This morning we took a ‘back of the bike’ tour of Ho Chi Minh city. It was exhilarating and fun, some of these photos are out of order.
Trev making Vietnamese coffee, they used condensed milk and a filter, it was very chocolatey
There were lots of these small 3-wheel delivery vehicles. I asked my guide if they buy a large item how do they get it home, she said everything can be delivered by scooter, even washing machines!! There are 13 million people in Ho Chi Minh and there are 8.5 million scooters.
We went to a market, I have no idea what these eggs are.
View from our hotel pool
Later we had a tropical storm, it was spectacular and didn’t last long
View from our room
Back to the scooter tour, our guides were skilful drivers and we didn’t feel unsafe.
Going down some very narrow alleys amongst peoples homes.
They took us to the cathedral, post office and temple.
The buses here have indicators that sound like sirens, when you are in your room you can hear them all the time, I thought they were police at first until we were out on the bikes and heard them. The buses and larger vehicles have extremely loud horns they are so loud you jump when they toot them. They toot them all the time!
This afternoon we decided to get a massage, oh my goodness, seriously nothing relaxing about a Vietnamese massage, Trev talked me into going to a place near the hotel, it was dodgy, dingy, down a back alley, I was certain that I would be bruised and sore the next day. The girls asked for a tip before we left the room and when we handed over 20,000 dong note each, they said no – obviously that wasn’t enough. So we said we would pay at reception. We gave them 100,000 dong (about NZD$6) to share – they still looked peeved. No way was I paying them more it was the most severe massage I have ever had.
We went to dinner up the tallest tower in Saigon, apologies for the quality of photos, the phone doesn’t take good night shots. They had a band at the bar that sung popular American songs, hilarious with their accents, the woman was good but the two men weren’t great, they looked the part though with their long hair and sunnies on!
