11-03-2026 Racing Simulators and an Evening Exploring Saigon

On this day, Cara was busy so Eric struck out alone to explore the city. We worked most of the day and then at about 7 PM Eric took off to check out a driving simulator business and check out the town. This is the second to the last night we will be in Ho Chi Minh City.

Travel Facts

Date: Tuesday, November 3, 2026

Location: Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam.

Route: Hotel area to a driving-simulator business, then by taxi to the Japanese district, followed by a walk back toward the hotel.

Recorded distance: Approximately 14.73 km (9.15 miles) along the GPS trace; this is not a walking-only total because the evening included a taxi ride.

Recording time: 7:08 pm–12:14 am the following morning, Vietnam time (UTC+7); elapsed recording includes stops and simulator time.

Day in Photos

For 6 bucks there is a breakfast buffet nearby.

Near our hotel, there is a Lotus dealership. Rarely do you see fancy cars on the road. With what we see in terms of traffic chaos, it seems like you need a car that is built to deal with little bumps. I don't see how cars can travel in this city without occasional bumps.

We took this picture to show how a lot of the veggie stands look. They just lay out a tarp and then put fruit and veggies on it. Look in the upper left corner of the image. It appears that anybody can setup a vending area wherever they want.

I guess you can expect a lot of traffic when there are millions of people in a city.

GS25 is a convenience store and right next door is a 7 Eleven. We went in there to find basically the same stuff for the same prices in both.

This picture doesn't look like much, but is meaningful. I walked 1.5 miles to the driving simulator. Along the way I had to cross this busy road. The cars and scooters were going 45 MPH. There was no stop light in either direction. I waited here for about 5 minutes thinking that there would be a break in traffic so I could cross. There wasn't ever a break. Finally the lady you see in the distance at the food cart grabbed my arm and led me across the street. She just walked out in the road and let the scooters zoom pass us and we just walked across the street.

There are so many rats in this city. They move fast and it is impossible to get a picture of them. So I took a picture of a dead one to include in the blog :)

I came across a rice shop. In America rice is rice, but here in Vietnam there are a lot of different types of rice. Sort of like there are a lot of kinds of bread in the US.

Finally I made it to the Driving simulator place. They had state of the art equipment. Their business was selling these simulators really, but they had 5 different models to play with. The young guy that ran the place lived in Seattle for 5 years and spoke good English. He said that the simulators cost 3 k to buy. I could play for 8 bucks an hour.

These simulators were very realistic and the force feedback in the wheel was very strong. This is not something that you can be proficient at in an hour. You would really need to have this at your house so you could slowly get better over weeks. I played I Racing, which is a whole universe of people in the world with rigs like this that race each other online. It is so realistic that the champion I Racing guy got a real F1 racing ride just because he was so good at I Racing. 25 years ago, I built a state of the art racing sim and boy have they come a long way since then.

After the Sim, I took a taxi over to the Japanese district of Ho Chi Minh. It is similar to walking street and is a touristy area.

You enter into what looks like an alley and then you enter into a different universe. There are a hundred bars that are all in narrow alley filled with people.

This looks like a dead cat, but actually it is just chilling out. The cat is blissfully sleeping at the intersection of a 2 very busy roads.

In the image above you saw the sleeping cat. I was really zoomed in, the cat is still in this picture in front of the little cart on the left. There were 2 dogs playing in the middle of the intersection. The cars and scooters just went around them.

After visiting Japanville, I walked a couple of miles back to the Hotel area. There were 2 or 3 groups of people that were all creating content for the Internet apparently. They were dancing like they were filming a music video.

This band was a lot of fun. A lady from the crowd walked up to the band while they were playing, unzipped his pants, and inserted some dough. Then she did it to another band member. Just another day in the life of the band playing for tourists. The band was playing Thunderstruck. That reminded me of my favorite video ever. If you haven't seen it then you should watch it.