Travel from Nha Trang to Saigon
Today we wasted another day travelling. We departed our hotel, An Vista in Nha Trang at 8:30 am. Our one hour flight from Nha Trang to Saigon took the majority of the day! There was a 45 minute trip to the Nha Trang airport, a flight delay of 90 minutes, then a 7 km trip from the Saigon airport which took 45 minutes in absolute grid lock traffic. We didn’t arrive at our hotel until after 3 pm. According to google maps walking wasn’t much slower, than our car ride, getting across the streets though would have added hours to the walk in 32 degree temperatures. As the pilot said on our last flight 32 degrees above zero. LOL
We checked into the La Luna hotel. Our room while smaller than most we’ve stayed in so far is clean and comfortable. There is something about travelling that wears you down! The bed was calling our name so we took it easy for a bit, did some unpacking and figured out the safe. Every safe has its own trick to open and close. We always try to have it figured out before we start locking our stuff in it!
While relaxing we found an email in the SPAM folder from Cambodia Angkor Air notifying us of a flight time change on Saturday. We now leave at 1:30 pm instead of 8:30 am. I guess we’ll be sleeping in. That means leaving the hotel by 10 am.
We googled a place to eat supper and found a restaurant called TNT Barbecue. It’s only 300 m from our hotel, if we hadn’t taken the wrong street. We got there in 10 minutes, 3 near misses on the sidewalk, one car and 2 scooters. Traffic here is hell. Blocks of scooters stopped in gridlock and rogue scooters driving down the sidewalk in a steady stream. Yes and we met a sedan on the sidewalk. If a pedestrian is in the way they honk. The city of no rules, Saigon Vietnam. The communist government wants you to call it Ho Chi Minh City, but considering the people of the south call it Saigon, we rest the case.
Supper was fantastic and also the most expensive meal we have had in Vietnam. We left 600,000 VND which converts to $34.50 CAD including tip. We tipped American style in a restaurant that is owned by an American! The TNT BBQ Restaurant owner, Logan came to Vietnam is 2009 to teach English and he’s still here. He’s from rural Oklahoma, and Gary knew it as soon as Logan started talking to us. Logan knew more than any city raised kid would ever know – custom harvesters from Canada, grain augers and cattle. We had the best brisket we have ever tasted, hands down, period. We shared brisket, ribs and vegetable skewers along with 3 beer (not each).
We walked back to the hotel to wait for the spa jacuzzi to get up to temperature. Its a warm evening and there are food vendors every inch the way along the 4 blocks we walked between our hotel and the TNT BBQ Restaurant.
While we have been blown away by the traffic and sheer volume of scooters we’ve seen to date, everyone kept telling us, “wait until you hit Saigon”. They weren’t kidding! The city is a hive of activity, much it zooming by on the streets, some on the sidewalks. Tonight the congestion was unimaginable and many businesses have someone hired who sits outside of the business and parks scooters on the sidewalk. They jam them all together and when the owner comes back they carefully extract it from the mass. See the traffic below as we viewed it out of the car window this afternoon.
Needless to say pedestrians are not much of a consideration and you dodge around holes in the sidewalks, broken pavement or bricks and scooters, both parked and moving. We did have a major intersection we had to cross tonight and thankfully there were traffic lights which helped slightly. Otherwise you take a deep breath and step off the sidewalk and slowly start crossing the street while the cars and scooters work their way around you. Thankfully we had watched some YouTube videos before we left home and learned a few tips about crossing the streets. Even at that, it is still a bit unnerving. The honking never stops, we can even hear it from our hotel room faintly. Thank goodness our hotel is down an alley and not on the main drag! While our hotel is located in the downtown and one of the most congested traffic areas it is well located and we will be able to walk to a number of the sites. The hotel promotes a number of tours you can do of which the majority use a scooter as the mode of transportation. That’s not going to happen!! Thank goodness we can walk to pretty much all of the spots we want to see!
Good Night Vietnam
We’ve had a long day