May 21 Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

I finally got a good night's sleep which felt amazing. Despite how hot it is outside I was able to find a cool room that was also nice and quiet.

Overall, HCMC is loaded with history. It feels like anywhere you go there is some sort of remembrance of what happpend 35 years ago in this city. After a quick bite to eat, ham and cheese croissant, I set out for what was to be a day walking around HCMC. My first stop was the Reunification Palace aka Independence Palace (the name was changed to Reunification once North and South Vietnam were reunited in 1975). Reunification Palace was the home and office of the President of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War and was the site of the end of the Vietnam War when on 30 April 1975, a communist tank crashed through the front gate leading to the fall of Saigon (HCMC) to the Communists. I decided to take a guided tour which was okay, but most interesting of all we were shown the basement of the palace where the War Room (where many crucial conversations with the US took place) and the rooftop where a northern communist spy dropped a bomb on the building on 8 April 1975.

Following the tour, I headed to the War Remnants Museum which documents the atrocities of the Vietnam War/Conflict. This was not an easy site to take in. The museum had numerous floors which were full of hurrendous photos of people napalmed, shot or bombed by the US (the US dropped 14,300,000 tons of artillery or bombs during the war). What was amazing was that there was zero censory on what was shown. The museum certainly made it apparent that the US made a mistake there, killing so many civilians, and they were not shy about showing this viewpoint. It was interesting to see that the famous photograph (at least in the US) of Kent State protest took up only a small corner of the museum. After the museum I set out for a quick stop at the Notre Dame cathedral which was nothing too exciting.

At night I went out to dinner with some people I met on the bus to HCMC.

Exact location of where the communist tank
broke through the gate of the Reunification Palace
on 30 April 1975. The Palace is in the background.

On 8 April 1975 a communist spy dropped
two bombs at this location in the Palace.

President of South Vietnam's meeting room.

"Tiger Cage" at the War Remnants Museum.
POWs were held in these cages made out of
barbed wire. They were just big enough for a small
person to lay down in.

The "War Room" at the Reunification Palace
kept tallies of troops in S. Vietnam on 29 June 1968.
The US is the first listed with 541,933 troops
-- hundreds of thousands more than other countries.

Vietnamese Notre Dame

Inside Notre Dame