Ho Chi Minh City - December 4th

Today we have to get up early to leave Phu Quoc and return to Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon as it is more commonly known) to meet up with our cycle group.  Our flight was on time and so we were at the international terminal of the airport before our group (I didn’t want to leave everyone else waiting).  It took a few minutes to find our group leader, but we still found him before the rest of the group came in.  I have to say on first impressions our group was not what we were expecting.  We are in the younger section of the crowd, and most people don’t scream ‘cyclist’ at you.  Were we looking for a group of cyclists we might have walked right past.

We get a bus into our hotel, which as it is a Sunday doesn’t take too long.  The hotel itself is very good, the best we have stayed in on our trip so far, but then again it is also one of the more expensive.  This trip is not really a backpacker trip in the way overlanding trips are.

We leave the rest of the group to recover from jet lag and go out for a walk around the city.  The first thing we notice is that it is very calm, clean and the pavements are in good repair.  Dorota even feels at home enough to get some shopping done.  Interestingly all the shops are kitted out in Christmas decorations, which is a first for us this year, even though this is old news at home.  We grab a very good bowl of pho and continue on with seeing the sights.  We are really just looking around the city, not going into any of them.  There is some interesting architecture left over from when the French ruled here, although it is now being swamped by massive high rises.  Still as a city it is quite pleasant to walk around.  We finish our walk in an Irish pub (of course).

At 18:00 we have our trip briefing in a restaurant near the hotel.  Afterwards a few of the guys want to grab a pint, so we guide them to a different Irish pub we saw on the way back from the first one.  Well I did miss out on going to one in India, so two here just makes up for that.