After sleeping off almost 24 hours and just over 6,000 miles I wake up feeling surprisingly not terrible (forcing myself to stay awake cycling through Emerets content catalogue seems to have paid off).
I’m greeted with my first daylight view of Ho Chi Minh City’s skyline. Sleek modern skyscrapers share the horizon with rundown concrete buildings and corrugated metal rooves. It feels like an odd mix between design and evolution. The main roads follow an unnatural grid, while the buildings seem unplanned and individualistic. Looking from one building to the next you could easily traverse a hundred years of architectural history.
I go for a walk and the first thing I notice is the streets are dusty as as a Henry Hoovers gut and my shoes are filthy within about 10 steps out of the hotel door.
Then I see a man chasing a dog out of a Family Mart with a two by four.
Then I admire some of the most spectacularly bad wiring I have ever seen, with nests of hundreds of cables tangled on every telephone pole and half the trees. I have been told they don’t run high voltage through these nests, but yes they are still extremely dangerous and there is always going to be a small chance you get 220 Volts piped straight into your landline.
Then I am suddenly having to walk in the road because an old woman is cutting up a Durian into chunks and putting them in a bag alongside several impromptu barbeques selling grilled corn and a paint can of what I’m 99% sure was molten Pitch.
The road I’m now walking in seems to have hit morning rush hour mode consisting of 99% scooters and none of them aware of any traffic rules. Bikes on the wrong side of the road, or the pavement going through red lights, one of which was carrying 10 full, 15 liter water cooler bottles.
Its so busy and so much is going on you need your full concentration at all times. This is the first time in years I have had my headphones out for longer than half an hour while walking somewhere. Its the most in-the moment I can remember feeling, it really makes you feel alive.
I head towards the Nhieu Loc–Thi Nghe channel which is about 5 minutes away from my hotel. Its the main stretch of water for the northern part of District 1 and flows into the Saigon River just past the zoo (more on the zoo towards the end of my trip).
Despite being sandwiched between two fairly busy roads the river is surprisingly tranquil. Massive fish (I have no idea what type) swim just bellow the jade waters surface.
People do exercise on the grassy bank, a guy in a hat runs cabling across a bridge having renovations done and everything seems a lot more chill than a few minutes ago.
As I approach the bridge out of District 1 the morning traffic has started to settle into a less hectic flow and I realize I haven’t eat since somewhere over India the previous day. I know of two foods I should try: Bánh mì (a baguette with some kind of meat and vegetable filling) and Pho (noodles with beef in a rich broth) and not yet having the courage for a sit down meal I decide to keep my eyes open for bread merchants.
I pass many and after three hours of building up courage I decide to just buy one from the next stall with exactly one person buying something. Its the best sandwich I have ever had and cost ₫30,000 ($1.20).
After heading back to the hotel for a quick shower to get some of the petrol fumes offame I decide to be brave and take my first Grab to the Independence palace.
Grab is basically Asian Uber but with the option to pick between cars and bikes. Now I should have picked the car…
So the guy passes me a helmet and I struggle to climb onto the pillion, nearly tipping the bike over twice but I’m on. Its a 5 minute trip and I spend the entire time repeating in my head “This is stupid, I’m going to die” while holding onto my pockets to avoid their contents spilling out onto the road. I then get off casually, thank them and nearly walk off with the helmet I forgot I was wearing.
I’m now at my 1st cultural landmark. The Independence Palace which is the site of the fall of Saigon and the reunification of North and South Vietnam in 1975.
It was a profoundly moving tribute to the reunification of the North and South following the war. I did however find this sign in the toilets.
I then headed to the Vietnam War Museum and a man helped me across the road for the 1st time. FYI the technique is to look for a 5 meter gap in bikes, then walk into the road, face them and inverse Frogger your way across the road.
He then pulled out a manchette, cut the top off a coconut and massively overcharged me for it. (₫200,000 ($8)) which I’m told by my brother is “Hahahahaha you got ripped off”.
Due to the content of the museum and the atrocities documented I did not take any pictures (even of the really big, cool helicopter outside in the courtyard).
I wrapped up the day with a trip to the Ben Thanh Market where an old woman sold me on a shirt by saying “I have your size” and pulling out a bedsheet with a Vietnam star on the front. (I haggled her down to 250,000 for 2 shirts…)
With my main objectives for the day complete I decide to soak up some more of the city.
The strangest thing coming from the west is probably the fact every government building is adorned with Communist flags. Vietnam is one of 5 extant Communist counties in the world and it really throws you until you get used to it. There are also a lot of people with guns outside these government buildings next to signs telling you not to take pictures, so please excuse their absence.
I found an ATM…
I also found a shopping mall with Robot vacuum cleaners with faces and a shop selling very reasonably priced Gunpla (I make a note to return on my way back).
On the way back I’m assaulted by evening rush hour and an insane number of bikes fighting to get home at the end of the day. Even in the stretches of path I can walk on bikes weave around me trying to get ahead of the glacially paced road traffic. I’m later advised a really good way to mess with the scooterists is to look them dead in the eye, apparently it really confuses them and they nearly fall off their bikes.
Mission complete I head back to the hotel for a last shower before getting ready for my flight out to Da Nang.
Now despite my cynical attitude to pretty much everything, I enjoyed my short stay in HCMC and found it to be an awesome blend of modern and traditional. You can get a taxi for less than the price of a bottle of pepsi and a bike ride for half of that, but a the same time modern restaurants and shops alongside traditional and family run places.
I haven’t spoken about the language barrier because it was quite honestly not an issue. I loaded Vietnamese onto Google Translate as a backup, but I think I had to use it once and only because the taxi driver to the airport wanted to ask me about my trip (that was fairly awkward). For 99% of things they either spoke English well enough, they google translated for me or I got by with the point and thumbs up system and then held up a phone with the number typed out.
If your interested in visiting Vietnam HCMC is an excellent introduction, its very easy to adapt to (aside from the traffic maybe) while blowing you away with the culture.
