Siagon - YOU WEREN'T THERE MAN!!

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Hi all

Arrived in Saigon after four hour extension to my 6 hour night bus ride (that's Khmer time for you!)

Took me long time to find place but eventually found Lizzie Assman from the beeb (apparantly her joker father named her brother Richard... you work it out!)

Knackered as I was, but please to arrive in a nice air-conned room, I took my clothes to the lundry as I'd run out. In Cambodia I was desperately over budget, but in Vietnam everything costs a lot more!

It's a communist country, but you wouldn't know it! Saigon is bustling, advertising of big international names is on every street, export/import is flowing and there is market competition at the lowest levels here - not like Cambodia where everyone sells the same stuff for the same price!

After some nice but expensive food and a power-nap. I went to get some money and fulfilled my life ambition of becoming a multi-milionaire, withdrawing 2 000 000 dong. I wafted that around and learned over the next day how quickly it goes.

The traffic here is crazy but I like it - crossing the street is an exercise in bravery and assertive body language - there are very few pedestrian crossings and what you have to do is walk out into 6 lanes of speeding motor bikes and slowly make your way forwards between streams. I'll take a video and upload it when I get home!

I went to independance palace. Anyone who's been to van Mildert college in Durham, the architecture is strikingly similar. 1960s at its best. In fact, take van Mildert and add in some marble flooring, expensive chairs and you've pretty much got it. If you don't know what I mean, google images of van mildert and independence/reunification palace in Saigon!

Much of it is to do with American barbarism in the war - in fact until recently the War Museum was called "Evidence on American and Chinese war crimes museum". Now the Americans were bastards in that war - especially under the crooked tryrannt Nixon. But of course the Vietcong were only innocently trying to spread freedon for the people of Vietnam, and never did anything wrong (hello??)

We went to a bar where I spent great wads on booze. It was american themed - mostly filled with middle-aged white men (again) and a load of Vietnamese staff girls in tied up cowgirl shirts, hot pants and a gun holster for a lighter, going round and making sure the men didn't stop spending money - a lot of staff - probably 5-10 clients per cow-girl. A reoccurring theme of SE Asia seems to be middle-aged white men and young attractive Asian women. Can't blame them though - if I end up a middle-aged singleton I know where I'm going... and it isn't Essex! What do the middle aged asian women and young attractive white men do? Maybe there's a Red Dwarf-esque dimension where this dynamic exists...

Surprisingly, although Vietnam and Cambodia both came out of a pretty horrific couple of decades in the 60s and 70s (Cambodia for longer), the communisitic regime in Vietnam seems not to have runied the country. The few Vietnamese I've asked about this said that they're happy with the government, they can buy and sell as they please, corruption isn't too bad (it's mostly police and government officials, as opposed to EVERYONE in Cambodia - although I think Transparency disagrees with this view) and for a communist state it seems, in the south at least, to be a normally-running, industrious and prosperous nation - there are certainly fewer people living on the streets than I expected - more in the centre of London than here, I've noted.

Cambodia on the other hand, which is technically "demographic" struggles on. Democracy and communism aren't words set in stone, it seems.

Hopefully we're going to book some motorbikes and ride a couple of hours to the south coast. I didn't have many photos cos my camera ist caput so I did some western-style bartering to get a cheap price for an Ixus 85. Which had a warantee. But doesn't work very well. But warantee doesn't cover that. And there's no such a thing as a refund here!

It's my mum's birthday today - happy birthday! And thanks for the upbringing - it was brilliant (I now realise better)!

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