Ho Li Crap

From Pnomh Penh we headed to Ho Chi Minh City, otherwise known as Saigon and unknowingly took our lives in our hands. HCMC is a city of 7 million people and every single one of them seems to own a scooter and drive around at high speed without a care in the world for signaling, road markings, other vehicles or pedestrians on the road. They must have had a surplus of white paint when they laid the roads because I can’t see any other reason that they have pedestrian crossings, nobody takes a blind bit of notice of them.

Rules for driving in HCMC (or any other major Asian city):
– Drive on the road, unless of course there’s too much traffic, in which case drive on the pavement and honk your horn.
– Drive on the right, unless of course that doesn’t suit you, in which case just drive on the left and honk your horn.
– Red light, green light, it’s all the same. Make a gap, punch it and honk your horn.
– There’s always a gap, don’t stop under any circumstances and it’ll definitely open up for you, especially if you honk your horn.
– A scooter is a great family vehicle. Three kids and two parents on the school run? No problem.
– Raining or too sunny? Use one hand to drive the scooter (make sure its the horn honking hand) and the other to hold an umbrella.
– A scooter is a perfect heavy goods vehicle. Those lengths of lead piping/sacks of rice/gas canisters will be at their destination in a jiffy. Carry them across the scooter and honk your horn.
– Those yellow lights on the side of your scooter that blink on and off when you flick that switch are for decorative purposes only.
– Approaching a four lane roundabout is a great time to text your girlfriend to tell her you miss her. Just make sure your other hand is on the horn.
– HONK. YOUR. HORN.

Rules for walking in HCMC (or any other major Asian city)
– As a pedestrian you are lowest on the transportation evolutionary ladder. Be afraid.
– Get out of the way.

We’ve pretty much confirmed on this trip what we already suspected, we’re not really city people, so while we’re glad we went and experienced it, because you really have to experience an Asian city to believe it, I can’t say it was the highlight of our trip. In the spirit of list making however (which I get from my Dad who has always made lists in tiny indecipherable letters on scraps of paper) here are some other things of note about Saigon:

– Beer is cheeeeap. Like the budgie. The more uncomfortable the seat, the cheaper the beer.
– The buildings here have completely different proportions to those that we’re used to in the West and stand packed together like slices of bread before the cellophane has been undone. Every spare centimetre of space is utilised so don’t blink if you’re looking for a specific address because you’ll soon find you’re miles past it.
– Vietnamese ladies seem to have a penchant for the floral equivalent of double denim and anything that looks like pajamas. I tried to get some pictures to illustrate the spectacular examples that we saw but I fear I really didn’t do these ladies justice.
– Pavements do exist in Saigon but they’re largely used for parking scooters, seating for restaurants or roaming street vendors, pushing pedestrians further into the street with the insane drivers.
– The cleaning of flip flops is a serious business. We watched a guy go through about 6 different steps to clean a customer’s flip flops including using polish…
– You thought Notre Dame was in Paris? You fool! I just saw it in Saigon.

We also nearly had our first major disaster of the trip on our journey from Phnom Penh to Saigon which obviously involved crossing the border from Cambodia to Vietnam. I was clearly prepared and knew that you had to have a Vietnamese visa in advance of getting there and so had bought one for each of us back in Canada all those months ago. It was these pieces of paper that I somewhat smugly handed to the driver of our bus to Saigon when we got on. Not so smug when a moment later I was informed that these visas were only valid for entry via an airport and wouldn’t be any use at a land crossing. To this day I don’t understand why you have to have a different visa, but you do and we were unceremoniously turfed off the coach with our bags. Bugger. We were on a schedule and needed to be in Saigon so what the hell were we going to do? Simple as it turns out, all we had to do was give our passports and another $120 to a bus company employee and off he toddled, returning just under an hour later with two new Vietnamese visas and we were on the next bus. Sweet.