Ho Chi Minh City

So our night of peaceful sleeping on the overnight train to Saigon was rudely interrupted around 10 pm, at Nha Tranh station, when two very loud and excited Vietnamese women slammed open the door to our cabin and proceeded to noisily settled in. They cackled loudly like chickens, checked their cellphones for about an hour, then both fell asleep with the door wide open. Boo. Sleep was hard to recapture after that, and our 5:45 am arrival came way to quickly.

Understandably, our room was not available when we showed up at our hotel, deep in the heart of Saigon, but we knew this. We prepared for a day walking the streets of the city, visiting what we could of Ho Chi Minh City on this, our only day here. We changed into cooler clothing, as the weather has gotten hot and sweaty in the south of the country and headed out to embrace the day.

Stop one, coffee, at one of the only places open this early in the morning, and close enough to our hotel. We found it walking down our street, lined with early morning markets, women with baskets of fish still flipping their tails, bags overflowing with greens, carts piled with baguettes and pâtés and cilantro, ready to be made into breakfast Banh Mi sandwiches.

Mario is in charge of the navigating - he looked at all the details of the city, all the important points to see, worked out a loop itinerary around the city, all while we rode through the Vietnamese rice fields. But first, coffee.

Ho Chi Minh, or Saigon, is a MUCH hotter place, so here, you automatically get your coffee with ice. Mario seems skeptical, until he takes a sip, and becomes the newest convert. It is rich and chocolatey and oh-so-refreshing, and a good push-off for the long day ahead. Thus begins a long walk across the heart of the city, from the dirty, train-station- and-residential areas, to the squeeky-clean-and-crowded tourist side.

We stop at the War Remnants museum. It's one hell of an eye-opener, especially for someone like me, who has really only ever heard snippets of historical details over the years, and majoritarily American-sided. This museum shows the hard facts of the war from the Vietnam side of the conflict, major errors made, and how the Americans ultimately lost. A lot. But so did the Vietnamese, in terms of generational loss. Agent Orange, a chemical used primarily to defoliate the forests, ended up having much more dire consequences on the human population. Four generations on, people are still suffering from illness, genetic mutations and deformities due to this war tactic. Photos throw the results in our faces, plain as day. It's hard to look at, but certainly gets the point across in teaching people what is ultimately WRONG.

Another gallery shows a collection of beautiful photography from war correspondents who paid the ultimate price for the love of their work. Their stories are told through their lenses, and it offers a glimpse at the smaller battles, lives lived during the war, and paint s a more human picture of the people on both sides of the conflict.

Of course, there are rooms showing strategic movements by both sides, the smaller battles fought all over the country. There are lots of guns, and lots of bombs, and we run through a pack of lots of school kids on one of the upper floors, all seated cross-legged in one of the galleries, ready to learn their history, and taking up as much space as the scooters to in the streets outside. We make beep-beep noises to navigate through them, and the moment adds a little lightness to an otherwise somber morning.

We walk on to the Notre-Dame Cathedral, with a silhouette reminiscent of the lost beauty in Paris, but Saigon's version is hiding under a curtain of scaffolding, awaiting restoration. We walk on to the Ben Thanh market, a major tourist draw in the touristic heart of HCMC, if it even has one. Seems that all the "good" sights are so spread out here, you almost HAVE to pay for those crazy Hop-On-Hop-Off bus tickets! We tour the market, and are disappointed with the assortment of goods, though I feel, with a little more patience(which we are short of today), it could be a really immersive experience. Take note that the outer ring is like a department store, where the prices are fixed, but you can get your fill of price-haggling at the inner stalls. 

We generally give up at this point, and walk on back to the hotel, stopping for a snack at a small eatery en route. Fried eggs on broken rice, a Coca-Cola, and a strange beef-noodle dish fills our stomachs. We finally check in, and take one of those wonderful post-travel day showers, only to head back out into all that smog and pollution, in search of the Vietnamese Scout Shop. It's a long walk, but worth it, as Scouts have only just returned to Vietnam since the beginning of 2019. Mario peruses over all the fun badges, and we laugh at the fact that they sell bags of assorted patches from all the previous World Jamborees.

Cold lemon tea and chicken Banh Mi sandwiches in our hotel room make for a perfectly=lazy supper, and we spend the evening mocking the poor television programming, over-dramatic Korean and Indian dramas, dubbed in Vietnamese. It's been fun, HCMC, but you are big and noisy and way too polluted. I am glad to have stopped by, but sorry, I cannot stay.