IT’s so hot, so humid, so dusty…but I love it. Maybe only a small dose, though.

So after Hong Kong and Guanzhou, Lisa and I continued our adventure in Vietnam, a small four hour flight from HKG international airport. I have some family in Vietnam, they mostly live in the countryside in the south of Ho Chi Minh where they live off the land and farm they own, but some of my cousins do work in the city. One cousin, My Nuyen, is about my age. She came to pick us up at the airport, and luckily she did.

Once off the arrival terminal, we were attacked by a herd of taxi drivers, trying to snap my luggages away from both my hands and lug us towards their car. I had to pull them back (with force) and insisted (yelled) that we did not need their service. Finally, the message went through and we were left on our own to finally land our eyes on the busy streets of the ancient vietnamese capital.

There are so many motorcycles, there’s barely any space between the drivers. Their legs skim pass each other, but they do so with so much practice that no one is alarmed. The cars honk each other, the buses honk the bikes and the bikes honk pedestrians. It’s noisy and dusty, and that is the life of Ho Chi Minh city.

We stayed there three days in a hotel on Pham Ngu Lao street. The hotel is supposedly rated 3 stars, but beware…it probably means a 1 star on our occidental scale. We had a cockroach coming out of the floor drain in the washroom, luckily my local cousin took care of it for us with her slipper.