Wednesday 9 November 2011

Ho Chi Minh City / Saigon

We arrived in Saigon, as it is named by the locals, or Ho Chi Minh City, as it is called for official purposes, after a 6 hour journey on a sleeper bus. Reaching the outskirts of the city was pretty quick but making our way to the centre appeared to be a more complicated task across very heavy traffic of mainly motorbikes. We had booked a triple room in the backpackers area as Baptiste would arrive the next day. In the 10 seconds after we stepped into the room we had already heard 3 horns and the continuous background noise from the bars, restaurants and people walking around. We stepped out and asked for a room on the back of the building, it was not going to be a problem.

The next morning B arrived as planned, he avoided the taxi scams from the airport (not using the meter and offering a price up to 4x the normal fair, charging the airport access fee twice) and joined us for breakfast. He was jetlagged but we still went for a wander. By 13h he was gone and made his way back to the hotel for an afternoon nap. Nic and I walked a bit longer past Notre Dame Cathedral, the old post office with colonial style. We were even interviewed about tourism by a group of local students. In the evening, like most evenings in HCMC, we started by 'taking the apero' at the street bar beside the hotel on some child-sized plastic chairs. That way we were very close to the road, there were neon lights coming from all the shops, the temperature was heavy and we were all feeling very far away from home!

Saigon is a mix of old and new, colonial buildings versus brand new skyscrapers, very rich and very poor: the only place we saw Porsche and real Gucci in one street and people walking bare foot with a couple of baskets hanging from a wooden stick selling cheap food in the next. It was disturbing. We headed to the war museum and saw the atrocities of the war, visited the presidential palace, which was partially blown up during the war. We also went on a day trip to the Cu Chi tunnels that were used by the Viet Minhs to hide from the French and later by the Viet Congs to resist against the Americans.

On our last day we went to the Sheraton hotel for a cocktail happy hour session on the roof top terrace. We had a pleasant sunset and a couple of Mojitos :-)

On Monday we took our flights from HCMC to Phuket via Singapore and landed on time. We had heard of reliability issues about Jet Star, Easyjet's Asian cousin, but everything ran surprisingly smoothly. We booked our boat tickets to Ko Phi Phi from the airport and arrived to our GH despite the taxi driver being slightly lost. It was all so easy, for once!

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