Fever all through the Night

Trip Start Nov 12, 2008

Trip End Apr 30, 2009

Loading Map

Map your own trip!

Map Options

Show trip route

Hide lines

Flag of Vietnam Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Just spent the last two days with a weird Saigon fever. Temperature racing, bones aching and throat killing, I was retired to bed whilst Raza did his best to make sure I was okay and see the sights in the city. My rubbishness means we've been hauled up here for a few days, me personally spending about 48 hours straight in the hotel room with no air con and very little memory. Today is the first day I've been complus, ironically I write this whilst Raz is confined to bed with terminal tiredness (but he's still in good health).

I forgot to mention one of the best things we have done so far in Hoi An, hiring motorbikes and riding to Marble Mountain, a very cool place out of town where the temples are built in the rocks and in these amazing caves, where you can climb to the very top with a bit of effort and look out over the sea. It was incredible and pretty much deserted, seems the Lonely Planet doesn't give it much of a write up (undeservedly) so the hordes don't seem to trapse out there.

In Saigon Raza has visited the War Museum (it was okay apparently) and a big empty football stadium (?). We both went for a sauna when I was coming down with whatever it was, and experienced a massage at the Institute for the Blind (is it exploitation?). Raz liked the sounds that one of the blind masseuses was making so much he went back with a microphone to record it, which from the sounds of it could have got him 20 years in a Vietnamese gulag when they thought he was a reporter.

We're hoping to see the Cu Chi tunnels soon, tiny tiny tunnels that apparently were designed to be so small they could trap American soldiers by the hips, and then set the sewer rats on them! nice.

The weather still fluctuates massively. The day time is scorching sun, the night time is biblical rains. Apparently its the end of the rainy season.

This country continues to be a bit of a mystery. I know it old, but it doesn't show it. Its kind of like 1970's Britain trying to be 21st century Hong Kong, falling pretty far short. It seems to me it can't decide where to pitch itself touristically so it tries to be all things to all people, never quite hitting the mark in any category. Everybody is out to make a buck off of you, which isn't uncommon, but I just can't get used to the sheer ballsiness of charging a tourist price then slashing it in half when you threaten to walk away. The traffic is crazy, you've never seen so many mopeds and there appears to be no rules on the road. Its not that they pull the same risky moves we may do in London more often, its that they pull moves you would never ever do for fear of criminal punishment or death. In Vietnam, if you're turning left, you pull over to the wrong side of the road about 100 yards before the turning and psuh your way through with your horn held down. Its clearly natures way of keeping the massive population down.

We have plenty of photos but these internet cafes use computers a disadvantaged Malawian school would turn down! As soon as we find a computer made after 1986 we'll get them on-line.

Until then...