Michael Batson

The road distance from Phnom Penh to Saigon (Sài Gòn or Ho Chi Minh City, Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, as it’s been now for years though Saigon is widely used informally), is just 226kms, or 206kms (128 miles) as the crow flies. In the 1900s a Frenchman once pedalled the distance on a cyclo in a day on the newly constructed highway built with Cambodian labour, just to show it could be done. I’ve done the trip multiple times by road and one thing I’ve learned is that in the almost 20 years since I first made the trip, the journey time despite improvements in infrastructure and in technology to facilitate cross-border movement, the time it takes hasn’t changed much in all that time. I once flew between these two cities deciding that after multiple trips by road I just wanted to get there as quickly and effortlessly as possible. I flew with Vietnam Airlines on one of the largest passenger planes ever built, a Boeing 777, the trip taking well less than an hour from take-off to landing. It seemed ridiculous to use a plane constructed and designed for inter-continental flight to travel such as short distance. It was ten minutes to gain altitude, about 15 minutes of actual flight time before the descent began, which if I recall took about another 15 minutes. I think the road journey to Phnom Penh‘s former airport at Pochentong and from Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat International Airport took longer than the flight, which must have laid a massive carbon footprint for such a short