Taking in the sights around Saigon

  Saigon / Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Thursday, December 28, 2006

Although we had to checkout of our lovely 5 star Christmas present hotel on Boxing Day we still managed to spend the whole day by the pool and only left at 6pm to move hotels - believe me it was hard to downsize quite so drastically, but the new place was spotless and we still had air-con and cable so you can't complain. Our dinner date this evening was with good friends of ours from university - Jimmy and Mel were spending the festive season here visiting her brother. It was so lovely catching up with more people from home - anyone else wanna join us?

01 Fancy meeting you here!

After so much time lounging and catching up with people (and because we no longer had a pool) we decided to dedicate a whole day to proper sightseeing. We started by wandering around the largest market in Saigon - the Ben Thanh is where you can pick-up anything from quails eggs to couture. Dodging the porters and watching the stall holders artfully arrange cashews nuts in boxes is a great way to spent time - especially if you can stomach the smell of the durian fruit.

08 Post Office

After the market we went to see the lovely Notre Dame Cathedral and the neighbouring GPO. It may sound strange to anyone who hasn't been to Saigon, but the main Post Office building is worth visiting even if you don't have parcels to send. The ochre and white walls, dark wood and painted maps showing telecommunications in late 19th century Indochina make it one of the best preserved colonial style buildings we've seen in Asia.

11 Reunification Palace

Another remarkably preserved building, although from the 1960s not 1860s, is the Reunification Palace. This is where successive South Vietnamese presidents lived until the North successfully reunified the country in April 1975. The place screams sixties and seventies kitsch - from the barrel shaped cocktail bar and portrait of Jim Morrison in the games room to the vibrantly coloured shag-pile carpets and soft furnishings in the many reception rooms. It's just like stepping (or should that be tripping?) back in time.

09 Gimme that baby

After visiting a few more of Saigon's sites we decided to spend the next two days on day trips outside the city. The first was to the city of My Tho for a trip on the Mekong Delta. Whilst we enjoyed getting out of the city and glimpsing the boatpeoples' way of life we couldn't get over the unbelievable number of tourists around.

10 King Kong

Our next morning was spent driving through the lush countryside to the north east of Saigon. This region was heavily bombed by the Americans during the war: we passed the spot where that infamous photo of Phan Thi Kim was taken as she was running burnt, naked and screaming towards the camera - it's difficult to imagine now as farmers go about tending the rice and water buffalo wallow in the mud.

We we're in the area to visit the strange Cao Dai Temple. This is the main centre for a bizarre indigenous religion set up by a civil servant in the 1920s. Cao Dai (which translates as "high place") blends Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism and throws in a bit of

19 Trip to the Mekong Delta

32 Cao Dai all seeing eye

psychedelia for good measure. Not the refined neo-classicism of St Peter's in Rome or the relative understatement of the Golden Temple in Amritsar here - this place is bright pink and highly decorated with everything from starry ceilings, all seeing eyes, and lotus flowers to writhing dragons and a life sized bull balancing on a globe on the roof. Graham Greene was moved to describe it as "a Walt Disney fantasia of the East, dragons and snakes in technicolour". I mean you've got to love a religion that lists a

34 Cao Dai worshippers

Vietnamese poet, the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen and the French man of letters Victor Hugo, as signatories of 'the third alliance between God and Mankind'!

22 Trip to the Mekong Delta

After blowing our minds at the temple we moved onto the Cu Chi tunnels. This network of burrows were used by local people fighting against the South Vietnamese and the Americans during the war. They're extraordinarily well camouflaged and meant resistance fighters could launch attacks and then disappear when the retaliation started. The actual tunnels were tiny - about 60cms x 80cms, they ran for 250kms and were four levels deep in places. While we didn't get to

45 No one told him the war was over

go inside the real ones we were able to crawl through a very dark, slightly larger one especially dug for tourists to see what it was like - not much fun was our conclusion. But then it wasn't really fun and games for the GIs either as we saw from the various lethal traps the locals used on them.

The next morning we left Saigon by bus to travel up the coast to Nha Trang. It was a shame as the city had started to feel like a home from home, but we needed to find a new place to see in the New Year.