ singing was inscribed in 2009 on the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, presumably so no one outside of Vietnam would be allowed to perform (and therefore listen to) it.

We then had a rowing boat ride 700m down a narrow tributary and arrived at a coconut candy shop, we sampled some freshly made peanut flavoured which was delicious.

I had a sip of some snake rice wine, which was actually nicer than some dried banana rice wine I had earlier.

We had a long journey back to the hotel and after getting back bought some snacks and paracetamol and had an early night.