Ho Chi Minh City and Nha Trang

At the moment I'm at the beach town of Nha Trang which seems to be a lovely place to hang out for a while. We arrived to Nha Trang at six in the morning after a ten hours bus drive from HCMC and found out that it was raining. A lot. The rain continued during the whole day, so I had a day of relaxing, exploring the town (in the rain, yes), reading, catching up on some e-mailing, eating lots of food and checking out all the cafes and bars in town. That was great - I needed a chill out day like that - but now I'm ready for some serious beach life! :) In the evening we visited Guava (a nice bar) and played pool for a couple of hours and after this we went to the Sailors Club - supposedly _the_ place to be in Nha Trang during nighttime.

Tomorrow I'll probably go for two dives - scuba diving is so awesome! I'm not sure the visibility is too great this time of year really - but it's still supposed to be really beautiful here so I want to try it out.

Ho Chi Minh City then. I haven't said much about what I did in HCMC and truth be said - I didn't really do much at all. We mostly walked around town and tried to get a feeling for it. We saw some sights, but mostly markets and the everyday life of one of the most interesting cities I've ever seen and visited. Ho Chi Minh City is intense, it's fast and furious, it's constantly moving and everybody is always on the move to go somewhere in some business. After being in HCMC rush hour, going to New York and Manhattan would feel like a trek in the countryside. I've never seen that many motobikes at the same time - thousands of them in each crossing - each one finding their own way through the no-mans-land that makes out the streets of Saigon. Whenever you want to cross the street you just close your eyes (not literally - although I doubt it would make a difference) and then walk in a slow and steady pace through the current of thousands of motobikes passing on each side of you. Traffic lights, crossings for pedestrants, driving on the right side, adhering to rules like one-way or no-left-turn seems to be concepts that are unheard of - or they see them mostly as guidelines meant for breaking.

I don't know what to think about Ho Chi Minh City. It's huge. Some parts are poor and dirty, some parts are shining with skyscrapers reaching for the stars. The markets in the morning is bustling with Vietnamese people buying their food for the day, the town is a mix of light, color and movement in the night. In a small alley we found some butchers working in the middle of the night - with a huge heap of pigs heads lying on the street and they sat around smoking and chopping them up in neat meat packages. I might have had one of those for breakfast the morning after when we went for a small food stall nearby and pointed on some things that looked delicious. The best food you always find in the food stalls - just look out for the ones that are regularly used by the locals and sit down. Point at the things you want and use your limited Vietnamese skills to say how much you want and how much you want to pay (I know how to count now at least - that makes it a lot easier haggling with people not speaking English). I guess you can only love the city and just hope that you sometime in the future have the possibility to return here for a more thourough experience of the city.