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Published: August 3rd 2012
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The bus journeys and time spent on the road is getting easier & easier. The bus ride from Phnom Penh, Cambodia through to Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam was 8 hours including a stopover at the border to have our passports stamped. The process was seamless. Hand your passport to one of the assistants on the bus, receive a departure stamp, get off the bus on the Vietnam side of the border for another stamp and checking of your baggage, then proceed to your destination.
Our arrival in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) marked a change in our vulnerability. We had the usual heckles from taxi drivers as we stepped foot of the bus. Having no idea where our bus had docked, we decided to show a taxi driver our hotel address and he agreed to take us there. We only had American dollars at this point. But the taxi driver said this wasn’t a problem and he would accept it. Two minutes around the corner we found ourselves at a Jewellery store changing a $20 note for Vietnamese Dong. We took a few left turns and we arrived at our hotel alleyway. I questioned the integrity of our taxi driver
and asked him if we had just done the block from the bus stop to bring us within a street of where we get off our bus. He insisted I was wrong, so we paid him his 240,000 Dong (equivalent to $11 AUD), collected our bags, walked across the street and saw our bus stop. It was from this point onwards that we now have our destined hotel address programmed into our iPhones before our departure to our next hotel.
With only 3 nights in HCMC we booked a tour of the city for the very next morning. This was going to be the quickest and most in-depth way for us to get a handle on HCM. The tour covered sites such as the Vietnam War Museum, a Weasel Coffee shop, Chinatown and a Chinese Temple, the Kings Palace, a Handicraft shop, Notre Dame Cathedral and the very French Colonial Post Office.
For our last day in HCMC we booked a tour of the Cui Chi Tunnels. These were definitely a must see! It was amazing to learn that the South-Vietnamese dug out 250 km’s worth of underground tunnels. The tunnels are formed and dug out of clay.
A walk through the tunnels is not advised for the claustrophobic. Pitch black with no room to stand and not much more to turn around. Hard to imagine the scurrying through the tunnels when they were in full use.
Our half day tour would not have been complete without another stop at a handicraft factory. It seems this is an agreement had by all tour companies. There were approx 7 other tour buses stopped there at the same time.
We met up with our friends Nicole & Dennis tonight after we departed eachother in Phnom Penh. Dinner and Vodka & Orange buckets complete with the usual antics and we said our goodbyes until what we thought would be a reunion when we all arrived in Laos.
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