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Just called in to say a temporary ciao. Off in the morning to Vietnam for 3 weeks, training the next generation of Affentitten backpackers on how to deal with taxi touts and aggressive tour guides. Not to mention plenty of Apocalypse now re-enactments.

Then coming back here for a couple of days before shipping out to Melbourne permanently. Normal Internet service will be disrupted during that time. So just in case you thought I had been kidnapped by reptiloids, thought I'd say 'bye for now'.

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Have a great trip. I almost booked there for my trip next week but settled on Cambodia and Thailand instead. Regarding the warnings about the locals, here's a abridged (clean) post from another website.

And then the penny drops......."Is this the same scam where there is someone else under the bed ???"

I tell you what, even though I half expected it, what a &$%*@%$ fright I got when I looked under the bed and saw this middle aged Vietnamese woman hiding under the bed!

Me and the the girl were stark naked. The middle aged woman ran for it and I got dressed.

The girl then said, "Give me $3 US for room for rent" !!!!!!!!

I said, "Well, we can discuss this rent problem when I call the police"

She said, "If you call the police, I will call my boyfriend and he will shoot you before police arrive"

At that point, I thought, "Time to get the &$%^ out of there"

3 days later, again in Saigon, the same thing happened to me.....really modern fancy moped driven by a 10/10 girl and asked, "Where you go, do you want to go with me" and there was an older lady who got off the rear and handed me a helmet.

I said, "I think the lady under the bed needs to stop stealing wallets". They gave me the dirtiest look and drove off at speed.

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Well here I am in the central highlands of Vietnam. Nothing like the above happened to me in HCMC. Unlikely to with the wife and kids in tow!

Saw some good grog stuff in and around HCMC. The "War Remnants" museum there have some good hardware on display. I never realised just what a big ass plane a Skyraider was. Obviously it's a fairly one-sided view of things. Australia and NZ are listed as "American satellite and puppet forces".

Also visited the tunnels at Cu Chi, which has become a bit of a Vietnam War Disneyland. Got my rocks off firing an AK-47. My daughter wanted a go at the M16 but they wouldn't let her. Tunnels are pretty amazing. They have been doubled in width and height to allow tourists to traverse them, but even so I had a bit of a Winnie the Pooh moment at a narrow section. Can't imagine what it would be like down there with the B-52 bombs raining down above.

Tomorrow we're off to the beach at Nha Trang. No war stuff there. Waiting to reach Hue and the DMZ for that.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm back in 'The World' as of this morning. Courtesy of the amazing A380.

Am collating some photos at the moment and will try to stick the grog ones together somewhere to view. Unfortunately as Tet approached the transport was getting booked up and it left us a day short in Hue. That meant I didn't get to do the DMZ tour and visit Khe Sanh. But by all accounts there isn't much left to see at all those old firebases anyway, since they have been reclaimed by the jungle or by urban sprawl. An amazing coincidence is that my brother-in-law's wife works in an office building that sits pretty much on top of the old Hanoi Hilton, where the US POWs were housed. She says nobody works late in the building because of the 'ghosts'.

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