Our Holiday Destinations: December 2013

Its been quite a while.

Its been a busy year, so much going on. We opened two businesses, very tiring year. And we need a short holiday. We were not sure where to go for our next holiday destination at first. But then hubby suggested Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He convinced me its a good place to visit. According to a few friends and acquintences. I am skeptical but kept an open mind. I always open to new suggestions especially when it comes to places to visit. Its always fun to try new places...

So we booked our tickets and hotel. As usual we did some researches on the best place to stay, according to our preferences. Must be near to Halal restaurants! And we did find a good place and we were happy of our choice. More of that later.

We left Brunei via Miri, flew to Kuala Lumpur then to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam since there is no direct flight from Brunei. Its a bit troublesome but no problem. We were in transit at the airport for around 5 hours waiting for our flight but time flew by quickly when we had fun :)

Reached HCMC Vietnam around 9.00pm at night. Tired but happy and couldn't wait to check in. But there was a hiccup waiting for us at the hotel. First, we caught a taxi which brought us to the wrong hotel!

Luckily it was not too far from the correct one. When we arrived at the correct hotel, we faced by another issue. There was no room available! Well.. the room which meant to be for us had a faulty airconditioning. The aircon broke down earlier so the reception named Jessica suggested we should check into another hotel a few blocks away from where we were and checked in for the night while she sorted out the airconditioning. She will send us there and picked us up the next morning with no charge.

We were too tired to argue and to cut the story short we decided to accept her suggestion and went straight to the hotel and checked in for the night. And the next day we went back to the hotel but we chose to change to a bigger room with minimum charge. Both sides happy and that's where we stayed for the next 5 nights of our stay in HCMC.

That was the only hiccup. For the rest of our stay we had a wonderful and grand time!

I had a mixed feeling about Vietnam although if I wanted to weigh on how I feel about the whole experience, I do have a good feeling about it. Meaning - I like Vietnam! Reasonable enough to go back and visit!!!

Vietnam was beautiful. It has a pretty infrastructure (some buildings had a European influence to some extent) with clean streets and roads. But it was noisy, chaotic with polluted air. Especially so when we were at 49th floor at the sky deck of telecom tower (more of that later).

And there were lots, I mean lots of motorcycles on the road. I knew about it from tv or documentaries. But to witness the real thing ie. number of motorcycles to see and how many of them on the road was totally a different story. They were endless.

I think there were more motorcycles than cars. So many of them. There were lot of honking and braking also because some of these riders just ride! I mean they just ride, without looking left or right or other traffic. So these cars and other big vehicles just honk them to move them away. So overwhelming.

Some motorcyles carried the whole family of 3 or 4. Kids were squeezed between the two parents without helmets. Sometimes the children were standing up only being held by the mother while the father ride the motorcyles at 40km/hr. I was cringing to see this. So amazingly dangerous but it didn't bother them one bit. They looked happy and content, maybe because they didn't know any other life and they were used to this kind of life style. But for me, it was really an eye opener, on how lucky some of us are.

But Vietnamese were good people. They were polite, helpful and respectful. Especially those working at hotels. I know you would say, of course, they work at that kind of places, they do that to attract tourists to stay. You may be right but still, from past experiences in different places, some hotel staff weren't even bothered.

Shopping is plentiful. Who would have guessed there were international brands with their own buildings in Vietnam. Gucci has its own building. So as LV. Not to mentioned some others. But the most famous places for shoppings are all these markets all around Vietnam. I know there are a few of them and we only managed to visit two markets, Ben Than and Saigon Square. These places were awesome. They were big markets selling everything, well that's Ben Than Market. Saigon Square was more to materials, casual wears, handbags and shoes.

The currency is Dong. B$1.00 equivalent to around 8,000 Dong. US Dollars were widely accepted too. And in Ben Than Market they accepted RM. I think Malaysian do most of their shopping in Vietnam for the fact that everybody thought we swere from Malaysia, they can speak little Malay and they offer their prices in Malaysian Ringgit when they saw and thought we were Malaysian.

There were also a few Malaysian restaurants offering Malaysian dishes and we saw buses carrying Malaysian tourists.

Food was good. We tried Pho. That's the Vietnamese soup noodles. They were quite nice, I like it. We also tried Vietnamese Spring roll, which I didn't like very much. They were not fried like what we had at home. And the sauce was also a bit weird and didn't agree with my taste bud. We went to two Halal Restaurants, Halal Saigon and D'Nyonya. Both served good food but Halal Saigon has more variety because they served Malaysian and also Vietnamese cuisines. But I think food was a bit expensive in Vietnam. It cost us up to B$60 at one time. But I don't know, may be because we asked for Kari Kepala Ikan which then caused us B$60 which was a bit expensive even in Brunei, lol.

Anyhow, I don't mind going to Vietnam again. Its a good place to visit. And maybe next time
we should go and visit some places of interest for a change because during this visit we didn't manage to go to any except the telecom tower.

Maybe next time.

To be continued...