We entered Vietnam at the Ha Tien border crossing (the furthest south border crossing with Cambodia) and then meandered our way around the Mekong Delta area, ending up in Ho Chi Minh City.

Accommodation

Incredible value. You can get a decent room in most places for around the £8 mark. If you spend around £10-12 per night that gets a double room in a good hotel in a town, or a homestay out of town, usually including breakfast and bottled water. Rooms are usually huge and spotless. It is almost unbelievable. Staff and guests often park their motorbikes in an indoor lobby area, so often that’s where you can put your bike. We never had a problem storing them somewhere safe.

Ho Chi Ming City is the exception to the rule though. Narrow properties mean small lobbies and tight staircases, so bike storage is more of a worry. In places like that we usually check ahead of time by messaging a few places, focusing on ones that have luggage storage or that serve food (because those are more likely to have storage areas.) Prices are higher too, as you’d expect. But £20 is a good budget for a room.

Food

The food is amazing. Pho – a type of noodle soup, usually beef – is the most famous dish from Vietnam. I’m not a big fan of noodles, and Richard even less so, but we still found the food here some of the best we’ve had. What makes it so great is that the cheap, roadside eateries are so good and so consistent. You don’t need to eat in “proper” restaurants, or spend a lot of money, to get really fantastic food.  Portions are often quite small, but that means more meals per day and more variety!

Two of the greatest kind of foods I’ve ever eaten are: Pate banh mi (filled baguette with pate and cold cuts, pickled carrots & radish, chillis, coriander and spicy sauce) and bo ne (sizzling beef in sauce, with fried eggs, and sometimes a dollop of pate and/or some cold cuts, served with a a small baguette on the side.)

Costs: Food is great value in Vietnam; better than anywhere else we’ve been except perhaps Nepal. Expect to pay (in Dong):

15k for a banh mi. 

30-35k for a bowl of pho

30 to 45k for a complete meal in a cheap restaurant, such as cracked rice with stir fried meat in sauce

For larger servings and more a la carte items:

30k for a large plate of garlic or egg fried rice (easily enough for 2)

40-50k for beef with veg, ribs, fish in sauce etc.

30k for a large vegetable dish

Food is always served with a glass of iced tea, which will be topped up. It’s more slightly flavoured water than strong brewed tea, and is meant to be both refreshing in the heat, and a palate cleanser before and after food. It’s usually green or jasmine tea, which is lovely because of its light vanilla flavour.

Cafes and Coffee gardens

These are absolutely everywhere. Vietnamese iced coffee is usually served in a glass filled with crushed ice, a spoon and a straw. The coffee component  only takes up about a quarter of the glass, and is always very sweet, almost syrupy. But stirring it round dilutes it pretty quickly. Very thin tea is served alongside your coffee, often in a jug from which you top up your coffee glass. If you order coffee with milk it will be sweetened condensed milk. A coffee costs in the 5-10k range, depending on the location, and is almost double if served with milk.

Roads & Traffic

Driving is on the right.

In the west of the Mekong Delta there are lots of narrow roads by rivers, inaccessible to cars, let alone heavier traffic. They are paved but bumpy with lots of small bridges. It’s a wonderful  way to see  this part of Vietnam. The main roads usually have a wide shoulder and even the main routes don’t get busy heading east until around My Tho. Our final run into HCMC was along the QL1A through Ben Luc. Much of the road  is actually divided into two separate roads running alongside each other – one for four-wheeled vehicles and one for two-wheeled vehicles (plus some local car traffic) so the ride to the outskirts of the city is surprisingly easy and safe. We stayed in District 7, which is very much not in the city centre. It was about this point that the traffic began to get really hairy.

Bird Houses

Frequently when cycling in Vietnam, I would hear bird tweeting coming from what looked like abandoned buildings with loud speakers on the top. These were always the same kind of buildings – plain concrete, clearly not lived in, and all with this sound playing loudly. At first I thought it was monkeys and being played to keep monkeys away from villages, but then decided it was definitely bird sounds. It turns out that these are “bird houses.” Recordings of swiftlets are played over loud speakers. This is to attract swifts to the building and encourage them to build their nest there. The birds use their saliva as glue when building their nests. This is then harvested for bird’s nest soup, which is a delicacy in this region and in China, and can fetch enormous amounts of money.  

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