Blogs from Ho Chi Minh City, Southeast, Vietnam, Asia - page 2

I woke up about 4.30am local time (8.30am Melbourne), but managed to go back to sleep until 6.30am. Figured that wasn’t too bad for trying to get the body clock aligned with local time? Fortunately Bernie noticed this morning that Telstra had charged my phone with a $10.00 day pass. Oh no, we don’t want that to be happening at all. We have purchased e-sims so that we don’t need to be paying $$ for international roaming with Telstra. Grrr, tried to turn it off from my phone, but it would not allow us to do so and gave a free number to ring to have it sorted out. After a bit of mucking about and waiting for a call-back via the app I spoke with an operator who has turned roaming off. Hopefully that will ... read more

This virtual tour with Heygo took us to A Communist apartment complex. A vibrant local market & The second oldest cafe in Saigon. The apartment complex once inhabited by the Vietnamese military is now given back to local people who enjoy a great community. The highlight of the tour was in Saigon's District 3, the café at 287/72 Nguyen Dinh Chieu Street used to be a weapons vault. It is decorated with memorabilia of soldiers in the Vietnam War, the country's war against American invaders which ended in 1975. The three levels building still has its original brick floor and tiled roof. The house’s specialty is a tunnel system that opened to visitors in 2018. In the 1960s, under the guise of repairing the house's bathroom drain, Lai asked his trusted workers to build this vault ... read more

Our trip to Vietnam starts with an 11hr Drive & border crossing. On the way there, I'm reminded of how utterly crazy some of the wild wild west driving you see in Cambodia. There's a motorbike and small trailer pulling some Air Con units. Instead of tying them down, some lad just sits on top of the boxes to stop them from falling off. You can't make this shit up. We get a public bus with another younger Intrepid group. The guy who's organising the crossing asks us to handover our passports, visa and $1 each. It seems a bit odd, like all the people on the bus do the same, but hey, if it makes our crossing faster, who cares. We pass through the Cambodian border check fairly quickly, get off the bus and walk ... read more

Our hotel room is on the 20th floor with a view over the river, but that wasn’t high enough to dilute the constant sound of horns below all through the night. In the morning, it looked very overcast outside, but it wasn’t until we got to nearer the ground that we saw just how heavily it was raining. We still went out, armed with our raincoats, but the rain stopped almost immediately as we left the hotel. Our first stop was the Ben Thanh Market and to say that that was full-on would be putting in mildly. From the moment we walked in, “You want shoes?” “You want bags?” “You want scarves?” “You want watches?” “You want purses?” “You want t-shirts?” “I show you Gucci.” “I show you Nike.” “I show you Calvin Klein.” “Why you ... read more

Pete and I, it would appear, still have itchy feet so this time we chose to explore some Asian countries that we have never visited before, opting to do it our own way rather than an organised tour. (There were some days when we both thought it would have been better to be herded around by a tour guide and especially when we seemed to be spending too much time organising internal buses, flights, trains and accommodation but on the whole we think our way was better as we could stay as long as we wished and move on when we were ready.) Hong Kong was amazing with its neon lights everywhere and hundreds of people on the streets which made me feel very much like a sheep being moved along! We visited the major tourist ... read more