Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Woke up and was feeling a lot better - think our dinner finally sorted me out (along with the antibiotics).
Spent the morning just using the hotel facilities - the pool, sauna, jacuzzi! Nice. Checked out at 12 and said bye to our lovely hotel and headed out into the city for the day.
Went back to the Reunification Place, took some more pictures but didn't go in. In front of the place we saw a couple having their pictures taken and the woman was in the most hiddious wedding dress I have ever seen - it had a train that could rival Princess Di's and had these red flower all the way down it. Had lunch at a place called Bunta whilst we waited for the rain to stop. Really good food there - enjoyed the meal. Seemed like it was a very fashionable place for young hip Vietnamese people to hang out - as well as us messy tourists.
Walked to the backpacker district - thanks to Manisha and her map reading skill of which I have none! Manisha decided that it would be sensible for her to buy a silk sleeping bag after the horror stories of dirty linen on the train. Hung around for a bit in the backpacker area - saw one of my fellow travelers Bev which was nice.
Headed back towards the hotel, nearly getting killed a couple of times on the way thanks to the maniac motorbike riders of HCMC - it really is very scary. Looked for some facepower on the way back- as I have turned into a bit of a greece monkey since coming out to South East Asia! Everywhere we went - Clarins, Clinique, Lancome - no one seemed to stock anything darker than natural or honey. Very typically Asian, while the white world is trying to get a tan, pale is beautiful in Asia. Walking back to the hotel, we found lots of places that you could get copies of famous paintings - was very cool to see these people work, they were able to recreate masterpieces on mass and in any size!
Went to Pho 24 for dinner, only had one dish that didn't contain beef, so went for that. Was nice but didn't want to have too much of the soup as I wanted to avoid going to the toilet on the train!
Went back to the hotel to get our bags and chill out for a bit before our big journey. Came the time for us to go to the station, used the nice clean bathroom one more time and was off.
Got a cab from outside the hotel, the guard told the cab driver where to go - we were told 30,000 Dong, which seemed fair. Drove off and 10minutes later came to a stop, and the guy looked at us as if to say, here you are, which seemed a little odd considering we were outside the trade center not the train station. We tried to explain, train station to the guy, he looked at us blankly. Manisha got her ever trusty lonely planet guide out, showed him the address- still looked blank. He then called his friend who understood English, Manisha told him where we wanted to go and then handed the phone back over. The cab driver chuckled, and started driving. He then told us that it would be 100,000 Dong, as it was far far away - that he could tell us but understanding the difference between trade centre and train station in Vietnamese, he couldn't! Manisha told him, no - he agreed 30,000 - thats all he was getting. And could he please hurry as we were running rapidly out of time! He was arguing so much that in the end we asked him to take us back to the hotel and we'd get a new cab from there. Got to the hotel - got our bags and left the dodgy cab guy behind! We got a new cab and this time, before we got in we confirmed with the driver where we were going. He charged us $5 which was a rip off but we were pretty desperate and didn't have time to argue. He was pretty quick and we got to the station with time to spare.
We found our carriage pretty easily, and in all honesty, it was much cleaner than we thought it would be. There were two men already in our carriage which was fine. I took my top bunk, we struggled a little to get my big backpack on to the bunk. I tried to move around on my bunk and it was very difficult - there wasn't much room - I couldn't even sit up straight! I could see into the light fixtures bit and it was gross - some one had left and eaten corn on the cob, another person had left some sweet wrappers and there was a cup of something up there too - I didn't want to look at what it was as I may have been sick!
Time came for lights out and I did try sleeping a bit but one of the guys was snoring and the little old lady was hacking up so much that it sounded like she was being sick - it was pretty gross!
- comments