We touched down in Ho Chi Minh City around 9 am on INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY! We were surprised at how run down the airport was, considering it is the largest city in Vietnam. Despite this, our bags came out fairly quickly and we called a Grab to our hostel. We were staying at Long Hostel, a family run hostel right in the centre of District 1. They allowed us to drop our bags until check in, and we went out on a little walking adventure!
Since beginning to travel nearly 2 months ago, we have been very diligent about eating local and not splurging on more expensive Western food. However, we decided to make an exception because we wanted a nice, air conditioned restaurant to chill at before we could check into our hostel. We found a place about 10 minute walk away called The Pizza Company, which we discovered was a big chain all throughout Vietnam! We were greeted with a massive International Women’s Day rainbow balloon arch right as we walked in. In an even bigger win for women (us), we discovered that The Pizza Company had a buy 1 get 1 large pizza deal every Tuesday & Wednesday! We happily ordered our two large pizzas and the final bill came out to just under 8 USD!
That night, we also tried a Taiwanese restaurant called Jeffrey’s Kitchen – and it was DELICIOUS! It was so nice to have a taste of home, and we chatted with the owner, Jeffrey, about Taiwan, where he learned to cook, and what brought him to HCMC.
After dinner, we went for a walk on the famous Bui Vien Walking Street… and discovered that despite being called a walking street, cars and scooters were still allowed for some reason. It was fairly early, but the walking street was still popping with lots of good vibes. It wasn’t too busy yet, and we noticed that there were tons of signs at various bars advertising FREE COCKTAILS FOR LADIES in celebration of International Women’s Day! Not accepting the free drinks would’ve been very unfeminist of us…right? We had to! #womensempowerment
The next day, we woke up an enjoyed a delicious breakfast at our hostel. They had a menu with lots of different options, and I got the pancakes and Saz got scrambled eggs, as well as coffee and tea! We spent the day exploring the touristy things that Saigon had to offer. To be honest, we were quite underwhelmed. Ho Chi Minh has all the chaos and commotion of Hanoi, but with less beautiful architecture, history, and sites. We hit the main tourist spots, like Tao Dan park, Independent Palace, Notre Dame (which was completely covered in scaffolding due to construction), the Opera House, and walked along the river. Nothing stood out to us as particularly beautiful or interesting. Crossing the road was aneurysm inducing, and the honking seemed to never stop. We explored most of the “tourist hot spots”, and concluded that HCMC just wasn’t our vibe.
The main goal of our stop in Ho Chi Minh City was actually to figure out a visa run situation. Currently, Vietnam only allows 30 day tourist visas without any option for extending that while in country. We are meeting up with our best friend in Hanoi at the end of the month, so we needed to reset our tourist visas to extend past that 30 days. There are plenty of companies in HCMC that organise buses to and from the border, help you with all the paperwork etc. but these companies charge a major premium. The cheapest option we could find was $60 USD/person, and that was way out of our budget. There used to be a public bus that ran every day from downtown to the border, but apparently that bus was halted during COVID and hasn’t restarted. Ultimately, we settled on renting a scooter and driving to the border ourselves.
The evening before our visa run, we went to the scooter rental shop down the street and rented a scooter for our big adventure. We took it to the gas station and filled it up before our big adventure, and gasoline instantly started spewing out the bottom. Not a great start – but the owner was very apologetic and gave us a new scooter.
We woke up at 4:30 am the next day to embark on our journey, hoping to beat some traffic and have a relatively easy drive to the border. It was anything but. Ho Chi Minh was BUSTLING! Restaurants, stalls, and stores all looked like they had been open for hours. The road was already packed with cars, buses, scooters. Traffic was like the wild west, with nobody obeying any road signs, AND it was cold & pitch black out! To read all about our traumatic visa run adventure, click here.
Just 3 days of being in HCMC really drained us. The visa run was stressful, and every time we stepped outside we felt like we were going to get run over. Our saving grace was that we found a really great coffee shop/coworking space just down the street from our hostel called Percent Coffee, and spent the next two days avoiding the chaos of HCMC in their aesthetic, clean, and bright working space.
We plotted out that our next stop was going to be Nha Trang, and booked an overnight bus to Nha Trang. We tried to treat ourselves and kill some time the afternoon before our overnight bus to a nice relaxing massage but unfortunately ended up getting debatably the worst massages of our lives. The masseuses were talking and laughing the whole time and would get distracted from the massage and start jokingly hitting each other. We were just counting down the hours until we could get out of this city.
In HCMC’s last f*ck you to us, the Grab we ordered to the bus station cancelled on us at the last minute, the taxi we flagged down to take us instead overcharged us, the overnight bus we had booked got cancelled and they had to rebook us on a later bus, and the bus station was blaring Vietnamese announcements at 10000 decibels. All we could do was laugh. Luckily, the bus we had booked was actually really nice, and we finally felt relief as we drove out of our least favourite city of all time, towards Nha Trang.
