Category: Vietnam

We spent most of the last day of my recent trip to Vietnam sightseeing.  We were in Ho Chi Minh City which was formerly Saigon. We were going to spend time in the downtown area checking out museums and looking at historic areas. Before we left our hotel, one of our hosts told us what he usually does when he has a flight later in the day like the one we had. He would leave his luggage at the hotel with the concierge and return a couple of hours before his flight left. He would then go to the spa at the hotel for a shower to get refreshed from a day out in the city. Since we were in a tropical zone during the rainy season where there was extremely high humidity, this sounded like a good idea. The night we had arrived in Vietnam, the humidity was smothering at 11 in the evening when we exited the airport. It didn’t get much better any time we were there except immediately after a rainstorm.  A shower should be refreshing alternative to just getting on the plane like I normally do during international travel.

The traffic on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City was one of the most fascinating things I saw during my recent trip to Vietnam. I took more pictures and video of the traffic that I did of anything else. The first thing that you notice is the number of motorcycles and scooters. They are everywhere. They weaved in and out of traffic and around the van we rode in. We were told that the middle class had about a seven year period of growth in this part of the country and that the bicycles had been replaced by scooters. We were also told that the taxes on cars were extremely high, effectively tripling the cost of a car. This was intentional on the part of the government to try and discourage people from buying cars. The streets could not accommodate more cars. They were putting in subway systems to try to help.