Ho Chi Minh City - October 30, 2010

October 30, 2010

Senne's Summary: We arrived in Saigon and explored the city. Saigon is a very busy place... 10 million people... 3 million scooters.

We said goodbye to Bali and flew on Malaysia Airlines to Kuala Lumpur and then on to Saigon.

Arrival was extremely easy. The immigration guy barely said two words to us, checked our visas, stamped our passports and waved us through. We found our bags quickly and headed outside. Our driver had a sign with our name on it, but recognized us immediately (only Caucasian people coming out?) and waved us over to our ride. He only spoke two words to us the entire time which were "minibus there". ☺ To be fair we didn't say any Vietnamese words to him, so he was twice as good as we were!

The ride to our hotel was FRIGHTENING to say the very least. (Well I found it frightening… Steve found it extremely entertaining watching me be frightened!) I have never really experienced traffic like this. There are bajillions of scooters and plenty of cars. There appear to be no rules whatsoever… not even for left turns. Our driver pretty much just drove like we were in a tank. It seems that everybody expects everybody to just get out of their way… and it seems to work. I am very surprised there are not people spilled out all over the road as they just cut in and out and in front of each other (almost touching each other) in a random fashion. Don’t even make me talk about the traffic circle… I’ll probably have nightmares about that one! Even Steve said, “This is not the place where we’ll rent a scooter!”

Extra Note: Steve found this video on youtube. It's a great video to see what traffic in Saigon is really like:

Saigon Night Traffic

It's at 1:11 in the video where you see the part that I find very scary!

When we arrived at our hotel they were very excited about us checking in. (As days have passed it seems that people here are very enthusiastic and very LOUD, which Steve thinks is more evidence that he is, in fact, Asian…) We were taken up to our room and everything about the room was explained to us in detail. The room is perfect. The bed has nice linens and good pillows, there is a TV with English channels (later Steve even managed to watch the recent UFC on our TV), it is clean, has FAST free wifi, and the tub is a six foot soaker! Included in our room is a buffet breakfast and believe it or not… free dinner! Not bad for $33 a night!

We were pretty tired, so just crashed for the night… well I crashed early… Steve played online poker.

Side note: It’s interesting to me that in Vietnam they have commercials on TV with young beautiful girls where they are advertising products to whiten their skin… when we subject ourselves to all kinds of bad things so that our skin is darker.