Our last couple of days have been spent taking it very easy in Ho Chi Minh City, with today being our last full day in Vietnam. As the Tet holiday officially ended yesterday, more and more businesses have begun to reopen which has given us a chance to try out new eateries and browse behind unexplored doors. The temperatures have been in the 30s which has meant we are often looking for shade for a good deal of the afternoon so we've been up and out early to make the most of the cooler mornings.
(Back at the lovely Cafe L'Usine for breakfast yesterday.
Love the Villemot-esque image of the woman walking in the rain behind the window)
The city is made up of 24 districts, of which only a couple contain the better known tourist attractions. We had the time to walk beyond those districts and into the areas where we could just hang out around the people going about their daily lives, where we weren't asked to buy lottery tickets or to take a ride on the back of a motorbike. It was nice to be ignored.
(The Bitexco Tower, which our guidebook describes as looking like a CD rack with a tambourine stuck in it...)
(A woman rests in the shade of some colourful houses)
(A big mother-to-be pig)
("Comptoir" on the building's facade suggests it used to be an old trading post during the French occupation)
It's a pretty common sight to see Vietnamese people burning paper goods on the side of the street. I may have explained this before, but the purpose of doing this is to make an offering to their ancestors, ensuring the ancestor has everything they need in the world of the dead. As a result, it's possible to buy everything from paper shoes, clothing and horses at most markets. Even paper money can be purchased, including foreign currency in case the dead wish to travel, as the Vietnamese believe it is as important for the dead to have money as it is for the living. The family will write the name of the person who died, along with the date of their passing onto the paper before throwing it into the fire, in order to ensure it reaches the right person. Today, for the first time, we saw a woman burning a paper house and we wondered if this was perhaps for a recently deceased relative.
(A paper house being burnt)
Tomorrow we will be leaving Ho Chi Minh City and Vietnam as we make our way to the Cambodian border which is 70km from here. We will stay in the border town of Bavet, on the Cambodian side before heading for the capital, Phnom Penh. We have been in Vietnam for over 60 days now and yet every day we either have another question or find out something we didn't know about the culture. Perhaps living somewhere is the only way to really get to know a country and its people. Still, even with all our unanswered questions, we are excited to be moving on to Cambodia and look forward to getting back on the bikes in the morning.
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