Keep-snakes, rubber, dong, tunnels and mopeds.... Vietnam

So to Vietnam. We flew into Ho Chi Minh/Saigon from Singapore on Valentines day, the eighteen hours of travel, the taxi haggling and the smog at sunset made for a romantic day.
HCM has all the contrasts you'd expect from a city in Asia, wealth and poverty at every turn, if not in equal measure and collosal amounts of energy, sitting alongside plenty of lethargy.
It turns out the Vietnamese love their scooters, it's hard to imagine how many there are, but if you're been on the Isle of Wight for an August bank holiday and the annual vespa club thingy, you've got some sense of it, everyone uses scooters, to do everything. We suspect there must be as many words for scooter as the eskimos have for snow.

It's hard to believe we've only been here four days, it's so different from Oz and NZ. we've had plenty of tip top smiles, and not all of them have faded when we've said 'no thank you'. We've enjoyed being Dong millionaires, US$100 gets you 1.5million dong, that's a lot of Dong. It's all much more Chinese than we expected, the temples, the food and the people.

Thirty years on, the war still feels fresh, we visited the war remnants museum, damning on Agent Orange and conflict in general and we've crawled through Vietcong tunnels north-west of Saigon, now surrounded by very ordered Rubber plantations. All in all a good intro to South-East Asia.

Two key historical facts learned by Erica so far (never my top subject but . . .)
A) Apparently Viet Nam is a communist country (figured out two days in)
B) when the Germans were here (whenever that was) they planted cotton instead of rice which turned out to be a grave mistake as, according to our tourguide, 'everyone died by the hungries'.

What about the keep-snakes? A tourist top seller apparently, pickled snakes in rice-wine bottles, not keep-sakes, but keep-snakes.... boom boom.