Arriving in Ho Chi Minh we had the luxury of three nights in a row in the same city. Time to explore and relax a little.
Jack was still working hard on his last two university assignments, displaying enviable discipline while on the trip, working on his laptop at every opportunity – whether on a train, a bus, or at our hostels.
Owing to their French-colonial days, Vietnam is full of beautiful terrace buildings, very tall and thin, and is also home to many amazing, top-quality bakeries. After a week of noodles and rice, we were very glad to tuck in to some crusty, fresh-from-the-oven bread rolls. ‘Saigon’ was the name of the city before Vietnamese independence from the French, and is now known as Ho Chi Minh City, with only the very city centre being referred to as Saigon.
We were staying in the tourist district, with Italian restaurants, bikes for hire, and tour operators galore offering ‘local experiences’ in the Vietnamese countryside. On our second night, on recommendation from some other tourists we’d met, we wandered down to the Mae Khong and were presented with a dazzling array of dinner cruise boats to choose from. We picked the one with the horrendous high-school marching band out the front and along with about 400 other diners, Vietnamese and tourists, had a delicious feast, accompanied by a violin-guitar duo, while the boat cruised up and down the river. This seemed a world away from eating crickets in the dark with taxi drivers in Cambodia only two nights earlier.
On the Monday night, our last night in Vietnam, we had made an appointment to meet a group from the Bayer Young Environmental Envoys program at the Bayer offices, near the airport, at 6pm. We greatly underestimated the Saigon traffic, and left our hotel at 5:40pm in a taxi. Come 7pm and we were still only halfway to the office, having been moving at an average of 10 metres per minute through the sea of motorbikes. Katy described it perfectly when she said it was like grains of sand rushing around rocks, so the rocks couldn’t move anywhere. We got out of the taxi and walked along the sidewalk, which itself was full of motorbikes, until we reached a restaurant. We waited at the restaurant for a further 2 hours before the traffic was calm enough to move again, and then jumped in another cab and made our way home. Major apologies to our young environmental friends in Ho Chi Minh who we didn’t get the chance to meet up with.
