…while it’s now officially called Ho Chi Min City, the Vietnamese people call downtown HCM still Saigon, which makes total sense, as HCM is incredibly huge (about 8 million people). I found this out right at the beginning: In the minibus from Can Tho I met this girl from Belgium. When we arrived at the bus station she looked into her guide book and determined that the street with all the backpacker hotels isn’t too far away and that she’s going to walk there. I didn’t mind saving money and joined her. So we started walking and asked a few locals for directions. Everybody pointed us into the right direction, but everybody told us too, that is very far away. But as everything further away than 200m is very far away for Asian people, we didn’t take this seriously. From time to time motorbike drivers stopped next to us and wanted us to hire them. After a while my backpack got heavier and heavier and I got one of the persistent motorbike drivers down to a reasonable price, so I gave in.  I had to convince the Belgium girl a little, but she finally gave in and took a motorbike too. And yes, it was far away. Very far. It took us at least 20 minutes with the motorbike. We would have walked for ages… So what do we learn from this? Never trust a women with a map!

So as we arrived in the backpacker street, we started looking for a place to sleep. The first place we checked out, didn’t look too bad, but it was too expensive for her. It was not exactly cheap, but I probably would have taken a room there, if I would have been on my own, but I thought to myself: Just follow her and let her find the cheapest place available. She haggled a bit with the hotel owner, but he (his mother) wouldn’t go down with the price, so we walked out of the place, looking for another hotel. We came about 20m far, when suddenly the guy came running out of the place, stopped us and said we could have a double room for free. We were a bit puzzled, but he explained, that all we had to do, would be teaching English to some kids for 2h. Didn’t sound too bad and for a free room… We both didn’t mind sharing a room, so we accepted the offer. No idea why he had to walk out of the place first to get this offer…

So the next day (after I went to the Chinese Embassy to apply for a Chinese Visa), a taxi drove us and two other people to a nearby school, were they had several classes in all age groups from 4-17. They put us all in different classes and explained us what to do. I got lucky as they put me in the classes with the oldest kids (14-17). They didn’t have any real lessons any more, so my job was just to talk to them, ask questions etc. It wouldn’t have been to bad, but the school was a bit too small for all the kids, so there were 3 different classes in the first floor, without any walls or anything in between. So it was really loud and I had trouble understanding the kids. But it was an interesting experience anyway.

After two hours a taxi brought us back. The belgium girl moved out of our room as one of her friends had arrived that day and the room was too expensive for me alone (they didn’t have any single rooms left), so I went out again, looking for a new place. Well, I didn’t find a good room, but an interesting one. It was on the 6th floor of a small building and was basically a birds nest, as 3 of the 4 walls consisted of wired fence. The view however was really nice!

In the evening I went out into the buzzing night live of the backpacker street, which had a nice mix of travelers and locals. And after a while I finally found, what I’ve been reading a lot about in the guide book: A place selling “Bia Hoi”. Fresh beer aka the cheapest draught beer in the world. One glass of beer for 0,22€. The bar was really cool and I think I spent every night there, as long as I stayed in Saigon. They only had these little plastic chairs (as everywhere in SEA) and not really much space. The funny thing was, they rotated all the chairs and tables all the time, to make space for new people. So every night you ended up on at least 2 or 3 different tables, so I met a lot of people. Locals, tourists, Expats… Good Times.

On the next day I went to one of the many war museums. It was very interesting, as they had many weapons, tanks, planes, helicopters ect. on display and a really good exhibition of photos taken by photographers who were killed during the war (my favorite).

I spent the rest of the days (I had to stay 6 days in Saigon to wait for my Chinese Visa) strolling around, visiting various smaller sights and just “living” in Saigon, like going to the cinema etc. I’m really not a big fan of big cities, but for some reason I really liked Saigon. But it’s not for the faint hearted, as the traffic is crazy. It’s motorbike madness! HCM has a population of 8 million people, of which 300.000 have a car and 4 million have a motorbike! Whenever you cross the street, it’s best no ignore what you have learned as a child (look left and right first) and just started walking. The hundreds of motorbikes will just flow around you. Once you show fear, you’ve lost so!

On my last day I booked a tour to the CuChi Tunnels. A place nearby were you could see some original Vietcong tunnels. Most of the stuff was nothing new for me or anybody else, who’s seen most of the Vietnam War movies, but it was still interesting too see all that stuff with your own eyes. Like the tunnels. I knew that they were small, but this is just amazing:

They had a good display for various types of traps too. Some of them were really creative (not this one).

They also had a small shooting range were you could shoot various weapons, like the M16, AK47, M60, M1… It wasn’t really cheap (about 10€ for 10 bullets), so at first I didn’t want to do it, but then I thought: I’m only living once, so what the hell. I bought 10 bullets for the biggest gun they had around, the M30 machine gun.

The whole fun is over in about a second, but it’s a niiiiice feeling. While shooting you don’t really notice it, but once you’re finished, you’re ears a beeeping, as it’s f***ing loud!

A few meters next to the shooting range you could see large bomb craters, created by B52 bombers during the war. While there’s now a forest on top, it was more like a wasteland during the war, as all the vegetation was destroyed by bombs, agent orange and other stuff.

They also had some tunnels that you could crawl through. These were already enlarged for tourists (about 3x of the originals size) and they were still to small for me. It was incredibly exhausting for the upper legs and extremely hot. That was definitely no fun in the original tunnels!

On my last night I met up with Bram again, who was also travelling through Vietnam. My next stop was Mui Ne. So was his, only that we would be leaving one day after me. We had a few beers and arranged to meet up again in Mui Ne…

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