The Turkish Airlines flight from Dublin to Ho Chi Minh was via Istanbul was excellent - though the Dublin to Istanbul leg was an hour and a half late arriving as the weather over Istanbul was diabolical - so much rain we’re lucky the plane didn’t dissolve. James was full of painkillers to the point of rattling, so travelled in relative comfort with his big shoulder wound. It helped being in the pointy end of the plane. (We bought the flight on miles/points through Life Miles - Avianca’s programme. Obviously not as familiar to Australians as Qantas and Virgin, but they’re the national airline of Colombia and a member of the Star Alliance.) The second leg from Istanbul to Saigon was superb as it was longhaul (10 hours) and had good lie flat beds and wonderful food and service. The owners of the AirBnB we’d booked arranged a private transfer to meet us at the airport. Which sounds much more expensive than it was - for an hour in a large, brand new people mover with super air conditioning it came to 270,000 Dong - about A$16/€10. Really must get used to all those zeros with Vietnamese Dong.

Very warm and humid here - ‘Asia Standard’ as expected. We found a lovely apartment on Airbnb in District 4 (a 5 minute Uber/Grab ride from District 1). As much as we enjoy hotel rooms, we now prefer having an apartment and it’s attendant luxuries - sofa, kitchen and laundry. Not to mention our apartment is 50% less than a very average hotel in the centre of town. We are both afflicted with jet lag and find the rule of thumb to be 100% accurate (unfortunately). It takes us a day to recover for every hour of time difference. So here we are, more than a week after we arrived and we’re finally sleeping at night, awake through the day and not brain fried. Yay!

In our new ‘hood, after a few false starts and walk outs, we’ve found a Vietnames restaurant (or ‘restaurant’ as they’re known here), where we can look at pictures in the menu and there is a staff member with enough English to explain it to us (helped us avoid the dish with the frogs. And the dish with the pig innards). Whilst there are a lot of tourists in our apartment building, we seem to be the only ones exploring the culinary delights of D4 and as the only 2 white folks in our new fave restaurant, we’re likely the most exotic thing in the place (even allowing for the pork/chicken/frog stew). We’ve ventured into town (all of 5 minutes in a Grab/Uber to District 1) and thoroughly explored the Ben Thanh market - sampling a frozen mango smoothie and buying a glorious bunch of Oriental lilies. One evening we also checked out the relatively recent addition and highly sanitised ‘Street Food Market’ and surounds. Squillions of tourists - probably don’t need to eat there again. We had thought the traffic in Saigon was uniformly crazy - scooters everywhere, but one night we were in the city when Vietnam played the PHilipines in a football final and won - millions of scooters, all on their horns and with passengers blowing vuvuzelas, waving flags and yelling in excitemnent. We never need to do an extreme sport ever again since that evening of extreme ‘walking home’

It’s not all budget restaurants and skittles though. One night we caught up with friends in the city and had dinner at one of their ‘go to’ favourite places - The Secret House restaurant. World famous in Saigon for having a pet chicken that wanders about the restaurant. We think it was her evening off however as she was definitely not in evidence and, face it, not really something we’d miss. Expensive is a relative term here - usually dinner is about 180,000 (A$10 or so). That evening it was 500,000 (A$30!) We had utilised the Grab (Asian Uber) system and nipped into town in air conditioned comfort for about A$1.50/€1. It was such a beautiful night though that we walked home and crossed our favourite bridge - Cau Mong (Rainbow Bridge) which leads us straight back to the Tresor building in D4. Also known as the Pedestrian Bridge it is one of the oldest bridges in Saigon, built in 1893 by the Levallois Perret company (formerly led by Gustave Eiffel - primarily famous for that rather well known tower in Paris).

Well that is about all. We swim an hour every morning, we enjoy the sunrise every day and we are settling into life in Saigon very, very well. Later this week we move to District 2 - ex-pat haven of the city and a whole new adventure.