Busy Saigon! A few days in Ho Chi Minh city #Monomad

Saigon was its name before, many still use that instead of Ho Chi Minh City I guess?

Classic Citroen

At least this Citroen Traction Avant is from those times!

I did not check that cafe out, one thing is that I enjoy back alley street joints, the other is that it would be a long day of walking the streets, without much planning other than setting a general direction hehe...

Local market

This is more like it! The cheapish but clean & quiet hotel I found was in this area, a good location for some photography these 2-3 nights.

There was not much I could buy staying in cheap hotels, this is of course for all the families and small eateries that cook real, healthy food from scratch 🙂

Need a rooster and a few hens?

Now that would have been something to drag back to the room! I could imagine doing that if I was a teenager with wild friends around again... :-/

Well actually no, of course we never mistreated animals!

Local motorbike repair shop

The hotel was recently acquired by a war veteran, actually not on the Vietnamese side, and also he had his back totally wrecked during training, in the US.

I do not know much about Vietnam of course, but I've heard that they have an admirable ability to let the past be past, I guess this might be hinting at just that.

Actually he had some officials inspect while I was there, it all seemed to be very relaxed.

How much might that load weigh?

All of Vietnam totally depends on motorbikes, the very lively, local economies all over the country are all served that way!

I found this street corner in the early evening, it was a perfect place to do some pano photography.

Who are you?

I guess many wondered who I was, as I drive a lot on two wheels myself I know that when doing that I'd also pick up anything outside of the norm, such as a weird tourist on a street corner haha...

Traveling in style!

I do like the calmness and natural way people have about things, also the traffic is very organized, its just that you'll have to learn the real rules first!

One of my future plans is definitely to do the Ha Giang Loop. I would not have any problem with that in itself, I feel confident driving anything almost anywhere, but as always its better to get at least some paperwork fixed, at least initially haha...

There is a lot of files to go through from the pano session, of course a hit rate of 5-10% is all you can hope for doing that, so there will be more of these tomorrow.

So that's it for today! #monomad