Okay, I lied.. I’M IN HO CHI MINH CITY AND HAVE TIME ON MY HANDS.

We have some time before we check out of our hotel in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and I thought I’d say Hi to you, I’ll include a couple of photos but don’t know if they’ll load. It is currently after 11 am and we are in a Holiday airport hotel that took ages to get to because the traffic is unreal. Millions ( and I don’t exagerate) scooters. I wondered where all the scooters that used to be in Hobart went.

We got our pets into boarding on Thursday and that night it felt like a death in the family with no animals in the house. We both just hate it. We had a wonderful Uber driver from Pakistan pick us up at 4:15 am so who gets any sleep and took us the back way to the front of the airport. He pointed out the best fish n chip shop in the state which made us laugh at 4:30 am.

Our flight was on time, Qantas to Melbourne then Melbourne to Ho Chi Minh (I’ll call it Saigon as shorter to write) which is a wonderful airline, You can also fly business class for about the same price as Qantas economy so what’s to think about?

I settled in with my Kindle and all my little things around me. I am reading a book called Riverman: An American Odyssey by Ben McGrath. Ben is a New Yorker writer (at times I think he free lances) and heard about this man who is canoeing the waterways all over America. He wrote an article for the New Yorker about him. The man is a very eccentric man with some mental health problems. A very large man too as he is described. Well he goes missing. His canoe is found but not the man. He is in the southern states at the moment. I am enjoying the story but the writing is quite disorganised. I was thinking that and thought I would go to Good Reads and see what people thought. Three reviews said he is “disorganised”. For a New Yorker magazine writer I am surprised but never mind. Our author made friends with this guy in New Jersey and many people either saw him or new him. He comes from a family of 12 and our author catches up with a couple of brothers. They begin a search for him. The reader really wants to know too what happened to him. I am only half way through the book so sorry can’t tell you much about him.

We arrived in Saigon. The immigration lines were long. I made a thirty minute friend in line. A woman who was behind us from Melbourne getting ready to join a tour there through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Her husband was in the queue next to her and they were seeing who moved forward the fastest. It was quite funny. I decided I have met a lot of thirty minute friends as I will call them.

Syed was the Uber driver we made friends with for 30 minutes on the way to the airport. 30 minute friends, I have determined, are people you spend 30 min with, where you have a conversation, really enjoy the company and wish you’d run into them again. I have realised how many of these 30 min friends I have met at theatres when alone, when travelling mainly and I thought I’d start keeping a record of them in my travel journal.

Well I am going to leave you and see if I can figure out how to add a photo. I might have to insert it from my phone as I normally do this on my iPad and not my laptop and I have not uploaded photos before on my laptop. I left the iPad at home.

200,000 dong = about 12.50 Aus $. Hard to get used to those big numbers😎

I’m not sure what internet connections I’ll have while travelling or how much time but I will try to put in some more news, if people are interested. I will try to keep it folksy as that is my favourite kind of writing. Non Fiction Folksy. Look for it in the back corner of your local bookshop. If you’re not interested that is good too. Just don’t open this page. I will be back when I am back. Thinking of you all anyway.