Ho Chi Minh Fever

June 1st - 14th

We flew into HCMC, Vietnam, on a very late night flight from Manila. We were relieved that the traffic was so light in this city...

Then the next morning, stepping out of our hotel room, after first being assaulted by jackhammers pounding on the other side of our wall, we were assaulted by everything else this city had to offer. Motorcycles EVERYWHERE, honking and weaving and mounting curbs and going the wrong way down streets. The roadside food, selling yummy tangy, spicy cuisine, a great changeup from the lacklustre FILIPINO food. Then there were the guys offering rides on there bikes - "Taxi sir?", "Motorbai sir?", "Where you go sir?"on every street corner and in between (they always seemed to approach me and not Taren). Then there are all the other people selling all sorts of stuff that you kind of need, but not really, and if you show the slightest bit of interest you are given the hard sell. There were also way more tourists here than wee had seen on any other part of the trip so far.

We visited the War Remnants Museum which tells the grim Vietnamese story of the American War (or the Vietnam War as we know it). Australia was mentioned on the information a few times, and we were one of the biggest serving countries in the war, but if you were from the US, you would have felt pretty bad about the things your government did which were described in the exhibition (chemical warfare for example). That's not to say the Vietnamese were angels by any stretch of the imagination - the stuff the Viet Cong were doing was pretty gruesome too. But when we left the museum, we were feeling a bit low as some of the pictures and descriptions were very tough to look at.

It was about the next day, the 3rd of June, that Taren started to show flu like symptoms - high fever, joint aches, headache, lethargy. After a couple of days of this, we took her to the doctor and they diagnosed Dengue Fever. The fever lasted about 8 days and a gruesome looking rash hung around for about a week or more after that (see gnarly picture). During this week and a half of rest and recovery we played a lot of Yahtzee, cards, read some books (Taren read a big fat stupid murder mystery thing in less than 24 hours), watched some TV, every now and then I would go out by myself and have a snoop around the city.

Once Taren had recovered enough, we ate some nice food together. One evening we went for a fish hotpot, where you boil up the raw ingredients in a big pot at your table. The waitresses didn't speak a word of English (which is great!) so we pointed at another table meaning we wanted to eat that too. The other table seemed pretty chuffed at this so they gave us a shot of vodka to celebrate, and we then watched what they did so we ate it properly (the trick is not to cook things for too long). They then offered us another shot or two, so wee bought a bottle too and repaid the favour a few more times, after a slowly eaten meal of a couple of hours we walked slowly home, there seemed to be twice as many motorcyles on the road this time!

The highlight of HCMC for me (Ben) though was the waterslide park, so much so that it deserves a whole blog post of its own...