Cau Dai Temple & Cu Chi Tunnels

We went on our first real tour today, 38 people on a bus heading for the Cau Dai Temple (which im sure Ewen will post a lot about, he was a tad more interested in this than i was) which is a temple where we got to watch a mass service, the religion is four combined; catholic, Buddhism, Taoism & Confucianism. they have four compulsory masses a day, one at midnight, 5am, 12pm, and 5pm. talk about your religion taking up your entire life! we saw at least one monk asleep against a wall, poor guy has no time to sleep in a proper bed in between all of those masses!
The temple was really nice though, very colourful
You had to take off your shoes and hats to go inside, apparently you're also supposed to dress modestly but i had shorts on (and some girls had TINY shorts on and singlets) but no one seemed to mind.
After the temple we drove a few more hours to the Cu Chi tunnels. we had the opportunity to climb into one of the original man holes (one not enlarged for fat American tourists)
we also saw some of the different booby traps the viet con constructed to catch or harm the american soldiers, some of them were pretty dam brutal!

we also had the opportunity to fire a gun, Ewen jumped at the chance but i was happy to skip this one, it was loud enough sitting around for the corner from where they were doing it let alone actually firing one! plus you know, its against my Pieta Religion :-)
once Ewen had finished shoopting we got a bit distracted buying cans of drink and talking to another girl from the tour and ended up a bit behind everyone else, when we caught up they were just finishing trying some shots, we're not sure what they were, but it involved snakes and alcohol. it was the most disgusting thing i have ever tasted! thank god i had the 7up for a chaser!
the best part of the tour was climbing through the tunnels, it was a stretch of 100m and you had four opportunities to get out; 20m, 40m, 60m or the full 100m stretch. me and ewen had three people in front of us managed to do the full 100m but surprisingly not too many other people managed it, it wasn't as bad as i thought it would be, although it was VERY hot as you can see form how sweaty i am! at some points it was high enough that i could walk just bent over, but sometimes you did have to crawl on hands and knees.






we arrived back in Saigon around 6.30pm very hot, sweaty and tired. we had a quick dinner of pizza before coming back to the hotel to shower. luckily we have finally got our laundry back from the hotel as we were both basically out of clean clothes! Tomorrow we are off on our tour of the Mekong Delta then its just one more day in Saigon before we fly to Siem Reap, Cambodia