Below are some travel tips and advices given by the locals and experiences gained during my trip in Ho Chi Minh City or HCMC (abbrev.), aka Saigon, in Vietnam. As I did not travel much around HCMC, please feel free to contribute your tips in the comment box here, so that I can add on to benefit everyone who is going there.

1. Crossing the roads with full of motorcars!

HCMC is the capital of motorbikes, with motorists ignoring red lights, not stopping for pedestrians on marked crossings and driving on the foot paths. We hardly saw any traffic lights for pedestrians, so most of the time, we really have to watch out for the traffic and cross carefully.

Ok, how to cross the roads in HCMC? My two-cent worth of advice:

• If you are crossing a two-way traffic, look at your left first for any oncoming motorbikes and other motorcars, cross at a normal pace so that the motorists can sense your pace of crossing and usually, they will slow down when they are near you to let you cross the road. Then when you are near the middle of the road, look at your right for the opposite traffic. Similarly, cross steadily at a normal pace, the motorbikes will slow down to let you cross.

• However, when a car, bus, or bigger vehicle is going to cross your path, you have to be extra careful. I will only cross the road after such vehicle crosses my path. It’s sheer madness, yet if you cross steadily like I mentioned above, rest assured that you will always make it to the opposite side of the road!

2. What to do during your stay in HCMC?

Cu Chi Tunnels

This is a must-see attraction! Cu Chi used to be a bitter battle ground for many years during the Vietnam War. It’s an underground village with an intricate network of over 200km of tunnels at Ben Dinh, 50km from HCMC. You will get a chance to crawl in the tunnels! It is recommended to take a bus tour to Cu Chi Tunnels instead of taking boat. Price for a half-day trip to Cu Chi Tunnels: USD 5 per person, inclusive of air-con bus and tour guide; exclusive of Tunnels admission and video session fees at 80,000 VND, which is around USD 5.80. Departs daily. (Read post on Cu Chi Tunnels!)

Full-day Mekong Delta

If you like boat trips, this maybe the right one for you. I have never hopped onto so many boats within a day

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Budget trip to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam! Me and my gal friend bought cheap tickets from Tiger Airways.

1-way ticket = S$9.90 -> return ticket = S$19.80.
Airport taxes & surcharges = S$130.
Total cost of the return ticket = S$149.80
Visa = free

Heard that now budget airlines are going to charge check-in baggages to offset the high fuel cost. This Vietnam trip could be our last budget trip.
:(

We stayed in Blue River Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City District 1. It is ranked no. 2 hotel out of 116 hotels in Ho Chi Minh City by TripAdvisor. We booked a twin room without window at USD20 nett per night, inclusive of breakfast. The hotel had prearranged a taxi to pick us at their airport at USD11.

This hotel is actually a family-owned guesthouse with not more than 20 rooms, but you will get 5-stars customer service from the counter. The girls, especially Thuy, would give you a useful city map and advise you on places to go. When we were not sure of the location where we wanted to go, she would even walk us to the road and get a cab for us. Thuy and the rest of the staff are just so hospitable; I have never received such great customer service at a small local hotel before. The staff are just like our friends even though we are of different cultural backgrounds and we only communicate with very simple English.

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Someone who has been studying Vietnam and the Vietnam War since he was a kid shared this to me at Yahoo…

“What many don’t realize about Cu Chi is it’s a mass grave for the Viet Cong and the Viets who supported the NLF. If you look around Cu Chi, you will see bomb craters everywhere. The cold hard fact that the communists don’t want the tourists to know is many thousands of Vietnam were killed in the Cu Chi tunnels from all of the bombings.

I bet you didn’t realize when you trounced around inside the tunnels that just a few feet away from you was probably someone who was crushed to death by a bomb impact. A thought like that would take all the fun away of a place like that, which is why the communists don’t want the tourists to know the truth.”

I had been worrying about the uneasiness of crawling through the Cu Chi Tunnels way before I went Vietnam. My buddy had been recounting her “sauna” experience in the tunnels - hot and stuffy, darkness, lost along the way, and lot of sweat! She repeated many times, “Do not wear jeans!”

I had read about going into the tunnels with a big group of tourists, and everyone got stuck there in an uncomfortable position due to phobia and long photo-taking session in the small, dark and stuffy enclosure… On the thought of that, I really had a second thought of crawling the Cu Chi tunnels.

Our Cu Chi group was quite big with twenty over tourists, most were big-sized Caucasians. I was the third one to enter the tunnel. When I entered, I couldn’t see anyone in front of me. My tour mate was behind me, and two other tourists followed. I was pretty lost at first, as I didn’t know which direction to proceed. Then, we realised that we just need to follow the way where there are dim yellow lightings.

Standing at 1.65m, I had to bend myself low to walk through the tunnel. After a while, I was basically crawling on four limbs, and accidentally bruised my knee. With no one in front of me to lead the way out, I felt pretty lost in the maze, and hate the feeling of being enclosed in such a small space. My tour mate brought a torch along and shone the tunnel.

There are tunnels below tunnels. We simply went down the steps to go to the lower level. The final league of our tunnel experience was to go down a tunnel that has no steps at all. Our first impression was where the hole would lead us to. Could we climb out of the hole again? With three people behind me, I knew that I

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During the US-Vietnam war, many human traps were created to fight the American army. All were deadly with many sharp pointed rods. It was really disgusting to see these traps built to kill.

Our Cu Chi guide was a Vietnamese officer in the US army. When the US army retreated from Vietnam, he insisted to stay in his homeland as his family was there. He became the Prisoner-Of-War in Vietnam for four years, going through sessions of education about communism. Now he is given a good job as a tour guide in Vietnam.

This is a dog trap that was created to trap dogs of the American troop.

Left: Folding Chair Trap. Right: Window Trap.

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We embarked on a full-day Mekong Delta trip from 8 a.m to 7 p.m. The tour actually ended at 3p.m but it took us three to four hours of journey back to our hotel. This one day Mekong Delta trip from My Tho to Ben Tre, including a lunch, cost USD 17 per person.

We boarded a medium-sized wooden boat to take a cruise from Saigon River to Mekong Delta. It was a long cruise for about two hours… and I had taken a number of photos along the river.

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I had never hopped onto so many boats in a day before! We had a boat ride along the river. Our small “gondola” nearly capsized when my friend jumped into the boat out of panic that she might miss the boat. So, remember, don’t jump into the rocky boat. :D Also, remember to apply insect repellent. I got bitten by mosquitoes while cruising. We were given a typical Vietnamese straw hat during the cruise, and I was given one that was soaked with someone else’s sweat, yuck!

Getting ready to hop onto our “gondola” ride.

No one wanted to order this famous local cuisine in Mekong Delta - Fried Elephant Ear fish. To eat them,

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Can you spot three dogs here?

We made our own city tour around Ho Chi Minh City. This is the Central Post Office, which is just opposite Notre Dame Cathedral.

Right in the centre is the portrait of Ho Chi Minh, one of the most influential people in the 20th century as named by Time Magazine. He established the communist-governed Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945 and defeated the French Union. Then he led the North Vietnamese in the Vietnam War until his death. Six years later, the North Vietnamese won and Vietnamese unification followed. The formal capital of Saigon was then renamed as Ho Chi Minh City in his honour.

The Notre Dame Cathedral was established by the French colonists and has hundred over years of history.

The Reunification Palace, formerly known as Independence Palace, is a historic landmark in Ho Chi Minh

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