Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City / Saigon

A quick note about the city before getting into what we did here. The history of Vietnam is complex. I will talk about some of the history here, but this will by no means be a full account. I'll err on the side of over explaining potentially well-known information because I don't feel like I got an adequate sense of the history of this country in school. This is especially unfortunate because the States played a critical role, even though it's not a role to be proud of. During the American-Vietnam War, Hanoi was the capital of communist North Vietnam and Saigon was the capital of South Vietnam. South Vietnam was backed by the States in an effort to try to block the spread of Communism through Southeast Asia. In 1975, Saigon was recaptured by North Vietnam and the country was reunified. Saigon was renamed to Ho Chi Minh City after Hồ Chí Minh, who was the leader of the Vietnamese independence movement and the founding president of the Democratic republic of Vietnam. As one can imagine, there are many different opinions about this renaming. Officially in Vietnam, the city is known as Ho Chi Minh City and reunification date is celebrated as a national holiday. However, in some places, especially in the South, people still refer to the city as Saigon, either because that is what the city was called when they grew up, or because they were more aligned with South Vietnam. We found ourselves flip-flopping how we referred to the city, even being corrected (politely) by a local in the north after referring to it as Saigon. Generally I will refer to it as Ho Chi Minh city or HCMC, but if I do ever call it Saigon, know that I'm referring to the same place!

Wednesday, April 16 - Arriving in Ho Chi Minh City

It's pretty late when we land in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. We get a grab to the City Backpackers Hostel where we're staying the next couple nights. The guy that checks us into the hostel is pretty funny, telling us his favorite American movies, dropping lots of F bombs. He shows us to our rooms, then we put our stuff down & head off down the street to get some food.

The city is cool! It immediately has a better vibe than the places we went in Đà Nẵng, or we at least think so. There are more people walking around, and something about the buildings feels more interesting. It feels like there is more character and uniqueness to the buildings like there was in Hue and Hanoi. Something that was missing in Đà Nẵng. We find a restaurant called Tân Lập Restaurant & Bistro that has a location on each side of the street, so we figure it must be good. They say they can make Kaila a GF stir fry, and I order some pate and fried rice balls which I like a lot.

After we finish eating, we decide to wander around a bit. We come across cozy looking alley lit up by lanterns, turn down it, and find an Irish pub with somebody playing guitar, and decide to stay for a drink for a beer/cider before going back to our hostel and calling it a night.

Thursday, April 17

Our hostel is close to a big park, so we start our day by walking through it to go to a breakfast spot called Bagel Brothers which apparently has gluten free bagels! We each get a bagel sandwich and some iced coffee, then start our big day walking around the city. Our first stop is Bến Thành Market, which is a market that has some food stalls along the outside, but is mostly selling the mass market souvenirs that we've been seeing all over Vietnam. A little bit up the street we come across a souvenir shop called Saigon Eco Craft Store, which has much more interesting souvenirs that are created by Vietnamese artists. We get some gifts here, a couple cool Vietnam magnets, and a print of the city that features some cables as the focal point!

We head over to the Nguyễn Huệ walking street next to get some good views of the big skyscrapers in the city. We had also been told about an apartment building here where the apartments has been converted to cafe, so that is also something we want to check out. We aren't sure of the exact location, but as we are walking along the street, we see a building with many different (and some of the same) signs hanging from balconies, with names that mostly seem like cafes. We approach the building, get confirmation, and head up the elevator to the top floor.

We pay a small fee to ride the elevator up, and get some iced coffee to cool off for a bit. You can definitely tell that the space used to be an apartment, mostly by the kitchen that it doesn't seem like is used as a kitchen any longer because of a larger kitchen taking up part of the converted living room. The space is very cute though, and it has a big balcony that we go out onto when we've finished our coffee.

We're pretty close to the People's Committee building now, so we walk over there to see a big statue of Ho Chi Minh, then walk around it to the National Post Office, which is a fancy old building. We see a lot of people writing and mailing postcards, but the vendors inside the building are pretty full of people, so we make note to potentially come back and walk over to a street next door that is known for being lined with bookstores. We look through some of these shops, and find one that is selling some postcards! We pick a couple out, write some notes to our family, then walk back over to the post office to mail them.

We start get hungry, food good, so we walk over to the Ben Nghe Street Food hall. I walk around and decide to get a bahn mi, but I was disappointed to get cold grilled meat instead of freshly cooked meat. The food is pretty cheap here, so I find a vendor selling barbecued pork and get a skewer to put on my bahn mi instead. The vendor thinks I say frog, but after I clarify I realize this is an opportunity to try the grilled frog I didn't get to taste in Hội An! So I get the frog too and it ends up being a lot of food, but I'm happy with my decisions. There's not a lot of options here for food for Kaila, so we head over to a restaurant Nha Hong Fork (I really thought that's what it was called but that I can't find now), where we share a papaya salad. On our walk back to our room, we stop for some ice cream at a place called Milano Gelato that has a cool logo made of an "M" that looked like dripping ice cream. I thought their design overall was pretty cool because they used the same style dripping ice cream throughout their shop and on the packaged ice cream they sold. I always appreciate some good design!

Once we're back at the hostel, we hang out in the lobby while someone else is checking in so we can book a tour to the Cu Chi tunnels tomorrow. While we're waiting, we meet Rina from Alaska who tells us about how she works seasonally as an engineering project manager then travels the world in the other six months of the year. She lists a crazy high number of countries she's visited this year alone, and it kind of blows my mind. I've never even considered that as a possible way to live.

Friday, April 18 - Cu Chi Tunnels

Last night we booked a tour through out hostel of the Củ Chi tunnels, a network of tunnels used by the North Vietnamese Viet Cong to travel through and live in South Vietnam territory with more protection. A bus picks us up from our hostel, and we collect folks from other hostels on our way. Our guide was a middle-aged Vietnamese man named Kelvin who told us he's now an Australian citizen, but has been back in Vietnam for about a year for family matters. While we're driving out, Kelvin asks if we're American then tells us he will be calling the was the American War, and that we can't get mad about that or the things he says about the war. I wonder if there are some Americans who book tours like this just so that they have somebody they can direct anger and/or frustration towards. It's unfortunate, regardless of the reason.

The place we are going to see the tunnels is an outdoor museum. When we arrive, our guide walks us through the forest that is recovering from years of bombing. Overall I'm pretty disappointed with this museum because it feels more like an amusement park than a museum. The first exhibit we see is an entrance to one of the tunnels, but it's unclear if this is an original entrance or a recreation. We are able to lower ourselves into the entrance, but instead of a learning opportunity, this has become a photo op for people get pictures sticking out of a hole in the ground holding a trap door over their heads. In addition to feeling strange about smiling with the war relics, it also took a lot of time waiting for people in our ~15 person tour group to get in, get their photos, and get out.

As we continue to walk through the forest, there are some places where you can still see bomb craters. Kelvin points out some termite mounds that are hiding ventiallation shafts the Viet Cong used to clear out poison gas the American soldiers would use try to flush out the tunnels. It's also unclear if these are original or recreations, and I guess it doesn't really matter, but it still feels like something that a museum should be clear about. The next exhibit is a long hut containing a series of pit traps the Vietnamese soldiers used. These had various designs, but most of them involved some kind of mechanism for driving spikes, often tipped with poison, into American soldiers that fell into the pits. There is also another exhibit with some wax figures showing how the Vietnamese soldiers would smith the spikes using bomb shrapnel and other scrap metal.

After we see the traps, we're taken to the back of the property where there is a full shooting range set up. Tourists are able to pay for bullets to shoot from various kinds of assault rifles and machine guns. I understand that this is a way for the museum to make money, but it felt very weird to have a bunch of tourists come see these relics of war and then essentially pay to play with the war machines themselves. Kaila and I definitely did not feel comfortable doing this, along with about 75% of the other folks on the tour, which means we just had to sit in a very loud cafe area near the shooting range while the few folks on the tour shot the guns. Luckily they had some ear muffs, but it was still pretty annoying to have to wait.

The last part of the tour is actually going down into some of the tunnels. This also feels a bit weird to me, because the tunnels were obviously not an enjoyable place during the war. There is some contextualizing to be had by seeing these places for oneself, but even this isn't entirely true because the section of tunnels we saw had been widened to accomodate tourists. It was still quite small, and I have to crawl on my hands and knees to move forward, sometimes able to sit up into a squatting position. The tunnel we went through went on for 100 meters, and opened up into a larger room that could be used for sleeping or military strategizing. When we got out, we see a 3D diorama showing a cross section of what the tunnels looked like during the war. It really resembles an ant colony. Overall, I wouldn't do this tour again. If someone really wanted to see the tunnels, I would say to drive or get a bus to the museum yourself rather than going with a tour group and having to wait for the whole group at various stages. But really I learned a lot more about the tunnels on Wikipedia than at the mueseum.

While we're waiting to get back onto the bus, we meet another American from California. He must have somehow slid in under the radar of the tour guide. He tells us he's been traveling with his girlfriend who is Brazilian. They are on extended travel because the girlfriend's US visa ran out. I think they are waiting for a new one, but are not sure if it will go through because of the new administration.

Once we get back into the city, we get dropped off at the Ben Thanh market. We extended our stay in HCMC, but are room wasn't available for more nights, so we got an AirBnB. It turns out the AirBnB is in the same alley as the hostel, so we get our bags, walk for less than a minute, and enter the AirBnB homestay through a back door inside a boozy ice cream shop. The room is pretty nice, nicer than the hostel room at least. It also has a quintessential Vietnamese bathroom setup. I don't think I've shared much about how these bathrooms have been like, but it's been rare to see bathrooms that have a separation between the toilet area and shower area.

We're feeling hungry, so we get a Grab over to District 2 to go to the HCMC location of the gluten free bakery Gluten Free Gourmet that Kaila tried in Hanoi. It takes about a half hour to get over there, but once we do, Kaila gets another bahn mi then we walk around the district to find a place for me to eat. It's interesting to see another part of the city! It's a little less busy over here, and the buildings are all much lower. From what we understand, this is the ex-pat area of the city, which may be why there are so many foreign food restaurants. Eventually we find a Vietnamese place that looks good, and sit down. I order a fried eel dish that comes with a sweet and spicy tamarind sauce. It doesn't look like the most appetizing dish, but it was tasty.

Once I finish eating, we get a Grab back to the downtown area where we've been staying (District 1), however the traffic is horrible. After about 45 minutes in the car, we get to the front of a traffic jam and realize the road is closed off. This is when we remember that some folks had told us there would be a rehearsal parade for the Reunification Day celebration that is only a couple weeks away. All the cars and bikes are turning back around to go back the way they came, so we ask the driver to let us out so we can cross the street on foot. We are at the end of the Hue Nguyen walking street we explored the previous day, so we walk down it to get back to the People's Committee building, which has a crowd of people around it. At first the building appears to be lit up by some colorado spotlights, but then we realize there are projections on the building! It seems like this is also a sort of practice for the big day. We sit in the park across the street and watch for an hour or so as the projections switch between a few different visuals: a green grid demarcating features on the building, an image of the building itself, and a color-blocked visual of the building.

Eventually, some more complex projection art is played, showing an animation of the projected image of the building rotating in horizontal slabs in an optical illusion that makes it look like the building itself is moving. There are some other animations too, showing some patriotic imagery. We notice two folks next to us each watching a livestream, and eventually realize it's someone livestreaming the military off in the distance, about to start the parade. They see us watching over their shoulders, then straight up give us one of their phones so we can watch too! So nice of them to share. We give the phone back after a few minutes, then decide to get up and walk around. We figure we might have better luck seeing the parade if we go to a different part of the Reunification Day parade route that has already been published online, but quickly realize many of the streets are blocked off even to foot traffic. Once we head back to the projection art building though, we see a crowd of people forming farther up the street and are able to join them watching part of the parade go past! Shortly after it passes, we decide to walk back to our room.

Saturday, April 19 - War Remnants Museum

Today we go to the War Remnants Museum, a museum that depicts many of the atrocities committed in what is known in Vietnam as the American War or the Second Indochina War, and what we know in the States as the Vietnam War.

We started out the day by once again visiting Bagel Brothers to get coffee and bagels. Afterwards also trying the cafe next door, Tiệm Cafe Sài Gòn Xưa, for some more coffee. We drink our coffee on the second floor, overlooking a big park across the street, then get a Grab to the museum. After getting our tickets, we go through the gate of a concrete fence into an open space filled with helicopters, jets, and tanks. We're pretty hot from standing in line so we decide to do the inside of the museum first. The museum is understandly solemn. There are two exhibits that stick with me the most: "War Crimes" and "Agent Orange Victims".

The War Crimes exhibit shows some horrific photography captured by some war reporters as well as some perspectives from survivors. One of the photojournalists featured strongly in this exhibit is Larry Burrows. His work included a full photo essay for Life Magazine called "One Ride with Yankee Papa 13", which you can see here.

The Agent Orange Victims exhibit was sad, as expected. Agent Orange is an herbicide and was used in the war because of its defoliant properties, to thin out the jungle and make it harder for Vietnamese soldiers to move undetected. Agent Orange worked as a defoliant because it's so incredibly toxic. The exhibit mostly focused on the stories of people who had been born with birth defects because their parents had been exposed to the chemical during, and even after the war, with some cases now documented for fourth generation exposure. Photos showed the physical defects of people born with deformed or missing limbs, but many of the victims were also born with developmental defects, needing constant care for survival. The exhibit shows one of the ways the violence of war extends far into the future after the last bombs are dropped.

Once we finish inside the museum (after a total of three and a half hours), we don't feel like we want to see the machines of war outside, so we get a Grab back towards our room. We decide to walk around the nighborhood, giving ourselves the opportunity to process the exhibits we've just seen while considering what to do next. There's lots of different things going on in the city, and it's interesting to walk around and be a part of it. There's lots to take in, too. I really like the view looking down this street towards the tall skyscraper:

Eventually, we find ourselves sitting in the park. A nice Vietnamese man sitting next to us asks if he can practice his English with us. He seems to be about our age, and we learn that he is a newly-graduated lawyer who has just started at his first law firm. He says he'll often come to the park after work and find tourists to practice with. I wish I remembered his name, but I didn't write it down at the time and I'm struggling to remember as I write this a month later. Anyway, about ten or so minutes into our conversation, two Vietnamese kids (a brother and a sister) also come up and also start talking to us. They go to an international school, so their English is already quite good. The older brother tells us he's chosen Turkiye as his English name (like the country, not the bird, though his sister still calls him Chicken), and his sister's name is Sophie. Turkiye talks with me and the new lawyer about global conflicts (which is wild since he's only 15) then the topic changes to scifi and he's surprised I know about the SCP foundation (the fictional organization and collaborative worlbuilding project), since the tourists he talks to aren't usually familiar, but he's excited that he gets to tell me about some of his favorite SCPs/anamolies. Sophie asks Kaila if she has any games on her phone and they play Wordle together, and Sophie gets it in two guesses then looks offended when Kaila asks if she's already played it today. Sophie asks Kaila if she has Spelling Bee, because she's never seen it since it's not free on the NYT Games app, and excitedly plays really well when Kaila pulls it up.

Eventually we tell our new friends we have to go get dinner, and on the way over, we relfect on how nice the people in Vietnam have been to us. Especially today, after spending time in a museum dedicated to the atrocities performed by the country we come, the people here go out of their way to be kind to us, even though they have so many reasons not to be. It's a beautiful thing that gives me hope about the human race and our ability to forgive each other.

We get dinner at a place called Den Long, then walk over to what has been described to us as the Backpacker Street, which we know is an area with restaurants and bars that is very busy and very loud. Even though we have this context, we are still incredibly overwhelmed by the number of people, lights, and overlapping sources of music. Even though it's overwhelming, we are still a bit in awe at the scale of commotion on the street, so we find a bar with some loud music and get a couple drinks while we watch the streams of people flooding from both directions. Even though the streets are packed full of people, there are still motorbikes that somehow manage to slip their way through, which feels right given the last few weeks of our travel. This concentration over stimulation feels like a good note for our last evening in Vietnam, so after our drinks, we walk back to our room.

Saturday, April 20 - Bus to Cambodia

We start the morning with a trip to the same bagel place, only to learn that they're closed on Sundays. The classic Chick-fil-a Dilemma. Luckily we know from yesterday that the cafe next door has food. We go back in there, get some iced coffee and breakfast. I get a rice dish that comes with with pork, a fried egg, some veggies, and fish sauce. Kaila gets some fruit and yogurt on the menu as "four seasonal fruits soup". It's liquidy yogurt that comes with a spoon and a straw, and Kaila even discovers an ice cube in it as she eats it. We go back to our room to grab our bags, then we walk to the bus station. We booked with a travel office that gets us some spots on a sleeper bus through a company called Danh Danh Express. There are mixed reviews online, but our experience is smooth, first starting on a seated tourist bus then transferring to the sleeper bus 40 minutes outside of town. We will be in Cambodia soon!

Thanks for reading!