The End of the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Tuesday 30 September 2008
Hoi An to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)


So this day we had the luxury of waking up late as there was no pre-8 a.m. meet for any trips. We went out to buy some food for our trip as there wouldn't be any on the plane. We drove to Da Nang airport and caught a JetStar flight to Ho Chi Minh City.

Ho Chi Minh is still to this day known as Saigon even by the locals despite changing its name in 1975, as in Vietnamese it's five words long and much easier to say the old way. Once we were at the hotel we had an air conditioning unit that didn't work, and it took about five goes to get the hotel to change our room (a guy who didn't speak English kept on coming in and wiggling the broken air direction fan, suggesting that this would fix the problem even though the room was still muggy-warm).

After that we went to a meal in an outside market, having Vietnamese barbeque, that consisted of skewers of meat and seafood, with salad and rice pancakes to roll it all in. After that we went to a bar called Go Go, which unfortunately didn't have the suspected dancers, but beer and pool as ever. The pool table was a bitch and I think even the great Stephen only won one game.

Saigon is a much more modern city than Hanoi, with lots of high rises, wide roads and many more mopeds. Even pavements are fair game in this city. The neon, rain, crowds and dirt gave it a very Bladerunner-esque feel, a bit like a poor man's Tokyo. But probably not the most pleasant place in the world, particularly compared to the more historic and slow-paced citied we had just been to.