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Published: September 25th 2009
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I landed in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon) in Vietnam after a 10 hour flight, a 3 hour flight and a nice sleep in the transit terminal at Singapore airport. It was a real shock going from the busy but orderly life in Japan to the craziness of Ho Chi Minh City, but a nice shock. The first thing that strikes you when you enter the city for the first time is the ridiculous amount of motorbikes that are on the roads and lack of road laws (at least lack of laws which are obeyed anyway). The most difficult thing at first is figuring out how the heck you are supposed the cross the roads as theres no crossings or anything, you just have to step out into it, walk at a slow and steady pace and the bikes and cars all swerve around you (at least that's the theory anyway). I've been in Vietnam a week so far and I don't know how I haven't seen a single crash or anything because everywhere you look there's motorbikes flying in all directions and if theres a traffic jam they just use the pavements or any other piece of
land that is available. On the first day In Ho Chi Minh, we had a great time just sitting in one of the many street corner cafes having a few fruit smoothies and watching the craziness of everyday life in the city. As you'd expect there's also people trying to sell you all sorts of stuff every 5 seconds that you have to keep saying 'no thanks' to, most of it is people trying to sell you motorbike rides, books and other random bits and pieces but we saw one woman who was walking the streets with a big machine which makes some strange sound-effect noises and then measures your height and weight - quite a bizarre thing to see and no idea how she came up with that idea.
As well as just absorbing the sights and sounds of the city, we also had a quick look at the Ho Chi Minh City War Museum while we were there which was pretty interesting but it had some pretty horrible photos in it of agent orange victims and people who'd stood on landmines, it definitely wasn't for the faint hearted. After two days in Ho Chi Minh City, we
got a train for about 7 hours and went to the beach-side town of Nha Trang. The train was definitely no bullet train but it really wasn't that bad and was extremely good value for money since the 400km journey only cost us 186,000 Dong (about 6 pounds). Nha Trang was slightly more peaceful than Ho Chi Minh City and it had a pretty amazing beach where we spent most of our time when we were there - we decided that we needed a few days just to relax and do nothing as the previous couple of weeks had been quite tiring.
With the batteries recharged, we got on the train once again to head for the town of Hoi An in central Vietnam which is the old capital of the country. Hoi An is a really small place as I think the population is only about 70,000 and the whole town is basically full of tailor shops. I considered getting a nice tailored suit made to ship back home to the UK but I decided against it in the end, Stu was determined to get himself a pair of tailor-made beach shorts but I think he'd of got some rather confused looks if he'd gone into one of the shops to explain what he wanted. Whilst in Hoi An we also went on a boat trip to see some ancient city ruins at a place called My Son which would of been more impressive if the Americans hadn't of bombed it during the war, but it was still quite amazing to see. On the way back, the boat stopped for a bit at a local village on the riverbank where we watched some of the local villagers making some fancy furniture with pearls inscribed into it.
At the moment I'm in a place about 3 hours away from Hoi An which is called Hue. Tomorrow we're planning on going into Laos for a couple of days since everyone we've spoken to has said it is really worth seeing and this is the best place to cross into it, so we'll spend a few days in Laos and then we'll be back in Vietnam to go and visit the northern part of the country. Bye for now!
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