I love making travel and life plans, and since travel is my life, those two are one at the same for me at the moment. The thing with plans is that they always change. Planning excites me and can also make me feel restless depending on my mood.
At the start of my adventure in Southeast Asia, the plan had always been to go to Bali after the Castle’s residency in Koh Samui, as I had booked my return flight to Europe from there. After I cut my stay at the Castle sweat shop short, I had planned to go to Bali sooner and stay their until my flight was due. However, I heard that extending one’s visa in Indonesia can be a rather bureaucratic, time-consuming and just generally annoying affair. For that reason I decided it would be easier to enter the country visa-exempt. This means I could stay for 30 days with no need for a visa and without the possibility to extend my stay. As I had to leave the country after a month and I am in the region, I thought of visiting Vietnam and Cambodia. These countries were never on my tourist radar, but since I am near, I might has well have a look.
Ho Chi Min City Mayhem
After a day’s travel with a stop-over in Kuala Lumpur, I arrived in Ho Chi Min City, which the Vietnamese still call Saigon. I’ve always felt quite excited and inspired by big cities. I guess it’s not for nothing I lasted in the City of Cities, London, for a decade and the place is still very dear to my heart. However, Saigon was not doing it for me. It is Vietnam’s biggest city, yet it is not the capital, and I find it rather hysterical and I don’t mean ‘hysterical – hahaha’. My hotel was based in District one, which is as Down Town as it gets and apparently the place to be for the traveller-tourist. My residency was tucked away in a relatively quite alley way, thank fuck, as the main street lined with eateries and tacky bars was noisy as hell. After the experience of lovely and incredibly kind locals in Bali, the Vietnamese in Saigon were something to get used to as they seemed rather blunt and unfriendly and most don’t speak English, which doesn’t help.
I didn’t do a lot in Saigon as I found the city too full-on for for my, at that moment, tender senses. A few things were rather note-worthy about the city: there are a lot of scooters and motorbikes. I mean, A LOT. Probably more than cars and a lot more motorised bikes than I have seen in Bali, which has a lot of two-wheeled motorised vehicles too. Then, there is a coffee shop on every street corner with solid wifi and sockets, so you can charge your devices. The wifi at my residency too was excellent. For that reason, the city is very digital-nomad friendly. It’s probably low season, and I didn’t find Saigon very touristy. Yes, there are plenty of white faces and to my surprise I saw quite a few black faces too, mainly African men. I saw exactly one Dark Fairy sister, and despite our low numbers, people don’t seem to find us exotic to the slightest, which was a pleasant surprise. After a few days hanging in my room and in coffee shops, I relocated to the town of Hoi An. I took a plane to Da nang with Vietjet. Vietjet is an Asian equivalent of RyanAir, which is an Irish low-budget airline a lot of people love to hate. Vietjet has pretty bad reviews on Tripadvisor and I later heard that domestic flights are structurally delayed, which my flight was too. Despite the delay, I thought the service both at the airport as well as on board was pretty good.
Hoi An: Asian Disney Land at the River
Hoi An is located on the coast and at the mouth of the Thu Bon river. The city centre is located at the river side and its oldest part is a UNESCO Heritage site, which is the city’s main attraction. Hoi An was an important international trading centre in the 16th and 17th centuries and the beautiful buildings from those days still remain. I had been riding a bike through town, for a couple of days camping in coffee shops to do some work. I found people friendly- a lot friendlier than in Saigon- and although the town is pretty small, it is rather noisy. It seemed like a normal Vietnamese town and and I didn’t quite understand what the whole UNESCO-Heritage-site fuss was about. On the third day I saw I large tourist group pass by the coffee shop I was working at, and decided to go into the same direction a couple of hours later. Only then did I get a glimpse of the Old Town.
Hoi An’s Old Town is very cute indeed if you imagine it to be a ‘normal’ living town with a few tourists, but that is not what it is. As I said, it is low season, but the place was absolutely jam-packed with tourists, mainly form China and Korea. The neighbourhood is full of cafes and shops catering for the tourist masses and it seemed more like a museum town, rather than a living-working town.
The Hub & the Heat
I am quite an einzelgaenger and I although I appear rather gregarious and talkative, I could be considered a closet introvert. I very much like my own company and really enjoy spending time on my own for days on end. Until I get bored and need to interact with some people. I found the people in Hoi An very kind, yet it’s a challenge to have a proper in depth conversation as most don’t speak English very well and, despite my language geekiness, I don’t speak Vietnamese. I had found out that Hoi An has a co-working space in the middle of the rice fields right in between the town and the beach. The place looks absolutely lovely in pics and has raving reviews. As I can do with a community of people who lead a similar lifestyle, I decided to try it out and I have been part of the Hub Hoi An community for a week., which I very much enjoyed. It’s been too hot to do anything else but hang in air-conditioned spaces anyway.
My plan was to visit other Vietnam highlights such as Hue and Halong Bay, but I really seemed to have come in the wrong season. Two years ago my travels were occasionally plagued by storms and extremely wet weather. This time round it is the heat. At the start of my Asia 2019 adventure temperatures in Bukidnon were just lovely. Siargao was pretty hot, but I mainly hid in doors with fan and a bit of AC, or was on the water, so that was doable too. Then being in Thailand was tourist hell both in terms of temperatures as well as well as mainstreamism. I got some respite in Bali, where I was in the water a lot and temperatures in general were most bearable. Then travelling to Vietnam I am back in the thick of it, yet again. I never thought there could be too much of a good thing, but as I am hiding in airconed spaces doing not much else than feeling tired, napping and doing some work, this is not quite the envisioned digital nomadic dream.
Ho Chi Min City image: vietcetera.com
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