The most photographed kilometre and a half in Ho Chi Minh City is handed over to pedestrians for one morning: Lê Duẩn in front of the Reunification Palace, Công xã Paris square by the cathedral, the shopfronts of Đồng Khởi. No cars — instead a column in red star-emblazoned shirts that anyone is free to join.

For the second year running the morning walk is run by Nhân Dân newspaper and the Ministry of Public Security, this time marking the 81st anniversary of the August Revolution and of National Day. The target is stated as a number: 10 billion steps nationwide and a Guinness World Record claim for the largest number of localities joining an environmental walk at once. Guinness representatives are coming to verify the result, and the data has to be certified by an independent party.

The city route runs like this:

— gathering at Công viên 30/4 park, then along Lê Duẩn;
— Công xã Paris square, then Đồng Khởi and Lê Thánh Tôn;
— Pasteur and back to the finish on Lê Duẩn — about 1.5 kilometres in all.

The city organising team expects around 6,000 participants. At six the venue joins the other 33 regions in watching the national flag-raising on Ba Đình Square in Hanoi and singing the anthem; walking starts at half past six. The Department of Culture and Sports has asked the police to plan closures and diversions so that the neighbourhood is disturbed as little as possible, and to hand the roadway back to the city before noon.

Steps count even outside the column: by the evening of 25 August more than a hundred thousand people had registered on the programme portal, with almost half a billion steps logged. Vietcombank is doubling steps for its customers, and the record among Samsung staff in Vietnam so far is over 400,000 steps by one employee at the Thái Nguyên plant.

The distance is short and undemanding: this is a walk, not a race, which is why the column is full of families with children and older residents. Organisers ask people to wear red and trainers, and registering online is not a ticket — it is how your steps reach the national count. A year ago 1,112,336 people joined the live venues across the country.

If you want to see central Saigon with no traffic at all and twenty thousand feet moving in step, this is the morning for it — and it really is worth the five o'clock alarm.

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