Saigon
After a few days in Chau Doc, our friends the Australians were called home for a medical problem in the family, so we made our way to Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon) by ourselves. We were kinda fearing Saigon. We’d heard it was a nasty dirty place filled with swarming child pickpockets, deadly traffic,and sophisticated moto bag snatcher gangs. We saw none of that and we met some nice people there. I was just a sprawling city. Only Europe seems to do big cities right.
One day Mandy saw a guy holding a bamboo ladder out the second floor window. A guy climbed up the ladder, supported only by the other guy’s arms and began to paint the building on the fifth floor.
Down in the south we meet lots of ex soldiers our parents age. Many of them have frightening war stories, but they all end the same:Re-education camp. If you were unlucky, after your 2-15 year jail stint, you got your citizenship revoked. This means there’s thousands of well educated professionals in Vietnam that are forbidden from holding official jobs. These are your cyclo and moto drivers, your street vendors. They’re ridiculously well educated, but its all they’re allowed to do. They’re also pretty damn smug about the success of economic liberalization in the new Vietnam, but they lower their voices and dart their eyes around when they tell you so.
Photos of Ho Chi Minh City.
Tags: asia, ho chi minh city, travel, vietnam