Ben, Clare and I have been in Ho Chi Minh City for the past few days and met up with the group which we’ll travel with through to Thailand. This city borders on sensory overload: the lights, sounds, traffic and heat are inescapable but thankfully none of the smells which have almost overwhelmed in previous places I’ve been to. Compared to India the driving is (relatively) safe. There are traffic lights and road lanes which are occasionally observed, and no roaming cattle on the roads. Most foreigners I’ve met are on an adventure and there’s an amazing culture of sharing stories and advice. I’ve never been to a city anywhere in the world with such a great ‘traveller community’ and I love it.
Soon after we landed Clare and I left our hotel to explore. We were given the least interpretable map in existence by reception, which was so useless it may as well have been created by J.K. Rowling. Visibly lost, a man approached us and asked if we wanted a rickshaw tour of the city. Neither of us are inexperienced travellers and we followed all the usual steps (primarily agree a price in advance, 5,000 dong
per bike, bargain!), were confident we’d got a great deal, and hopped on the bikes. The tour was great: they dropped us off at loads of places, waited for us until we were done, and then took us to the next one. We visited the war museum (harrowing, but well worth a visit), Notre Dame cathedral (an out of place but fairly accurate replica of Paris’ famous building), the Reunification Palace, and the river bank. At the end of the tour we profusely thanked our riders, and they demanded 1,500,000 dong. That’s the original price multiplied by 10, and then trebled. I paid 50,000 dong which is about £6.50 - still significantly more that the agreed rate but an amount I was happy to pay given the great time we’d had. We argued the toss with them about the rest, they pointed at a cash point for Clare to withdraw the money from and grabbed my arm to keep me as a ‘deposit’. Luckily I’m a big white girl and they were little Asian men so it wasn’t at all difficult to get away, which I did. We then legged it, saw one was following us, so dived into a heaving indoor market to take refuge. We stayed there for about half an hour and tried to second guess which exit they’d be expecting us to leave by. We picked the obvious choice, tentatively peeked out to make sure we weren’t still being followed, and then merged back into the anonymous crowds of the city.
The next day we went to the Mekong delta which is a series of small inhabited islands at the mouth of the river Mekong, just before it reaches the South China Sea. We hopped between islands via boat and tried lots of local foods (fruit, honey, cocoa, coconut candy, snake wine), petted a python (2 were kept in captivity so their shedded skin could be used to make soup), and wore traditional conical hats. After we returned to Ho Chi Minh we headed to the street food market for dinner which was amazing, and a far more Western interpretation of ‘street food’ (or vice versa) than I saw in India.
Today we’ll be getting a bus to the Cambodian border and getting some more ink in our passports.
Love Emily x
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