Return to Saigon

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Today is Vietnam's independence day and I noticed quite soon because my usual banh mi (personal sized baguette sandwich) shop - which is just around the corner and had been open every day from 6:30 - was closed. This is Vietnam though so I didn't have to go too much further to find an alternative banh mi shop. My dong had become rather soggy after yesterday's rain though. 10k and up is plastic polymer banknotes, but the 1000, 2000, and 5000 are printed on really poor quality cotton notes. Given that they're worth 3.3p, 6.6p and 9.9p respectively that's unsurprising, and they get really mangled and soggy. I believe the government tried to replace those with coins at one point but people wouldn't accept and use coins and Vietnam runs purely on notes. There can't be many countries that don't have any coins at all?





As mentioned the other day, since today is independence/national day I had booked my bus back to Saigon. I had booked with a company called The Sinh Tourist which is quite a large tour company in Vietnam. The bus left from their office area, not the main city bus stop, and this was about 1.3km away which feels like much further when you're carrying all your stuff up and down Dalat's hills.



The Sinh Tourist seems primarily to be a sort of tour company, although you can just book a plain bus ticket on one of their buses which is what I had done. The usual ticket was $9 with an additional $8 'public holiday surcharge' which adds up to almost 400k! That's at least double what it should be, I'm sure no locals pay any holiday surcharge. Also, I was charged the amount as US$17 and generally it seems that if something is priced in dollars in Vietnam, there's a good chance you're being overcharged. TheSinhTourist seems to mainly organise tours. Not quite the level of the sort of load tourists on and off a bus like cattle and drive around to all the sites for five minutes each, but more the sort of tour where they organise everything for you and make sure you have as little interaction with the actual place and people as possible and never have to speak to anyone who doesn't speak perfect English. You know, catering to that demographic of traveler who would really secretly much rather be watching a documentary, but have to actually go to a place so that they can put adventurous pictures of themselves on Snapstagram and think that they're all multicultural. On my bus from Cat Tien to Dalat my backpack was put on top of a big pile of grapefruits and then covered in the bus conductor's banh mi crumbs. You don't get that kind of thing with a tourist bus.



I had a sleeper bus, which is a fairly common thing in Vietnam, not just for tourists. Basically you get two levels of seats, like bunk beds, that are sort of like the lie-flat seats in business class on planes. They go down almost fully flat and can also sit up. (This isn't just a tourist thing, I've seen these buses quite commonly here with the local companies too)



It's roughly an 8 and a half hour journey from Dalat back to Saigon. You can fly as well from an airport about 30km outside Dalat and it's a 30 minute flight. The flight costs at least 1.5-2 million when I looked and you miss out on the risking life-and-death fun of Vietnam's traffic. I actually quite enjoy long bus rides anyway. You just relax and look out at the countryside.



The bus set off very empty indeed, I would say only about a fifth of seats were full. This is extremely common on a local bus, often I would be the only person on the bus at the start, because the bus then drives around to pick up passengers who instinctively know where on the roadside the bus will show up and generally ends up absolutely packed. However as a tourist bus, this did not happen and instead we actually did the journey mostly empty. In fact just dropping off people, including at the Cat Tien junction. Those dropped off at the junction for Cat Tien had a car from their accommodation waiting there for them of course. As I said, people who want everything all neat and nicely organised.



It's worth pointing out that there was an extremely noticeable lack of buses on the highway today. When I came up from Cat Tien there were local public buses near constantly, and I barely saw any at all today. At least a 90% reduction in the number of buses. So I think the accommodation staff were correct when they warned me that I would struggle to get an ordinary bus today due to the holiday, and it's probably a very good thing I did book the tourist bus. Even if it did cost me 150-200k more (about £5).



I really enjoyed the ride back though. I'm relatively short by European standards but here in Vietnam I'm exactly the correct height and I was able to just barely stretch out to my full height in the seat so it was really comfortable. Unlike all these other freakishly tall tourists. It was nice just looking out at the scenery and not arriving at my destination having no circulation in my feet through them being jammed in with my backpack all day.



We left the amazing mountains with pine forests and broadleaf forest on the ridges that covers the Dalat Plateau. It really is a spectacular area of endemic birds, so many amazing species. Then back into the lowlands with completely different vegetation and look at of agriculture and development everywhere. There's one section of road that winds through rainforested mountains which is particularly pretty. What was less enjoyable to look at though we're the unfortunately numerous bird shops. I hadn't noticed any on the drive up, but I saw quite a few today. They seemed to especially have bulbuls and laughingthrushes, one shop had dozens and dozens of White-cheeked Laughingthrushes in pathetic little cages that would in the past have been considered suitable for canaries. There was even a massive Greater Coucal in a wire box that would have been too small for a hamster.



They're the only birds you see though. There are no wild birds on the roadsides. No doves or sparrows or egrets in the paddy fields. Anywhere else in Asia, you'd see mynas constantly along the roadsides. You know how many mynas I've seen on the roadsides in my entire time in Vietnam? None. Exactly zero. Rice paddies and lotus ponds where you'd expect birds are totally empty of wildlife, no birds, apart from occasionally domestic ducks. There's lots of amazing wildlife in Vietnam, it's just that there's less and less of it, and it's hard to find.



Back in Saigon I'm staying at the same place as last time. I looked for a different place on the internet, but I didn't fancy walking around trying to find a hotel when I arrived and, well, the place I got last time is insanely cheap. It's a private room (single room, shared bathroom) and although it's about the smallest room you could reasonably use, it's in the middle of district 1 and it's 140k per night. I couldn't see anything online priced similarly apart from dorms, which I basically can't be bothered with at this point when I can get a room for about £4. The lock is quite literally a chopstick shoved into a hole (there's a padlock on the outside, but it's if you want to lock on the inside that a chopstick becomes necessary) There is a TV in the room though! It doesn't work, is larger than my backpack, and probably older than me, but never mind.



The advantage of a tourist bus is that it drops you off in the tourist area, literally 600m from my accommodation. It's weird that you can be tired after sitting on a bus all day. I am a bit sleep deprived after this Vietnam trip though, but slewl deprivation generally means there's been lots of wildlife to see, or at least to look for. I also ruined my no mynas streak as there were two in mini sort of park thing as I walked to my accomodation. I was in my accommodation around 4.



My flight tomorrow is in the very early afternoon which of course means getting to the airport in the morning and leaving the accommodation in the mid morning. There's no wildlife in Saigon, seemingly apart from two starlings, and I've been to the zoo so I'll just be relaxing a bit. Tomorrow, I fly to Bangkok for just a short relaxed 10 day visit, and the final stop of the trip.

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