Crazy awesome Saigon

I’ve been back in Vietnam for a little over 48 hours and have already fallen back in love with the crazy brand of awesomeness that is Saigon.  For the first time visitor though – ie, me two years ago – the place can just seem like a total madhouse.  You can always spot the person who has just stepped off the plane that day – they will be the one searching for a change of underwear while waiting in vain for the traffic to thin sufficiently to cross the road.  Hint: it never will – just make eye contact with the oncoming stream of traffic and walk slowly and steadily across the street.  Vehicles will go round you if you keep moving.  If you hesitate, you’re toast.

Touts will continually harass you to buy things you don’t need if you’re anywhere near the touristed areas, and sitting down in a bar within eyeshot of the street seems to serve only as more of an invitation.  Some are more persistent than others, but the ones that really won’t take no for an answer are likely to annoy the hell out of even the most chilled out traveller.  Life is lived on the pavements – if you don’t want to stroll through an extension of somebody’s living room, you’ll probably find yourself walking in the street while scooters laden with an entire family and an assortment of random oversized objects zip by a few inches from your feet.

At the moment the competition for craziest things that I’ve seen being transported by scooter is a tie between an entire wooden door and about 20 motorbike inner tubes.  As I mentioned, though, it’s only early days yet, and I honestly don’t know what it would take to surprise me on that front now. Perhaps a cow, or a couple of sofas.  Although even then…

And it’s that sort of thing that makes me love the place.  Life is being lived all around you in Saigon, in ways that you just don’t see in the Western world.  Wonderful, crazy, bizarre, dangerous, fun – often all at the same time. From the ‘f*ck-you’ girl and the entrepreneurial dude wanting to shoe shine my sandals (he’s a braver man than me to get that close to them), to the family that took me home and fed and watered me in an attempt to embroil me in a poker scam, to the smiling face of my hotel receptionist who tried to assuage my guilt about waking her up when stumbling home drunk at two in the morning by swearing she didn’t mind, about the only thing that you can guarantee that Saigon will never be is dull.  Removed by so much more than a few thousand miles from my life in Melbourne, this place never ceases to amaze.  As Samuel Johnson would have undoubtedly said if he’d made it here, if you are tired of Vietnam, you are tired of life.

And because no good travel story could pass without mention of great food, booze and company, I have to give a special shout out to a couple of fellow travel bloggers that I’ve caught up with a few times while I’ve been in Saigon.  Wes and Colin – thanks so much for assisting greatly in my apparently ongoing quest to get drunk in every city in the world.  My head, stomach and wallet are all giving their heartfelt appreciation as I type this.

As you can tell, and in what seems to be a recurring theme, I’m enjoying my second visit to Saigon a lot more than the first.  I think there’s two reasons for this – the significantly better weather has to help (there’s been about 10 minutes of rain in the last three days, vs about 10 minutes without rain the last time I was here), but I think the lack of culture shock is even more of a factor.  This time round I’ve been able to take a step back and enjoy the hectic pace and assault on every sense that the place provides rather than spending several days wondering what the hell was going on.  It has been nothing short of incredible.  If the rest of this misadventure around the world can be as fantastic as the first three days, I’m going to be a very happy camper indeed.

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