Advertisement
Published: March 26th 2008
Edit Blog Post
We are in Ho Chi Minh for a two day stop over until we travel up to Mui Ne for our final week of our trip and the most relaxing part as well, 7 nights on the beach BLISS!!! But still it’s very cool to be back in the madness which is Saigon to some and Ho Chi Minh City to others. We travelled by plane from Vientiane via Phnom Penh then a short 20 mins flight to Saigon, Straight out of the airport grab the first taxi man we see and tell him we have been here before, we know it doesn’t cost $45 dollars from the airport, here is $18 dollars, Take us here!! No Bullshit!!!
Now you may be thinking that I sound a little bit on the pissed off side but I’ve had about half an hours sleep and my left eye feels like there is a smashed up glass bottle just at the back of my eye socket..Total Pain!!!So yeah I’m a little bit..well what can you say worried as my eye is gone all blurry and my contacts have had to come out and to top it all off we are in a country where
English speaking is not that common so Barbs and I made our way to a hospital that is meant to be the place to go if your got something up with your lookers!! Arriving there we are the only westerns in the place and every sign is in Vietnamese which is ok as some old dude pointed us in the right direction and I pay the 80,000 Dong (12 US dollars) to see the doctor which while sitting there this lady comes up and helps us again by grabbing the forms with my name (I think) written on them and putting them on this little table outside the room where we think the doctor is. She reckons wait is 20 mins in broken English, no problem as there were a few people that looked a lot worse off than me waiting around. Then no less than a couple of minutes go by and we hear what may have been my name called but who knows? Then people are pointing at us like it’s your turn, even the poor sod with half a roll of toilet paper over his eye is smiling and pointing for me to go in. So in
I go, now there must of been about 15-20 people sitting on these little plastic chairs that are about 300mm of the ground with a couple of normal plastic chairs as the line got closer to the man with the white coat who looks like the doctor. I go to sit down at the back then what I think was the nurse pulls my arm and drags me to about 3 seats from the doctor, tells some local girl to move a side and makes me sit down. Bright red with embarrassment and felling like a total asshole the doctor pokes and prods around my eye then all he does is point at my contact lenses case that I bought in with me shakes his finger and tells me in one word before writing out a prescription that I’ve got conjunctivitis. While he was writing out the prescription I notice the pink slips with the amount I paid on it and looking at the other slips I noticed that they all had 15,000 Dong on them so It seems I have paid over ten times more than the locals do. So armed with what looks like a police drug raid
bag full of pills we head home and as we are travelling back to the hotel we start to talk about the trip to the hospital and how lucky we really are to have the money, which wasn’t a lot to speak of and paying that little bit extra got me to the front of the line and ultimately it has cured my conjunctivitis.
Next day we decide to do a bit of sightseeing around the city and what better way to see the sights than to get a couple of the old dudes that offer the tours on the front of their 3 wheeled bikes (cyclos) these guys look rough as guts but they sure know their way around the place. After sorting out a price for the day we headed off into the mad traffic to the Army surplus market which was full of old memorabilia for the war. The next stop was a huge market that mainly sold everything in bulk. You could buy everything that was counterfeit in huge amounts from 24 Ralph Lauren Polos for $8 US dollars to 50 fake Zippo lighters for $12 US dollars. It was full on inside with people packing
up massive parcels to take to all the other markets around the city we ended up buying a huge wooden piggy bank and a model of a Cyclo bike which we were travelling on for the day. Next stop was the Reunification Palace which has been left in the same condition as it was on that day the 30 of April 1975 when 2 tanks burst through the main gates and finally took control of Saigon and basically ended the war. The Palace is a very good place to get to grips with what happened during the war and there are some very interesting photos and memorabilia throughout the place as well as copies of the 2 tanks that burst through the gates and they are parked in the same position as that day back in April 1975. One of the more disturbing photos that are on show is not of the war but the horrific face of our Prime Minister Helen Clark on a state visit AAARRRHHH!!!!! How she got her mug in an album in this place amazes me! Still a very interesting place and well worth it. Okay so after the Palace we were off to the
War Remnants Museum which was a huge point the finger at the Americans display with some old tanks and planes outside then inside its full of very graphic pictures form the war as well as some displays from other countries that the USA has made a mess of, pretty horrific stuff so we had a quick looky around and headed off with our 2 very tried looking Cyclo riders who ask me if I would like a go at pedalling my man around and if I can drive a Elephant! how hard can it be to ride a 3 wheeled bike with a very small looking Vietnamese dude sitting in the front???Well man was I mistaken as after about 10 metres I pulled the bike up and enough was enough it sure was hard work and I left it to my man to carry on. We travelled back to the area that our hotel was in passing by some old Pagodas and the Notre Dame Cathedral then ended up in a small bar for a couple of beers to quench the first of our 2 Cyclo riders which we had to pay for but it was cool as they had
shown us all we had wanted to see and more. Getting over the fear of being on the front of a bike in the traffic was a bit hard at first but after that we would defiantly say that it was a very good way to see all the main sights as well as having a bit of a laugh with the Cyclo men sure made for a good day out!
We got dropped off at the hotel by our half cut Cyclo drivers and got our packs sorted out for the bus ride to Mui Ne beach for the last week of our trip and a little bit of luxury. After a nice meal at the same place we had been going to every night we crashed out for the journey tomorrow..
Next blog Mui Ne beach..
Advertisement
Tot: 0.053s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 10; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0259s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb