I Remember When, I Remember, I Remember When I Lost My Mind

When I travel to a new town, city or country I always have certain expectations about how things will be when I get there.

A lot of this comes from picture that I have seen, or just my own personal expectations having read about my latest destination or just created my own images of how I think it will look and sound.
I should really stop having expectations as they are nearly always wrong!

When I talk about my travels to Korea, I always explain how I expected it to be nothing like it was. For some reason I had a really rural image in my head of the whole country, when in fact it was extremely urban and using many elements of western society had gone a good job of creating a unique identity for itself.
Many of my predictions about how Cambodia would be were pretty close to the mark with people everywhere, a significant lack of infrastructure and signs that it is still coming into its own as a country.

With all the times I have been incorrect about how a place will be, I'm starting to discover that to get a real idea or a true impression about each city it is important to get an authentic experience, and attempt to blend in as best as possible. I'm not talking about changing your whole identity, but embracing differences in culture, particularly in Asia, give you a better representation of new locations.

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It was time to pack up my things once again this morning and head off to the airport as I was preparing myself for a journey to Vietnam.

I've lost track of exactly how many days I have been away, and considering I have re-done by schedule about a dozen times, I'm no longer sure where the middle of my trip lies. Considering I have been away for just shy of two months and I am heading back to the UK in June, I feel I am somewhere close to the centre which hopefully means it's all downhill sledding from here.

For my trip to Vietnam I will be receiving some companionship in the form of my mum who is flying out from England today to come and stay with me during her Easter holidays from school. Before I left my mum had mentioned several times how she was looking forward to my stay in Vietnam having watched a number of travels programs and read a couple of articles about the country, so I guess is is very fitting that when she had decided to visit, the very place I will be is the one she was most intrigued about.
She will be staying for a week before returning to England, and this fits in perfectly as I am making my trip to Vietnam a seven-day stay.

If you've been following my trip carefully then you will know about my struggles, but then eventual success, with securing a visa for Vietnam and I was hoping that it was going to be a smooth ride once I reached the airport in Phnom Penh.
I managed to get a Tuk-Tuk ride from one of the many drivers sitting outside my hotel - I think it was the one who helped me secure a ride to The Killing Fields yesterday so I did him a solid by agreeing to pay him for his services this lunchtime.

Phnom Penh airport is relatively straight forward, I'd say it's about medium-sized and the terminal is certainly bigger than the one I flew out of in Siem Reap!
Once checked in I went towards the boarding gates which are all located upstairs, and I only had to wait about twenty minutes or so before my plane was ready to board.

For an extremely short flight once again I found myself on a plane which looked brand new and within thirty five minutes we were touching down in Ho Chi Minh City.

A bit like Cambodia, I know little pieces about Vietnam's history, and I know that Ho Chi Minh was the former capital of South Vietnam before its re-unification with the north. It is still known to some as Saigon, but was officially renamed after the former president of the country, Ho Chi Minh, who ruled over the country as Prime Minister and then President.

I find the concept of changing a city's name a very unusually process as I think for me, if I lived there, the old name would get stuck in my head and I'd never be able to remember to refer to it but its new one. Obviously throughout history cities and towns changed their names quite frequently but Saigon was only renamed in 1976 and there aren't many more recent examples than that. I guess it is a fitting tribute to someone who did so much for the country, but I can't imagine us doing the same in England and renaming any dwellings after famous political leaders - David Cameron Town doesn't really have the same ring to it.

It was time to find my bearings once I arrived, and I was going to brave going on the bus rather than paying an extortionate fee for a taxi into the city. I changed up my US dollars from Cambodia into just over 2 million Vietnamese Dong (Vietnam now joins Korea as the second country I have been a millionaire in) and set out through the gauntlet of people offering me a lift in order to find the correct bus.

It wasn't actually as difficult as I thought it was going to be. The site I looked at claimed that there was no bus stop, but it didn't really matter as the 152 bus I was looking for was parked up and ready to go. I handed over my money - 10,000 Dong; 5,000 for the ticket, and 5,000 for my bag - glad to know we have the same value - and then two minutes later we were on our way.

Like seemingly every other city I have visited on this trip, Vietnam immediately seemed engaging. I'd read that the traffic was chaos, and although it wasn't quite on the scale of Jakarta or Manila there were certainly a lot of people on the road. One thing I took away from the journey was that there seemed to be an awful lot more motorbikes than I had seen in Thailand or even Cambodia. I'd say that it was probably about 65% to 35% in favour of the two wheeled vehicles and for stretches of 100m or so, we were the only thing that wasn't a motorcycle travelling along the streets. Two months in and I am still fascinated by the traffic.

I was trying to take in as much as possible, and regular stops along the route made it easy for me to get to grips with things. Seems like an obvious thing to say for someone who doesn't speak a word of it or understand, but the Vietnamese language looks to be one which I'm not ever sure I'd be able to get my head around. I felt the same about Cambodian and Thai, but with Vietnamese it's different as they use English letters, not their own characters, but there are accents over or under every letter and each word on a shop or a restaurant was usually broken down into four or five words containing three to four letters each time. I think I'm going to have to really concentrate on street names to avoid getting lost.

Eventually we pulled up at the bus station, and from here I was going to have to work out whether or not it was possible to get to my hotel. Stepping off the bus like a Premiership footballer at a home game, there were people all around offering their services for a lift, but I felt I needed a little bit of time to assess exactly where I was going before just randomly jumping on board of a motorcycle taxi.
There was a map on the other side of the station so I headed over and look at it, but I'll be damned if I knew where my hotel was, or even where the bus station was located.
Someone helpful from the bus company came over to assist me and after I showed him the address he said it was about 2kms away and set me up with one of the taxis who agreed to give me a ride there for $2.

Even though it has been a common method of transportation for me throughout my stay in Asia, I still feel a touch of uncertainty when I am have no choice other than to get on the back of the motorbike. At least the guy offered me a helmet - not that it's plastic frame would to do too much, but it was reassuring non the less. With my smaller rucksack where his feet usually go, I carried my larger bag and we set off against the flow of traffic in order to clear a large roundabout which didn't actually have anything in the middle to claim it was a roundabout, but would have been absolute chaos to navigate otherwise.

It took about three or four minutes to eventually reach my hotel, the City Star, which is in the centre of Ho Chi Minh and is located in District One on the map I later received. I checked into my room, and spent a bit of time figuring out what to do. With it being about 4.30pm there wasn't really any time for major exploring today, but just down the road from there I am staying there is a park which I found on the map so I thought I would go and spend a little bit of time before going to get some dinner.

I think parks are a common theme for Ho Chi Minh, there seems to be quite a lot of them on the map, but considering the amount of traffic there is all around it's probably not a bad thing to have some green space out and about everywhere.
Tao Dan Park appeared to be a popular place for people to exercise, and it was funny to watch people walking in laps around the outside of it as others sat in the middle and enjoyed games of badminton or haki sak.

The sun started to disappear from the sky as I sat in the park and eventually I decided it would be a good idea to get some dinner so I completed my own lap of Tao Dan before heading to a junction where I attempted to cross the road.
I say attempted, because it was perhaps one of the most difficult things I've actually had to do in recent memory. The theory is remember, to walk slowly and confidently allowing the traffic to work its away around you, but when it seems like there is never actually a good time to walk across the road because the traffic is constantly flowing it's like the strangest game of human Frogger ever - except you don't want to get a game over here:

I stood and marvelled at the sheer volume of traffic all around me, and then I followed some local people across the street who it seems were equally daunted as I was, nervously looking left and right before skipping up onto the curb for safety. I feel like crossing every street in this country is a life altering experience and I just hope I am able to keep my wits about me at all times:

Having successfully crossed the street (not normally something I would be proud of) I decided to look for somewhere to eat, and after about an hour or walking around the block where I am staying I came across a restaurant who looked to have a menu in English allowing me to make sure I know what I am eating during my first meal here.

By now the whole place was lit up and was looking like any other place in South East Asia with neon lights and people out on the streets everywhere. This is the part of Vietnam that surprises me so far. I felt like I had an impression that it was fairly quiet and rural when actually its just as much of a metropolis as any of the largest cities on this continent. After I was finished with my dinner I walked back to my hotel and prepared myself for the arrival of my mum tomorrow.

Crazy
Gnarles Barkley (2006)