Day 15 - 23/05/25

 Woke up nice and early today in preparation for our flight to Ho Chi Minh City (which I shall be calling Saigon from now on since I can’t be arsed to type all that out every time). After hastily stuffing all my things into my suitcase we were on our way to a Toyota dealership to be picked up by a bus to Da Nang airport.


It was so hot today that you could physically feel the heat radiating from the tarmac underneath us. It felt like we were getting sunburnt on a cloudy day. We got on the bus and proceeded to finish all the beers we had leftover in our flat. Feeling slightly tipsy, we arrived in Da Nang airport, only to be greeted with the biggest airport queue I had ever seen.


Being the good friend that I am, I decided to pay 100,000 dong to leave my friends behind and get in the priority queue. The airport was so busy that even the priority queue took a long time to get to. This Indian man in front of me was very upset by this and shouted at several poor airport staff.


Luckily they upgraded me to an extra legroom seat for free, so I was feeling very optimistic for this flight. After an hour of me relaxing in the airport lobby, Jagan and Dan finally made it through and we headed to our gate. I fell asleep as soon as the plane took off and woke up as soon as it landed, so it felt like I had teleported to Saigon. After brushing off the various taxi drivers hassling us to get in their cars, we got to a nearby street and ordered one online.



Saigon was very much different to the rest of Vietnam. It seemed bigger, busier and much more modern. There’s skyscrapers everywhere and actual chain stores which don’t seem to exist in the rest of Vietnam! After lugging our suitcases up 3 flights of stairs, we were at our Airbnb.


We dropped our bags off and immediately headed out to a nearby food market place. I got a butter chicken curry, and ate it so quickly that I felt a bit sick.


Because of this, and the fact that we were exhausted from a day of travelling, we decided to head home for an early night.


 



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