Toe Chi Minh City

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Han - Our next stop was Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) where we were due to get a flight back to Thailand. Unfortunately we gave ourselves a little too long there (8 days - ideal time allotted to HCMC is 2 days) so got a room with air-con & cable & were very lazy indeed.

Probably the most fun we had was at the water park which has really scary water slides. I think this may have been where I contracted my toenail infection which was to become the cause of some concern for the following week.

Neil - Hi, Our blog should really have been called "Diary of a Hypochondriac", however on this occasion Hannah did have a bad toe. So bad infact that we took her to the local hospital and had a nurse put a plaster on it!

H - Yes, it was very serious and I was also prescribed antibiotics to prevent the imminent loss of my toe. You will all be relieved to hear that my toe is better and I am filled with new hope for the future.

N - Other than our visit to the water park we took things real easy. I luckily went alone to the war museum, it wasn't nice, you wouldn't like it, i didn't like it. My Cyclo driver tried to take me a local massage parlour on the way back to the hotel, I had already insisted that I didn't want a "Massage" even after he had shown me a picture of the 9 prettiest girls I had seen in Vietnam (not including my good lady wife), he still bloody well took me there and expected me to have changed my mind after he had cycled over every pot hole in a last ditch attempt to persuade me. They were not the girls in the picture, but that was ok as I wasn't having any of "it" anyway!

H - Traffic in HCMC is terrible. The roads are total mayhem with bikes going in all directions and are virtually impossible to cross. Neil had to hold my hand on many occasions and drag me through the un-slowing traffic. More hazardous are the pavements which, when not covered in parked bikes, drop away suddenly from under your feet in steep slopes to the gutter. I fell over just about every time I looked in a shop window.

Speaking of window shopping, by far the worst aspect of HCMC are the "Buy Something"s. You can't eat a meal without being approached at least 10 times by people flogging books, nail clippers, marijuana, cocaine, chewing gum etc. Its a constant strain on ones patience and poor Neil had a mini breakdown & started hitting himself on the head with a bottle of water and chanted "buy something! buy something!" like a demented Dalek.

Neil - I'm alright now, well atleast no worse than I was before. We actually really did enjoy HCMC. One of the highlites was Saigon Race Track - instead of real jockey's they tie children to horses, a great day out and fun for all the family!

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