Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh City is a modern city. The local people refer to the city as Saigon, but only out of earshot of the government. The main method of transportation is motor scooter. Vince, our local guide, said that there are ten million people in Saigon and six million scooters. We visited the Post Office, the Notre Dame cathedral and had some Vietnamese ‘pizzas’ consisting of rice paper, fried pork dried onions and a quail egg which was cooked right on the street on a little hibachi. Pretty tasty!

We made a trip to the former presidential palace where the president of south Vietnam lived during the war. The architecture was from the 1970’s era and decorated inside in the same fashion. It felt out of place on this trip since we spent so much time in the ancient world. We did have fun shooting the interior though.

We opted for the optional rickshaw ride in the streets of Saigon durning a rain storm. The driver had covers for the carriage, we were all bundled up “cocoon like” to keep out the rain. The Vietnamese on their scooters avoided getting wet by wearing those disposable rain ponchos. They were just going with the flow like sardines in the river. We ended up at a local beer garden where we had beer and duck tongue in spicy barbecue sauce. The texture was kind of like that part of a chicken leg you don’t really want to eat. The sauce was good though.

We then went to the Mekong delta where we took a paddle boat to the Ben Tre province. It was a very peaceful ride, four of us to a boat, just floating on the water surrounded by palm and banana trees. We docked in a village and walked along the narrow sidewalk (they were really roads) admiring the newly constructed homes with relatively large plots of land.

We boarded the river boat that took us through the delta, similar to the floating village in Cambodia but this one was permanent. The people live on house boats that they take out to fish. We could see the pink tilapia fish farms that had cages under water where the fish grow and on top of the water were covered platforms with a lone guard dog lazily sleeping.

On our free night we went to the Carver Hotel with Vince to the rooftop bar for happy hour and sat on the deck with a great view of Saigon. Afterwards we were on the hunt for dinner ending up at a coffee house. We heard the Bahn Mi was amazing, unfortunately they were out so we have some Pad Thai instead with milkshakes. The milkshakes had some really weird gummy jello like chunks in them, can’t say we loved the milkshakes. It started pouring rain, I mean hard. We just hung out until it let up enough for us to walk back to hotel - yeah we were soaked.