Wheeeeeeee!

So this morning I woke up after 11 hours of what I will generously call sleep. The rock hard bed and brick for pillow were fine but the extremely busy 24/7 street below my window took a little getting used to. Popped into my local dodgy street phramacy first thing and the woman laughed when I asked for earplugs - I suspect it might be a frequent foreigner request.

As my friendly cyclo man was nowhere to be seen (millions of others were of course but I am a loyal customer) I bade farewell to my insurance and hailed (or agreed to be hailed by) a 'Honda Om' motorcycle taxi, which in fact is usually just a bloke who fancies earning some extra cash with his bike. Negotiated a reasonable foreigner rip off price for our 7km journey to the Cholon china town markets and off we went. Not only was it not as scary as I thought it would be (remember that we are talking about literally hundreds of bikes on any one street at any time with no road rules to speak of), it was actually a lot of fun, give or take the layer of grime I was covered in at the end of it).

I'm not sure what overtakes tourists when they're off their home patch but riding pillion on a motorbike in insane conditions with no helmet while wearing shorts and jandals seemed feasible. That said, I will make the distinction between riding a motorbike in Samui, which I wouldn't dream of, and riding in HCMC. The difference (apart from the squillions more bikes in HCMC) is that the traffic never gets above 30/35kph in Saigon whereas in Samui it's what you can get away with. I know perfectly well that your head will split just as easily at 35kph as it will at 100kph but it somehow feels different. Riding in HCMC seems to be more an ongoing negotiation between reasonably civil madmen whereas Saumi is a suicide mission. When I come back here for a few months I may even considering riding myself (WITH helmet and appropriate safety gear), but we'll see about that when I get to it.

Anyway, enough of that. Saigon is a lot of fun. Am just about to book a ridiculously cheap tour to check out the Cu Chi tunnels (aka an e.g of exactly how the Viet Cong kicked the US's ass) and the temple of some mad religious sect or another for tomorrow so I'd better go do that - quite fun being an unadulterated tourist for a few days.