Crazy Saigon

Ok so Saigon is completely nuts.  It’s the traffic that makes you feel that way.  The population is about 6 million and there is no MRT or underground here so that’s a lot of people on motorbikes.  Unlike Bangkok, which spends the day in various gridlocks around the city, there are less cars and buses and way more bikes, so the traffic does move but that makes it way harder for pedestrians.

For starters, footpaths are used for parking your bike on.  They are also used for when the traffic is not going fast enough or you need to go the opposite way so you just ride down the footpath.  At the normal speed of course.  It’s incredibly dangerous.

When you cross the road you have to use a certain method I like to call the en masse and pray, ie, get in a group and pray the whole way that they will in fact drive around you.  Traffic lights are merely a suggestion, so you have to be able to walk out into the traffic if you want to cross – there is no such thing as a break.  We’re getting pretty good at it now and having 6 of us makes a big enough group to be really obvious.

Unfortunately, we have had a few run ins with taxi drivers and cyclo riders in Saigon.  They agree on a price but then when you get out they demand more.  When we ask them – what happened to the agreed price and Paul tries to give them that, they get angry and throw the money back at you.  After a couple of times of trying to get them to take the money, they get even more huffy and drive off!  So we’ve had a couple of free rides but it didn’t add anything to our opinion of the Vietnamese.

Before we’d even got off the boat, we had already been influenced because we had booked a tour into the Mekong Delta.  After travelling for half the day, the tour lady came and said to us that our tour wasn’t running anymore.  It seemed very dodgy and when we  complained and wanted the remainder of our money back she told us that Vietnam was open to anyone and we didn’t have to come here – if we don’t like it we could always leave!!  Not sure how she would make any money but she certainly wasn’t the poster girl for Vietnamese tourism!!

We did a couple of excursions to the Reunification Palace (basically Parliament House for the South Vietnamese before the North  drove a tank through the gate to mark the fall of Saigon) and also to the War Remnants Museum (previously known as the Museum of American War Crimes).   They may have changed the name but the content was the same – graphic details of every nasty thing the Americans did during the war, including nice photos of napalm victims and deformed agent orange babies preserved in a tank.  If nothing else, a gruesome exhibition of the horror and senselessness of war but of course terribly propogandist  and one-sided (at least I hope so…)

Here’s a couple of videos of the traffic.  The second one was a bit scary when we were riding through a roundabout full of bikes at a snail’s pace on cyclos!