{"id":15456,"date":"2023-03-12T11:15:04","date_gmt":"2023-03-12T15:15:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sunflowerit.ca\/travel\/auto-draft\/"},"modified":"2025-07-03T15:01:26","modified_gmt":"2025-07-03T19:01:26","slug":"from-chaotic-to-laid-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sunflowerit.ca\/travel\/trips-asia\/other-trips\/south-east-asia-2023\/from-chaotic-to-laid-back\/","title":{"rendered":"From chaotic to laid-back"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Our stay in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) had marked the lowest point on our trip. HCMC has more than 10 million inhabitants and has been referred as the world\u2019s capital of scooters and motorbikes for some very valid reasons (and Hanoi is apparently not much better). We overstayed our visit in HCMC by two nights. Thankfully, a mere one hour flight brought us to the island of Phu Quoc – a much quieter (even serene) place than HCMC. From our early experience in Vietnam, we believed that for foreign independent travelers to enjoy Vietnam to its fullest, they must be willing to rent scooters or dish out a lot of money to hire local guides\/drivers at every opportunity. Obviously our views were not shared by all as there were many travelers who had fallen head over heels for this country. It was also noteworthy to mention that this segment was particularly annoying on Jenny as she had to remove her shoes and walk on the floor on two different occasions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2023.03.06 – Ho Chi Minh City – Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we ran out of sightseeing ideas after only a day and half in HCMC, we turned to an expat’s website<\/a> for some fresh ideas that were not in our travel guide. The first one that caught our attention was taking a ride on the WaterBus along the Saigon River. After breakfast, we got some assistance from our hotel manager who helped us purchase tickets on-line for the WaterBus. His help was invaluable to navigate the Vietnamese only website. He further paid for our tickets as the website only accepted payment from a local bank. We learned the WaterBus’s schedule was quite limited – with only a handful of departures a day – we opted to take the 10:40am departure and return on the 12:00pm boat. By the time we finally got a Grab car to pick us up, we struggled to get the driver to go a bit faster as we were afraid of missing our WaterBus departure. Jenny was completely stressed out with the driver as he appeared to be slowing down the more we tried to get him to go faster. Thankfully when we arrived at the dock, there was a queue of folks waiting to board the WaterBus. We just made it on board. The scenery along the river was rather dreary but we kept on reminding ourselves that the one hour boat ride was only costing us $1cdn each. At the end of the line terminal, we stepped out of the boat and waited for 20 mins before boarding the same WaterBus back to our starting point. We took a Grab back to our hotel and rested for the remainder of the afternoon. We had dinner at a rather expensive Cantonese restaurant.<\/p>\n\n\n