Vietnam

Tuesday, Nov. 17th and Wednesday, Nov. 18th   Vietnam is home to 90 million people and in square miles, a little larger than the size of New Mexico.  It's quite mountainous, but also has beautiful beaches lined with palm trees.  We also saw lots of rice fields.  The cattle we saw were terribly thin.  The dogs, however, looked healthy and our tour guide explained that South Vietnamese people don't eat dogs, but North Vietnamese started that practice after the Japanese occupation during WWII and when they left, looted and burned everything so that there was no food.  The people were starving and had to start eating dogs to survive.  He said now they only eat stupid or mean dogs!   We had two stops in Vietnam, the first being Nha Trang.  All of our other ports of call were very clean and street sweepers, usually women, were everywhere.  Not here!  The Vietnamese are a littering bunch, with trash along roadsides and streets.  Vietnam is a communist country but they have free speech, unlike China.   Our next stop was Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, the name the Vietnamese government gave this city in 1975, although the locals still call it Saigon.  It's the largest city in the country, population of around 9 million, with more than 4 million motorbikes, so the traffic is terrible.  There are no freeways, so the buses, trucks, cars, motorbikes, bicycles and pedestrians all must share the road.  Telephone, internet, and cable wires are strung everywhere.  It was so funny we had to include a photo.   We got to see the Rex Hotel, where the CIA's headquarters were during the war and toured the Presidential Palace of the Republic of South Vietnam, now renamed the Reunification Palace.  The North Vietnamese tanks are still on the grounds since they crashed through the gates on April 30, 1975.  We also went through Chinatown, another temple, and a lacquer factory.   Vietnam is a developing country, but as our tour guide said, "Hong Kong is 50 years ahead of us."  The people are encouraged to start their own businesses.  A British man on our tour bus said, "The Americans may have lost the battle, but just look around.  The effects of capitalism are everywhere - the Americans won the war!"