Saigon or Ho Chi Minh?
Xin chào (Hello)
I am just back from a week in Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City, to give it it’s full name). The locals do still call the old centre Saigon and that’s where we stayed – in the Continental Hotel, an old French Colonial building dating from around 1880. Apparently Graham Greene wrote ‘The Quiet American’ while staying here. The actual metropolis of the rest of the sprawling city is known as Ho Chi Minh City and the Saigon river runs right through the centre.
Airport visa scrum!
The fun started on arrival at the airport, with a genuine free-for-all scrum to get a visa stuck in your passport before you can enter the country. The system seemed very disorganised but it worked! After a half hour wait (and another whole passport page used up for the visa) we were through and at large in Vietnam!
Taxi!
A little bit of internet research proved extremely useful in this department. Out of the many, many taxi companies, we learnt that there are just 2 or 3 names that will not try and rip off the tourists! Stick to Vinasun or Mai Linh and you should be OK. We noticed even the locals were dismissing other companies in favour of waiting for one of these 2 brands!
The Highway code (erm, is there one?)
I’ve recently met a new friend, Sou, who is French Vietnamese and it’s with great thanks to Sou that we managed to negotiate Saigon on foot. The traffic in Saigon never stops – I mean it never STOPS – at all! There don’t seem to be any stop signs and very very few traffic lights, therefore getting across the road on foot is definitely an art that must be learned. Just the day before travelling to Vietnam, Sou warned us about attempting to cross the road in Saigon with words something like:
‘Don’t wait for a gap in the traffic – there never is one. Just step out into the road boldly and keep walking across the road at a steady pace. Do not speed up or slow down whilst doing this and definitely do not stop in the middle (that will confuse the traffic). Don’t worry – the cars and motorbikes will negotiate around you’
As scary as it sounds – it worked! The picture above is one side of a very large roundabout outside the main Ben Thanh market.
Shopping…
As predicted the shopping was varied and lots of fun. Whether just browsing (quite difficult in the market where you get pressed to buy something from every stall you pass) or haggling with street sellers, the colours and sounds of the shopping experience are amazing. I swear you could stand still in Saigon and never go hungry or thristy…. you could buy books, have your shoes cleaned and just about everything else – the street sellers come to you!
Have a go…..
The Vietnamese language used to be written in pictures, like Chinese – but in the last century one of the country’s leaders made the change to alphabetical letters and so it seems much easier to try and learn a few words. The locals laughed a bit at my pronunciation but also seemed genuinely pleased that I was making the effort. Words worth learning include: Xin (please), Cảm ơn (thank you) and Tạm biệt (goodbye), none of which are pronounced as they look! You need a copy of Lonely Planet’s Vietnamese phrasebook for help with this – the accents and cedilla’s on each letter all mean something different!
History…
One of the more recent historical sights worth visiting is the Cu Chi forest area to the North West of Saigon. This is where the north Vietnamese sympathisers dug over 200km of underground tunnels linking village to village, where they and their families lived and hid during the Vietnam War. Our guide told us of the amazingly complex tunnel system which included ‘rooms’ and bunkers which served as kitchens, hospitals and schools. The tunnels linking the bunkers are on 3 levels – many less than 1 metre tall and really narrow too. Part of the tunnel system is now open to tourists and you can go into the Cu Chi tunnels and crawl from bunker to bunker if you have the nerve! I took one look, felt a wave of claustrophobia coming on and backed out speedily. This was a squash to get 2 of us in the entrance at the same time for this photo opportunity and apparently these tunnels have been modified to allow tourists to take a look! I posted another pic of my attempt to enter the tunnels on a previous short note about this trip.
Food & drinks…
The Lonely Planet guide to Vietnam has a fantastic section all about Ho Chi Minh City, what to do and see and where to stay and eat and drink!
I believe that if someone has gone to the trouble of finding the best places and then recommending them, it makes sense to try a few or all of them! This was my meal at the Temple Club restaurant (LP has it down as Gourmet Vietnamese). I love the cucumber sculptures on my plate!
Out of the many Lonely Planet recommendations, we only found one bar to have been closed down (or re-located, according to neighbours), and our book was published in 2009!
We tried almost all of the recommended Vietnamese cuisine restaurants and all of the roof top bars with views over the city. There are also fabulous looking French restaurants and many other Asian foods.
This picture of cocktails overlooking the Saigon river was taken on the roof top bar at the Majestic Hotel – another of the old French colonial establishments.
But as well as fabulous restaurants, I can highly recommend a BBQ street sandwich of chopped vegetables, chilli and quails egg on a toasted rice pancake. Fold and eat hot….and then buy a litre of water to calm the chilli fire!
This lady was cooking up a sandwich for us outside the main post office. It was very good and she had a queue forming as we left.(Unfortunately I didn’t have the camera with me, so this fuzzy one was taken on my phone).
All in all I would highly recommend a trip to Saigon. I haven’t see half of what there is to see and do so I will definitely be going back there one day.
