Not all days are diamonds

We moved on, to the far south of Vietnam, to Ho Chi Minh City (abbreviated HCMC) today. It used to be called Saigon, but was renamed in 1975 when Northern Vietnam won the war. It is named after Ho Chi Minh, the North’s prime minister at the time.

We had a tough day - we took a train from Nha Trang to HCMC. I expected the train to be like the last one which wasn’t half bad, but was terribly shocked when we got on board. It was terrible!! The seats were uncomfortable, it smelled, it was filthy dirty, food on the floor from past passengers, barely any air conditioning (so warm) and there were bugs! Crawling little bugs! We had terrible seats - in back of people reclining way too far. When I got on I couldn’t believe we had to be on it for 8 hours! At one point I got bit twice by one of the bugs that was living in a crack in the wall where I was sitting. There were no extra seats so we couldn’t move away! It was not nice. Eventually I got my sweatshirt out and covered the crack in the hope it would keep the bugger in there - it appeared to work.

We eventually made it and found our hotel. The receptionist then warned us before we went out to grab dinner to be very careful as the “streets are un-safe”. Took us a bit to get her to iron down the meaning of that statement exactly, but apparently it’s not unsafe as in violent crime - just unsafe in regards to pickpockets, petty theft, etc. She warned us to not take our cell phones out at all, like for GPS and walk with them. Apparently it’s common for thieves to drive by and snatch them from your hands here. 😳 We were warned about this in Costa Rica as well. So I guess we won’t be taking a lot of pictures walking around???

1.1 milesRead more