Up early after maybe 4-5 hours of sleep max, we headed to grab some take away breakfast to eat on the bus on the way to the caves.
I would really suggest doing this to everyone who visits Vietnam. We had a great guide that shared some interesting insight into the ingenuity and perseverance of the Vietnamese who fought in the war with the Americans. I managed to fit myself into one of the original entrances, but not without some scrapes up my sides by the shoulders. We saw the over grown trenches, craters from bombs, cooking dugouts, hospitals, traps, and eventually we went through an “enlarged” tunnel for tourists. It was lit, but not always, and when it was, it was dark. You were sandwiched between other people in your tour group, there were dead ends, and places where you would need to climb up or down. At times you are 3 meters under ground. It is a very uneasy experience, and you can only imagine what it would be like to be in an actual tunnel during war times.
There was a gun range where you could pay to fire a gun like the ones used in the war, but I declined. The sound of gun fire through the forest made things seem a little more real though.
We got back to Saigon around 3ish and had some food, cold coffee drinks and then frittered away the day with showers and wandering until we decided to check out a movie theatre. We had missed a showing, so had dinner first at a cool hot pot place, and then we scurried back to catch a showing of Valentines Day. At first we couldn’t figure how a theatre could function with such low prices and maybe 10 people in the show (out numbered by staff 2:1) but watching the movie it was clear it was pirated and it all made a little more sense.
It was about 1:00 in the morning by the time we walked back to our place, and we fell asleep quickly as our bus to Cambodia left really early the next day.