Posts Tagged ‘Saigon’

Pics from Saigon

Thursday, May 19th, 2005

Saigon Day Tour

These pics probably belong with the last entry. I’ll sort them out later. I just wanted to get get some of them up or else I never will.

Traffic in Saigon
8 million people, 3 million motorbikes. Traffic in Saigon

Incence Burning
A whole lot of incence

(more…)

Saigon

Thursday, May 12th, 2005

It’s been ages since I posted anything. Jade and I have been living and working in London for about 4 weeks and already SE Asia seems a million years ago. I’ve got a backlog of journal entries that I want to put up and it has been quite nice sorting through the diary and typing them up. I will try and get on top of it over the next couple of weeks.

Arival

Everything we read and heard about Saigon led us to believe we would be robbed at knife point the moment we got off the bus. This clearly wasn’t the case. I’m not sure if it’s due to having arrived after coming through Cambodia where there is more desperation for the tourist dollar or if Saigon is more relaxed now than at the writing of the guide books but the city was a breath of fresh air, or rather carbon monoxide. I fell in love with it within 10 minutes of arriving.

Saigon is a bustling, developed city with beautiful tree lined boulevards and busy people going about their busy business, mostly on the back of scooters. A city of 8 million people and 3 million scooters, traffic was obviously off its tits!

We got off the bus and walked straight into a guest house. Charles, a tour guide writer we met in Cambodia, had told us about a place that was just out the back of a convenience store. Literally, we walked through the store and into a mini hotel. After dumping our gear we went across the street for Italian, it was pizza, salad and wine for lunch and it was awesome.

The following day we did a tour of the city. This was a cool way to see a couple of the key sites, get an idea of the place and work out what you want to see more of.

(more…)