The traffic madness of Saigon

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Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon as it is also known, is the largest city in Vietnam. The main area is small enough to walk around, some areas quite western with designer shops and posh hotels and other areas full of locals and street markets which we loved. We ate some great food at some of the street stalls near the markets, where we ordered a beef BBQ and when it turned up was a roof tile over a mini BBQ so we could cook the meat ourselves, great fun!

We thought that the streets were busy with traffic in Hanoi, well it was nothing compared to Saigon. There are about 6 million people living here and over 3 million motorbikes. Everyone uses motorbikes here, so you see smartly dressed people in suits and women in high heeled shoes going to work and the other extreme with people carrying all sorts of supplies. They just lay boxes on the back seat to transport them, sometimes beer, eggs, TVs, glass panels....anything that needs to be moved!!

The only problem with the traffic is we also had to deal with cars. Crossing the road is not for the faint hearted anywhere in Vietnam, but the bikes would weave around you as you crossed and we were quite confident that they did not want to hit us. Cars on the other hand were a different matter and hard to judge where they were going and whether they would stop for you or not....especially the taxis.

One afternoon we took a tour of the city on a cyclo to visit a few of the other sites in Saigon, but mainly it was just fun (or scary depending on your view) to sit and watch the way the cyclo weaved around the traffic!

Whilst here we visited the war museum, which showed graphic images of the American/Vietnam war. It use to be called the American war crimes museum so only told the story of the war from the Vietnam side. It would have been good to hear the details of the war from a truly objective point of view, but I don't think that would ever happen anywhere in the world. We also visited the Cu Chi tunnels which were a labyrinth of tunnels stretching 250km just north of Saigon. These were used by the people supporting Ho Chi Minh when the south was occupied by the States, they lived, cooked and sheltered from the attacks in the tunnels. One of the tunnels is open to walk through and even though it was only 50 meters long it was pitch black and you couldn't see anything in front of you be it stairs, corners, snakes, scorpions (luckily we didn't see any of the last 2, apparently they are on another layer of tunnels which we couldn't get to). They had actually expanded the tunnels to get western tourists down more comfortably, as originally they were built just to fit the Vietnamese people and to make it very difficult for the American soldiers. Even now they are quite claustrophobic, so we could only imagine what they would have been like during the war.

From here we join another group for our journey through Cambodia, on the way travelling through the Mekong Delta and Chau Doc.

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Photos

How many people and items can you fit on 1 bike
More importantly, how can the driver see!!!!!

More traffic pictures
Soooooo many motorbikes!!!