Ho Chi Minh

Today, we land in Vietnam (shout out to Julien, we’re in your country! We’re still waiting on your recomandations by the way…). We can’t believe we’re already here. Time flies. We are actually looking forward to venture ourselves in this country again. All three of us came in 2018 and we had loved it. Of course, we’re going to go back to the cities we had loved (Hanoï and Ho Chi Minh) but we are also looking forward to discover the places we don’t know yet. We’re on a tight schedule though: 15 days (well, actually 16 days if you count today). And that’s this 16th day that is problematic. Our visa (well, our right to be in this country) is only valid 15 days and when we got on the plane, we were told we had to buy a visa for 30 days on arrival (just for this extra day). The problem is, on arrival, they told us we couldn’t buy a visa without a recommendation letter (we obviously don’t have) so we had to leave the country within 15 days or go to the immigration office to ask for an extension…

So we look it up on the internet, we even go to the immigration office in Ho Chi Minh, but it’s sunday, and the office is closed. We ask the police officer on duty there and he tells us (thanks to Google translate) that we can pay the fine at the airport. Then another woman in charge of renewing visas tells us that nothing will happen just for one day. So, here’s our options:
Choice number 1: we leave a day earlier and lose 350€ of plane tickets plus one day in Vietnam.
Choice number 2: we wait and see until we arrive at the aiport and then, either nothing happens, or we have to pay a 75€ fine, or we have to pay the visas and a fine (for a total amount of 400€) and we might be forbiden from entering Vietnam again…
We’ll choose choice number 2 crossing our fingers (but we don’t show we’re crossing our fingers because apparently, that’s like flipping the finger here). We really hope at worst we have to pay a 75€ fine.

To be completely honest with you guys, this visa issue is actually on our minds and kinda spoiling our time in Ho Chi Minh. It’s really a shame because we had taken an extra plane and shorten our stay in Kuaka just to return to this city we liked so much the first time (even only for a couple of days). Now, we’re really bumped and we are not enjoying ourselves much. In addition, we find the city dirty, the people not all pleasant (especially behind wheels) and Côme is not making it easy for us today. We really feel a huge gap between Ho Chi Minh and Bali. We are used to a very different population, one that is not stressed nor stressful and an environment which is clean (except for the sea).

Not everything is negative though, of course. We have a few good moments nonetheless. We go back to the places we’ve had a good time (our old neighborhood, the bookstore street, the post office, downtown…). We take a picture of Côme on the same swing. We appreciate once more the small things we had loved the first time around: people sleeping on their motorbike, entire families on scooters, all kinds of vehicules transporting all kinds of things, gecko hunting at night (we have become specialists), Banh Mis (Vietnamese sandwiches with a mini baguette), Vietnamese traffic (that’s actually something Julia rather doesn’t like but that’s kinda funny for Doo who has to make a round trip once more to go get her cross the street). We also discover a DIY workshop in a library in which Côme has to decorate a Halloween candle. We take refuge on the highest building in town to escape a downpour and we get actually quite impressed by the waiting line of a popular restaurant where a robot is serving the waiting guests fruits and icecreams. We venture to try all kinds of food from the food stalls : a cheese “croc-monsieur”, some kind of rice flour doughnut “cooked” in weird looking steel tubes with coco and peanut inside, and really yummy “madeleines”. And of course, when we stumble upon a “French” bakery, Côme will beg us to buy a baguette. He will kiss it a thousand times before devouring it. It will enjoy it very much even though this baguette is what we call a “supermaket baguette”.

In Vietnam, the culinary habits are quite different from ours. At the restaurant for example, people order many diffrent plates so everyone around the table can eat from different dishes. We also noticed in the lively restaurant we had to go through to access our hostel room (yeah, kinda odd) that there are people who sell sweets, dry fishes and other types of snacks to the clients of the restaurant while they are eating. There are also a lot of street “restaurants” (actually food carts). People order food there and sit on plastic stools on the sidewalk to eat. We can see them there in the early morning, eating what we would call a real meal.