Blogs from Southeast, Vietnam, Asia - page 6

I survive the night. Contrary to my fears, the spider the size of a crab has not smothered me in my sleep. Today is a long day for a number of reasons. First, we are up at 5 am so will experience more day than is ideal. Second, tho old man has set his alarm in the wrong time zone so we’re up even earlier than planned. Third, we are travelling backwards through time zones so today will be 27 hours long. And finally, we are flying to Vietnam via Singapore so we have 2 flights to endure. Returning the hire car is complicated. It got booked out under the wrong registration so they think it was returned elsewhere a week ago. Somehow this has cost us £60 and Thrifty have no IT support at weekends ... read more

I'm leaving this afternoon. Saigon is a bustling, noisy, smelly, sometimes dirty, jigsaw of a city with all the pieces piled on top of one another yet all seeming to have a place in the overall picture. And then there's the traffic. The bikes buzz from dawn to dusk and the horns play the accompaniment. The fabled crossing of streets works well enough - I haven't seen anyone hit yet - it's a matter of choosing one's moment and not changing one's line when the crossing begins. Unlike the locals I still tend to keep an eye on the traffic as I "stroll" across. It's an intriguing mix of areas. This morning I walked to the Post Office about 20 minutes away, which is a work of art designed and built by the French - Eiffel ... read more

We crossed into Vietnam relatively untroubled considering the stress we had had the previous evening getting Julia an express visa. It was me that had the stomach dropping moment when an unofficial man told me my E-Visa wasn’t valid because I didn’t have a photo but having been in Asia for the past 4 months I didn’t fall for his trick and funnily enough I entered the country no problem. Why they let these scam artists hang around at border crossings etc. I don’t know, it doesn’t make for the best first impression! We were met off the bus in Ho Chi Minh City by the usual welcoming committee of taxi drivers who had never heard of your hostel, can’t read a map and yet able to pluck an inflated price that was double what we’d ... read more

Worst night’s sleep EVER! For me, at least, Sam was oblivious and passed out unconscious. Maybe I should have had more cocktails. The cute restaurant opposite the hotel is now another trashy bar, in fact there are a whole line of them, catering to a specific type of clientele. Even the side rooms at the hotel are not exempt from the noise now. Earplugs didn’t even take the edge off it. At 4am it stopped but then the vendors on their bikes, some with loudspeakers, were up and down the alley selling thugs we didn’t want. If we come here again we won’t stay on this street, it has changed such a lot. Sad face! Awake at 6.30,at breakfast at 7.30 feeling non too special. The breakfast was very good, large array of cooked items and ... read more

Our next stop in Vietnam was Saigon, aka Ho Chi Minh City. The name was originally Saigon, but officially changed to Ho Chi Minh City after the ‘war.’ Locals still call it Saigon, though. There were a lot more tourists here than our last trip in 2006. The population has increased from 6,230,900 in 2005 to 8.5 million in 2016, with an estimated 8.76 million in 2017; one of the fastest growing cities in the world. There are 3900 people per square kilometer (populationof2017.com); that works out to about 10,000 people per square mile. There are construction zones and cranes all over the place, and skyscrapers, which we had never seen here before. Back to the sweltering heat. Lonely Planet calls Saigon “Vietnam at its most dizzying: a high-octane city of commerce and culture that has ... read more