A Day in Saigon

This morning we woke in the port of Saigon, with the weather baking hot and the temperature at 06:30 already 26C,when we left Saigon at 19:30, the temp was still 30C. It took 3 hours to drive from the ship in to Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City to use its official name. The locals tell us they still call it Saigon and only refer to its official name on Government papers. We visited the various points of interest including the former US embassy where the yanks departed in 1968 rather hastily by helicopter from the roof when the city was over run by the Viet Cong troops during the war. It was absolute chaos driving into the city, we were told that the population consists of 75 million with 45 million owning scooters/motorbikes. At each corner or junction, thousands maneuvered for position, we guessed all of them had turned out to see our cavalcade of buses. Even more interesting was entering roundabouts with no give way, it was hilarious to watch, thank God we were not driving. Every where we went vendors on scooters tried to sell us everything but the kitchen sink for 1 USD, even when you got back to the safety of the bus they would bang the window trying to sell us the same thinks we said NO to this earlier. Later on we recognised some of the faces from earlier stops, the hawkers were following the buses for over 8 hours, difficult to tell the difference, they all look the same.