Vietnam 2024, December 04

Had the same routine again for the last morning in Singapore, 6:30am breakfast and 7:00am run for an hour. It felt more humid than previous days so I was sweating at the end.

For a change I took a different route along the river to the west, which was alright except having to wait at a couple of road crossings. Then it was back to the hotel to pack up and leave around 10:00am for a 1:50pm flight.

The airport train left just before I was able to change over, but I had plenty of time and the next was less than ten minutes. The boarding pass and visa check was quick, then I changed my 100 SGD I never used for VND at the currency exchange counter. Lines at customs were empty too, so I had plenty of time left to walk around inside terminal two.

There wasn't much too see though, a small sunflower garden upstairs and outside but it had just started raining. For lunch I got some cheese wedges from Go Pizza that were good but a bit small for the price, and some snacks from 7-Eleven.

The departure gate with another security checkpoint opened one hour before the flight. Opening up my laptop started some Windows updates, but lucky it was just a quick process this time. My Garmin watch had been refusing to detect as a USB device at the hotel, and again at the airport it wouldn't even charge the battery via the laptop. Possibly the sync option from the watch face works over blue tooth to the phone instead, so I could at least keep the satellite data updated.

There was still no sign of staff starting to boarding the plane, and finally they announced a 30 minute delay, but at least it didn't get extended several more times. The flight was pretty quick once we got going so made up a few minutes. Meal options on the flight were chicken with mashed potato or egg rice with prawns. The kid in the next row was complaining his rice had prawns in it, which is just what I was thinking.

In the HCMC airport the lines for passport control was the stupid lucky dip process where you have to hope you pick a good line out of about twenty choices. My line had two people get held up so five or more minutes each, while people either side were going through every minute or so. Finally after thirty minutes I was able to head down to collect my suitcase, which had already been taking off the conveyor belt since it had been so long.

I got the Grab app open on my phone, and I still had mobile data working, so was able to book a trip to the hotel. Initially the app still thought I was in Singapore so had to mess around with it for a bit to change location. Finally I got something booked and chose the more spacious car option, which was like 8 Australian dollars instead of 6. The only problem was again it was difficult to find where the pickup spot was, I thought it was in the middle traffic island but it was actually all the way across the road and near the car parks. While searching for the car number plate I had numerous other people trying to sell me a taxi ride, which was annoying.

The car trip was less than 10 kilometres but very slow due to the afternoon traffic, particularly lots of motorbikes cutting through traffic. We made it to the hotel at last and I received this little tea set while they complete the check-in, then got taken up to my room.

I had a spacious room on the sixth floor with about 25 different light switches, and a Japanese heated toilet. The only problem with the room was that it was at the very front of the hotel, so I already could hear lots of noise coming from the street traffic below.

While unpacking the rain got heavy so I was stuck in the room for a while working out where to get some quick food from. Scanning the TV channels I found a few movie channels but didn't see much sport. After the rain cleared I did a quick lap around the local streets and stopped at some convenience stores, got some bread, drinks, and ice cream. There was also a much better variety of drink options this time, and all for about one Australian dollar or less. I walked down one aisle of Ben Thanh market but didn't find any quick hot food to get, just had aisles full of clothes.

Steps = 19,063 with 12km running