BootsnAll Travel Network



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Vung Tau to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 

Boy was Vung Tau buzzing this morning! People were arriving by the minute. Breakfasters spilled out of eateries onto temporary tables set up beside the road. Walking along the street felt like being at a fair – music was playing, there was popcorn and sweetcorn, stall holders had set up shop, the roaming balloon man was there – indeed, there was quite a carnival atmosphere.
Made us wonder if it really was so deserted just a few days ago! Maybe we just imagined it. No, that eerie feeling of being in a ghost-town was too strong to be shaken so easily. Strange to think that so many many many buildings sit silent most of the time. Our western minds see empty dollars of  development surely not making a good return.

Uneventful minibus ride back to Saigon. Seemed to be one long traffic jam from Vung Tau to the outskirts of the city, but not in our lane; on the other side of the road. It looked very Chitty Chitty Bang Bang-ish, except the flags were not French, but the red and gold sickle and hammer of communism and the gold star on red background of Vietnam.
There were a few rice paddies and some flooded “fields” that reminded us of Kampot’s salt fields, but it wasn’t overly rural. One town merged into the next the whole length of the road.
I guess if we hadn’t been in Saigon last week we might have thought it was busy today, but in comparison to non-holiday-time it seemed asleep. Fewer people, fewer cars, fewer motorbikes. I think we passed them all going to Vung Tau this morning.

Our minibus stopped at the bus station somewhere off our map. Ever-eager motorbike drivers offered us rides before we even had our packs off the bus. A slightly more demanding taxi driver insisted he could fit us all in his very small car, but then decided we’d need another as well. I spied some cheap-looking rough pick-up trucks and, not knowing if they were for public use or if they travelled set routes (not knowing anything at all about them, actually) went to make enquiries. No English is the order of the day outside the backpacker area, but I managed to find out he’d take us for 400,000 Dhong. I walked off and he laughed.
When we were in town before the beach trip I had noticed a bus depot of sorts near our guesthouse – the green busses I had seen stopping there were starting from where we were now standing. With the help of a map and a questioning look (seeing as none of my Vietnamese was of much help in this situation: eight, thank you, rice porridge with beef, noodles with beef or squid, fried fish with rice is all I can do so far!), I discovered we needed to take bus 26 and it would cost 3,000 dhong each for six of us, four would travel for free. Pick-up truck driver laughed again as he watched us board. Surely an embarrassed laugh!

(And why did we return to Saigon a day early? Well, when we shifted to the second hotel, Mrs Abrupt and Surly Proprietor increased her room rates 500% and would not let us squish into one room for our final night as we had arranged, and so we left. One night there buys us almost a week elsewhere, so it was not a difficult decision to make.) 

Can we do a post without a picture? Surely not. Here’s the sunrise over the South China Sea from our hotel room at 6 this morning:



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