If you think moving around in Ho Chi Minh City is tough with all the street crossing nightmares and the traffic rules that do not seem to apply to those running late for work, you clearly have not tried finding one of these houses.

In Ho Chi Minh City, houses are numbered following a tree-root style, meaning your address will be determined by how many levels of alley down you are from the main street, with each new level represented by a slash (/).

It seems at first glance to be a fairly simple numbering system to remember and follow, but wait until you encounter one of these addresses which reads ‘36/45/32/49/13/54’.

That is an actual house number of a household on Bui Tu Toan Street in An Lac Ward, Binh Tan District, where several others are also struggling with the complexity of their addresses.

Truong Cong Huan, head of the local neighborhood group, said the long and complex addresses have made it difficult for residents to receive delivery or postal mails.

Huan said he had often had to walk all the way to the main street to receive deliveries, while all his mails had to be sent to the local post office, as mailmen could never find his house with such an address.

“Not even local ‘xe om’ [motorbike taxi] drivers could find houses in this area, let alone strangers,” Huan said.

On To Ky Street that runs through District 12 and Hoc Mon District, houses seem to be numbered at random, as house numbers can jump from 129 to 282, 350, and then drop down to 252 despite sitting next to each other.

On several other streets in Nha Be District, Go Vap District, District 12, and District 2, house numbers do not follow any rule, and some homes can even have from two to three numbers.

When asked for direction to a house on Nguyen Van Qua Street in District 12, a local resident advised, “You can search for it until next morning without any result if you only know the address. You’re better off staying at one place and call the house owner out to show you the way.”

Nguyen Thanh Hai, head of the Housing and Office Management Division at the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Construction, attributed the problem to uncontrolled urbanization in the past when residents freely divided their land into an interlacing network of small alleys.

Hai said local authorities are looking to address the problem by grouping small alleys into neighborhoods with a standardized numbering system.

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