Saigon

Hats and more hats

Pots and pans

She turned just as I was clicking

Bread, a Vietnamese specialty

Food everywhere, eating anywhere.

Looks appetizing, but what is it? Maybe candy?

Beans, beans, good for your heart

Mushrooms

All kinds of dried stuff

Yet another kind of dried stuff

Saigon Main Post Office outside

Saigon Main Post Office inside

The opera house This is actually an infamous tourist trap: Liliana fell and scratched her leg climbing the sidewalk, and a few days later I fell and scratched my leg – I was reading the program announcement, "Dido and Aeneas" and was too busy to look where I stepped.

Opera

The French Resident's palace – now the City Hall.

Saigon cathedral

Cityscape		On the river, unimaginatively called Saigon River

Lotus bud and lotus leaf A fancy building near our hotel; to me it seems truly inspired by nature. Actually, the platform is a heliport.

Interior patio in the hotel

Lovely arrangement in the hotel lobby, but somehow I could not shoot it right

Saigon traffic – very mild compared to Hanoi

Saigon traffic

Evening on the river

Evening on the river

During the war with America, this was a zone (quite near to Saigon) that opted to stay Communist. So it was declared a free bombing zone, and the Vietnamese went ubderground – literally, in tunnels – and stayed there for many years. On the surface there were only booby traps.

The common type of boobytrap

Tunnel entrance

Entering a tunnel

A captured tank		Shells

Other types of boobytraps

Door boobytrap and some others

Making weapons Metal came from bomb splitters or fallen aircraft. For boobytraps, only sharpened bamboo was used, in a variation of the traditional hunting method.

I took most of these in Cu Chi to rest from the tunnels and boobytraps.

Bark		Rubber tree with slit to collect latex.

Jackfruit

Rubber tree

Jackfruit

Rubber tree plantation

Cashew – the "nut" hangs below the red fruit. The plant is a relative of poison ivy, and parts of it are toxic.