Day 03 (the boys have landed) - Ho Chi Minh city

I met up with Lukas & Peter ahead of schedule in Qatar airport, and got our connecting flight to Vietnam without a hitch! Horah! :)

The airline didn’t do anything special for the new years being spent on a plane, but it was quiet, the plane was only about 20% full! Qatar airport was a bit mad; completely disorganised, but we got through it okay, and onto the final flight. I recommend flying on new years!

So we land, get a cab to our hotel in the centre of Ho Chi Minh city, eat, drink a lot, and then crashed out for 12 hours. The following afternoon we started to explore the city. It’s bonkers here, with 10 million motorbikes/mopeds on the roads in Ho-Chi-Minh city alone, and only a handful of cars and busses. Crossing the street at first seems like a life threatening exercise, but you quickly adapt. Drivers are very aware of everything going on around them, and because of the severe congestion they can only go so fast. The horn is used as a form of communication; you can’t be near a street without hearing one go off every few seconds. The shops are all coated in neon and power lines in their thousands snake around the road network.

Typical HCM street scene
Video of the traffic.

Lukas and I decided to shave our heads, down to a couple of millimetres (at the time we could only find a posh lady hairdresser to do it in, which the owner found very amusing), to make it zero maintenance and cope with the humidity. Temperatures are in the mid-20’s, but humidity is really high during the day. Petr had hair like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction before he came (apparently), but his girlfriend kindly removed the lot before he set off :)

Once we (finally) got up yesterday, we walked clear across the south-east of the city to the financial district, and then took a boat ride over the river and up a canal where you can find the shanty town like dwellings. It’s interesting to see such a contrast of living conditions separated only by the water.

We’ve found some great places to eat (and a few crap ones). Today we went on a bus tour to the Vietcong tunnels – a kind of theme park, re-built to demonstrate the tunnel systems dug during the war to combat & confuse the Americans, and protect themselves from the carpet bombing of the region that took place. Was interesting to hear the story from our guide – someone who was a Vietcong solider in the war - and to experience for a brief moment of time what these soldiers lived through every day, for months on end.

Tomorrow morning we leave the city, and have booked ourselves into a beach resort further up the coast called Phan Theit (below), where we intend to relax for a few days (the jet lag, has really taken it out of us…) and enjoy some beach activities before continuing north to start the real adventure.

All, in all, we’re having a fantastic time, the people are all really friendly, the food is good, everything is silly cheap, and we’re full of anticipation of where our adventure will take us next.

P.S. Lukas covered our guide book with soy sauce, in a series of butter finger moments earlier, I’m being bombarded by ants as I type.

MORE TO FOLLOW SOON!

Our next destination, Phan Thiet: