Some Scenes of Saigon

Today we splurged and hired a private car and driver/guide to take us into Saigon and show us some of the sights.  I asked if we could go to a flower market, and that was our first stop -- lots of narrow little lanes lined on both sides with the most beautiful, colourful displays of every kind of flower you could imagine!  You did have to be a bit careful navigating, because there were plenty of the inevitable motorbikes zipping up and down, but otherwise it was refreshingly uncrowded now that the Chinese New Year/Tet celebrations have finally ended, and people have gone back to work.

Other images in the collage show some unusual sights glimpsed in the traffic -- a beautiful flowering tree planted in a ceramic pot being transported by tuk-tuk to somewhere ... not sure how many blossoms were still attached to the branches by the time it reached its destination!  Also a heavily burdened motorbike with a very thirsty driver!

We also walked through various parts of downtown, being taken up to the tops of a couple of hotels to admire the view from the roof, we visited a Buddhist temple, a sidewalk book market, and saw the famous building which used to be a CIA safehouse during the Vietnam war from the roof of which many US personnel and Vietnamese civilians were evacuated by helicopter during the Fall of Saigon in 1975.  (See extra).