Keeping my karma intact in Saigon

Arrived into Saigon the other morning on the 5.30am train. I hadn't slept well on the train a combination of smelly Vietnamese train, easily the worst i have gotten since i left home and i have gotten 17 different over night trains in the last 3 months so i'm a bit of an authority on the matter, noisey Germans who insisted on me drinking beer with them and a weird rattle which after a while i was convinced was the beginning of acute paranoia.

I had emailed my hotel to tell them that i would be arriving at 6am and to have a room ready for me even if I had to pay an extra day (9USD) is not going to break the bank. But of course they didn't. They said to wait until 12. WTF! I had wandered the streets of a drizzly Nha Trang the previous day for 11 hours, I was not wandering the streets of Saigon in my state of derangement. I then asked the lady about getting my visa extended. She said, 6 days, $35. Holy crap, it expires on the 10th - and in Nha Trang they told me $22 and 1 day in Saigon. I was all sweaty and probably smelt of beer and stale cigarettes, and I mumbled at her, but you don't understand, I'm a shark .... I ca... can....c...c...can't stay still for 6 days, I'll die .... She looked at me and smiled, I had a moment of lucidity ... and asked for the toilet. I splashed my face with some cold water, and reminded myself that crazy Una was not going to get any room or visa extension at all ... so I went back upstairs smiled kindly apologised, gave her my passport, paid for the extension and 6 nights and sat down in the corner with a glass of very acidic orange juice.

The nice lady had my room ready by 8 and after watching a movie, and having about 5 hours sleep I felt just like my usual sane self. The hotel is really nice, just one small problem last night. well i went out to meet some other Germans I had met earlier on the trip and when I got back I decided to have a shower and when I pulled back the curtain there was the biggest fucking cockroach I have ever seen just sitting on the wall looking at me. I didn't scream, well I think I made a weird ackkkeeeek noise. I couldn't kill it ... this is a Buddhist country and anyway, it was just hanging out there, hardly the death penalty was warranted. I was going to try negotiating but in the end I reckoned it was probably more scared of me than I was of it, so I just climbed into bed and figured it would be gone by the morning. And it was. No lives lost and my karma remains pretty much intact.

The lonely planet describes Vietnam as being like a gangly teenager on the cusp of coming of age, and if that is true and I am loathe to say that it is a pretty good analogy, then Saigon is like it's slightly unhinged older uncle. This is a real city a New York to Hanoi's Washington DC. It's super hot, 35 - 36 degrees, it's humid to the point of craziness and the noise never ever stops. I took a motorbike ride today for an hour around the city. I refused to get off the bike and just snapped photos from the back, it was crazy ..
The main reason why I didn't want to get off the bike, aside from not wanting to be hassled to buy stuff I didn't want to buy was that I wanted to go to the war remnants museum and it was on lunch break, I knew if I got side tracked i wouldn't go at all. The remnants museum is a very stark reminder of the futility of war and the fact that in the end it is always the ordinary people who die the dirtiest deaths, Uncle Ho and President Johnson weren't tortured, or blinded by agent orange or had their skin burnt off by a phosphorus bomb, no they died peacefully in bed.

There is a photo exhibition and also an exhibition on the photographers who died covering the war, it was super interesting. And many of the photos would bring tears to your eyes. Agh. they also had a pretty impressive collection of captured US tanks, and planes and guns and some unexploded bombs and land mines. It's a sobering and chilling place to visit but essential if you are going to understand the people here.

On a lighter note, sometimes when you are travelling alone you get to overheard some pretty insane stuff. Today at the museum I overheard an American lady asking her Vietnamese guide why the Americans didn't bomb Saigon? were Ho Chi Minh city and Saigon the same place? and then she asked him to point out Saigon on the map and turned to her friend and said "so I guess that pretty close to where we are now". But that didn't trump the Mexican lady i overheard a couple of weeks ago who asked our Vietnamese was Ho Chi Minh Vietnamese.

Avoiding looking like an idiot is what google is for.

Oh sweet lord they are playing a pop version of jingle bells in Vietnamese over the radio here ... I have to go ....