Day 2
Country
Woke up at 6:30 a.m. Ron was already up. We got ready and headed out to find breakfast. Found a little cafe in front of someone's house which must have been their garage. We ordered two coffees hoping they'd be hot but we got iced coffees instead. We also got hot green tea which we had not ordered. We found this everywhere in Vietnam over the next 4 weeks. As soon as you arrive in a cafe they bring you hot green tea free of charge. Anyway, as we drank the iced coffees other customers would arrive with French baguette rolls and eat them at the cafe with their coffees. So we went looking for and found a cart by the side of the road with fresh bread rolls and tried one. They were so fresh and tasty we knew we would eat them a lot more in future. These Banh Mi carts would just roll up at the same place each morning and disappear once sold out. They'd have a little gas cooker where they'd fry eggs or make an omelette to put in your roll or you could have soft cheese or meat filling. They'd also add fresh salad and coriander leaves, soya and sweet chilli sauce. Yummy!! All for about 15000 vnd (50p)!
Grabbed a taxi and headed out to collect our bikes 😁. Two almost new Honda XR150 bikes were waiting for us. After we test rode them and were happy with them we discovered they did not yet have the blue cards (log book/ownership document) and without the blue card we would not be able to take the bikes to Cambodia and Laos like we intended. So we ended up having to swap bikes and got two bikes which had done about 30k miles but the good news was they had their blue cards.
Then we got a couple of SIM cards for our phones, had a wander around Ben Thanh market, ate more noodles, bought a Rolex watch each and rode back to the room in rush hour. I can only describe riding a bike in the chaos of Ho Chi Minh city (formerly Saigon) traffic as playing space invaders. Absolute carnage! But it gives you such a buzz!! We lost each other for a bit but thanks to the new SIM cards, we were able to get together again.