We arrived in Saigon on Saturday afternoon after 2 short flights from Phuket. Definitely a lot faster than the bus! After some hustling we managed to find a taxi. It cost 250,000 dong! Most expensive taxi I have ever paid for.
We are staying at a small hostel called Dai Huy Hoang. It isn’t the best place to be honest. There hasn’t been any service since we got here 4 days ago. But it has 2 comfy beds and haven’t been robbed. So I guess its not that bad. The staff take our motorbikes in the lobby every night and put them back out on the street later which really helpful.

We bought motorbikes on our first day here from an English bloke (John) who Ian found on Craig’s list. We spent about 5 hours test riding bikes, buying helmets, getting racks put on the bikes and a bit of fine tuning to get them running slightly better. We paid $400 USD for them, which is a bit more than the average price, but they are good bikes, and we got to try a heap of them so we are happy.

We headed out to a place recommended to us by John. It was a theme park just off the side of the road. You paid for each ride separately the prices were about $1.80 per ride. So we went on a couple of rides which were really epic!

We went out riding the next day to the war museum, it was really sad to read about what happened during the war. The chemicals the Americans used were so toxic, that to this day there are still people affected by the toxins that are now left in the soil. Over the past 40 years there have been so many cases of people being deformed from all these chemicals used. I found it hard to hold back tears as I read about individual stories of people who have been, and still are struggling.

Our first day of riding and I ran into some bike troubles. I got my first puncher. It is ridiculous here, there seems to be someone who repairs tyres on every other street corner in the city. So I got my tube changed within 15min and it only cost $11.

After that we headed to Saigon Zoo. It cost us $1 NZD and was really good. There were about 40 crocodiles there, all sorts of birds and monkeys, rino’s and hippo’s and well hung elephants. Also I saw my first white tiger! Was a very cool experience! There are only 200 of them left on earth so we were very lucky to see one!