HCMC, Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon or any other names?
Trip Start
Jul 10, 2008
1
14
20
Trip End
Jul 10, 2011
Loading Map
Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Our driver was waiting for us with a sign showing our name on it. It was a 30-minute ride to our hotel. Even at 9pm at night the streets were packed and driving here was like driving back in Boston but on steroids! There was a lot of horn work required and a left turn (Vietnam driver on the right) meant slowly edging across the road into oncoming traffic and once there was space the bikes would switch from going in front of you to going behind you! It must be the volume of scooter/mopeds/motorbikes (or what ever else you want to call them) on the road that amazes any new visitor to South East Asia. How they manage to avoid each other with what looks like total disorganization is amazing, there must be some method to their madness!
We drove for what seemed like 2km down one road and it was just shop after shop. No big stores from well know brands. Each store was a little hole in the wall 4m wide with the sidewalk space taken up by other street vendors. This gave us a little perspective of where the South East Asians get their entrepreneurial spirit. It was also great to see such lively streets at 9:30 at night.
The Vietnamese hospitality showed at our hotel, Hotel 127. We had to have a drink before we were allowed to go to our room, although I'm sure part of this was so they could show us the brochures for the tours they got commission for.
Teddy bear bed
They did not push though. The room was clean and comfortable. We had A/C although we did have some teddy bear bed sheets that only seemed to look good once the lights were out! We had a fridge that turned out to be the norm for Vietnam and one of those showers with no curtain that once on soaks the rest of the bathroom including the toilet and the floor. For $17 per room this place was a real bargain and for that price we got breakfast and dinner! To put that in perspective we did eat lunch at a popular cheap place the next day and it cost is $12 for the two of us.Vietnam is 2hr 30 behind Darwin and we were therefore up at dawn and ready for an early breakfast. It had rained overnight and cooled things down a bit for us. People we met at breakfast commented on how warm things were here, after coming from Darwin though things were nice and cool and a welcome relief for us!
Breakie was green bananas that despite their appearance were ripe. Tea, coffee and kumquat or orange juice we weren't sure which. We also got this nice crusty bread, so crusty there was almost no dough in the middle! Very tasty, especially once the homemade sweet strawberry jam and butter were added. The coffee came with a thick sweetened condensed milk. I think these guys like their sugar! The coffee had a nice nutty flavour, not like the hazelnut flavour crap you get some places. I did mention this to a Vietnamese person at some point and I think they were slightly offended. The Vietnamese are proud of their home gown coffee.
Before we knew it we were loose on the streets of HCMC.
Ben Thanh Market cleaner
After a slight miscalculation, otherwise know as finding your bearings, we were soon on route to the Ben Thanh Market.Crossing the road in HCMC is an experience in it self. With 10,000 mopeds rushing towards you, you just have to edge across slowly and watch the bikes magically disperse either side of you. The secret is to move nice and slowly, give the riders plenty of time to see you!
A good number of the bikers in HCMC wear masks, we were not sure if this is for SARS or because of the pollution as I know after out taxi ride into town the previous night my eyes had been stinging. We did hear later on our trip the ladies also liked to keep white skin, so wearing these masks and shoulder length gloves helped them keep their skin away from the smog drenched sun!
Christmas decorations adorned a lot of the shops. More so than anything we got in Darwin that was a surprise to us. I though Vietnam was mainly Buddhist and Hindu. It turns out the French missionaries had done a good job at converting people to Catholicism!
At the main roundabout by the market there was a huge Christmas exhibit sponsored by Heineken. The Christmas trees had Heineken plastered all over them. We got plenty of pictures for Erica's dad whose favourite beer is Heineken! As we moved around the country we found Heineken set up plenty more of these Christmas displays.
There were souvenirs, clothes, coffee and some wonderful flower shops in the market. Unlucky for Erica though I always get drawn to the fish and meat section! There was tongue, tripe, intestines, good old pigs trotters and an assortment of other body parts! Most of the seafood was still alive and in bowls of water or laid out on ice! It was certainly fresh! One lady kept looking is disgust as one of her lively fish kept jumping the bowl and landing on the floor, only for her to have to pick it up again and place it back in the water! They had shrimp of all sizes from tiny dried ones to monsters that looked more like lobsters! They did also sell some variety of lobster/crayfish.
Fish market
All the vendors were happy enough we I asked if I could snap a photo. I should mention the durian fruit in the market. These are known for the pungent smell, some will say the worst smelling fruit in the world, the fruit looks similar to jackfruit a fleshy fruit we oven see in Darwin and a fruit I have picked from our local trees. I didn't find the smell too bad, and though it smelt similar to my hair after a hairdresser girlfriend of mine decided to give me a perm! Needless to say that relationship was pretty short lived after that experience!
Back on the streets and we were constantly asked if we needed a ride - choices being taxi, moped or rickshaw! If we stopped to look at our map we would get surrounded with drivers helping point out how hot it was or how far it was to get to where we were going. We stopped at a few street vendors on the way for nectarines and waffles and everything was 'one dollar'. I don't think the people on the street realised we'd just been through the financial crisis and if you gave them 10,000 dong they were happy. The US$ was now actually fetching 17,000 donga to the $!
The town hall was our next stop. It has some nice French architecture and the no photos sign next to the soldier and sentry box outside didn't seem to be stopping people from snapping away, so we joined them!
We did an unplanned lap of the block before arriving at the post office building and the Note Dame Cathedral -worthwhile stops on out little walking tour.
For lunch we stopped at Pho2000 - Bill Clinton and Chelsea had stopped here for a bowl of noodles back in 2000 and they had the pictures with the various staff members dotted all over the wall to prove it! This had been the first president to stop in Vietnam since the Vietnam War.
flower store
We, of course, had spring rolls and out first of what would become many bowls of noodles since our arrival. I chose to try a fruit juice - Sapodilla that was tasty but we weren't sure what it was at the time!http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapodilla
Erica got a lime soda, this was a soda water with freshly sliced lime to squeeze in there. Erica definitely approved of the fresh approach. The meal comes with a plate of fresh herbs and veggies that you can eat raw or add to your soup, Mexican coriander, basil, cuces, radish and carrots. Erica brought up the fact that we were eating veggies washed in probable tap water, drinking fruit juice and ice. A few no nos. I mentioned if it was good enough for the Clintons they it was good enough for us. Maybe when we got to the smaller towns we'd be more careful!
We had a bit of time before the Reunification Palace opened so I suggested a coffee shop for a pick me up! Erica got an iced coffee along with the condensed milk and that deadly ice again! Before I over dramatise too much we found out that nearly all ice in HCMC comes from a special factory where it is purified so most ice is good. We both got iced tea with our coffee. We found this to be common to all coffee shops. Get a coffee and they would keep topping up your iced tea! Well I tried a black Vietnamese coffee. The lady seemed a bit surprised when I refused milk or ice. She probably had a smirk on her face as she brought over what one could probably describe as tar! After a few sips I couldn't take anymore and fished out a few ice cubes from my tea and added it to the coffee to make it a much more enjoyable beverage!
The reunification palace was next, this was where in 1975 the much media publicised event of the North Vietnamese driving their tanks through the gates for the South Vietnamese government to surrender had taken place.
nice flowers
There were some old Chinese tanks and US fighter planes left on the lawns that were interesting. Inside the palace, besides the sense of history there was not much besides old meeting rooms still in their 70s decor and some old radio equipment and control centres in the basement. Not really my cup of tea. Experiencing my first Vietnamese beer at a café on the roof was probably the highlight of this place. It was a Tiger beer that I now know is actually owned by a Singapore listed company and together with Saigon Green these seem to be the beers HCMC residents drink. Nothing too exciting - just the usual mass-produced lager style beers!Just around the corner was the War Remnants Museum. This was apparently once known as the Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes, but some level of diplomacy and a want for the tourist dollars had got them to change the name. This place is well worth a visit if not to outline the terrible atrocities that occur during wartime. The pictures of torture and disfigurement from bombs and chemical certainly aren't for the faint hearted!
A few things stuck in my mind. One of the first displays was a passage from the US Declaration of Independence; at least I think it was the US Declaration as Ho Chi Mihn had apparently modelled the Vietnamese Declaration very similarly to the US, although that doesn't matter. It was the passage about treating all individuals equally. A few displays further round there were details of how the USA had paid out $180m to US, Australia and New Zealand veterans for problems caused by exposure to Agent Orange. Equality didn't get applied to the Vietnamese people who did not get a penny in compensation for exposure to this chemical herbicide. The other display that stuck in my mind was when you think about the consequences of war and who really gets harmed was a photo from 2003! A very graphic photo of a young boy with missing limbs hit by a landmine!
After than we needed a drink and where better than the Majestic Hotel. We decided to take a cycle rickshaw, the first guy wanted 150,000 dong, and so we wondered across the road when we got a ride for 50,000. This of course caused a small altercation between this guy and the original seller - but it's a buyers market out there with those rickshaw drivers! Apparently all the rickshaw drivers are offspring of intellectuals who supported the US during the war. The US had promised a lot of these people they would not be left if things didn't work out. They had not followed through on this and even now as a punishment their offspring were still not official citizens, they cannot own property and are not offered the rights of regular citizens and are resigned to being rickshaw drivers!
The Majestic Hotel has a rooftop garden overlooking the Saigon River and it was nice apart from the stingy cocktail sizes!
Back at our hotel guess what was on the menu? Spring Rolls and noodle soup again. Good job we like it so much!
