We spent one day walking around Saigon and seeing its major sights, including two museums, a cathedral, the main post office (a grand building built by the French during colonial times), and a Chinese pagoda. The most striking thing about Saigon is the motorcycles. It seems that almost everyone has one. The streets are flooded with motorcycles. Sometimes we would see a family of four on a single motorcycle. Apparently the bicycle used to be the main mode of transportation here, but as the country has gotten wealthier, people have upgraded to motorcycles. Most of the motorcycles are smaller than the ones typically seen in US, more like scooters. The dominance of the motorcycles makes it very difficult to be a pedestrian. We almost got hit by motorcycles a bunch of times. There are very few stop lights (and where they exist they are often ignored), so we would run across the street to avoid getting hit by hundreds of motorcyclist. Eventually we learned to do as the locals do, which is to walk slowly across the street while motocyclists steer around us. They drive on the sidewalks sometimes and we've seen motorcyclists drive against traffic on a one-way street. It's really scary. When we traveled by taxi, the taxi would move down the street at a snail's pace while motorcycles swarmed all around it.

We took two organized day trips from Saigon. The first trip took us to the Cai Dao Temple in the morning, which combines Buddhism with other religions. We watched a ceremony in which all the participants were wearing colorful robes. In the afternoon, we visited the Cu Chi tunnels. These are tunnels built by the Viet Cong during the war so that they could hide and move from place to place without being detected. They built 250 km of tunnels by hand. We crawled through a tunnel and learned about the history of the war in this region. On the second trip, we took a two-hour bus ride to My Tho, and then boarded a boat. The boat took us along the Mekong river. We stopped along the way at a honey farm and a place where they make coconut candy. We also stopped at a village, where we tasted local fruit (mini bananas, papaya, pineapple with salt & chili pepper, sapodilla, and dragonfruit) and listened to live music.

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