Trevor & Jonathans Cruise & Trip to the Far East and Australia 2016

Day 27 - Sunday June 5th 2016 - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

So we woke up around eight o’clock this morning and I guess that we were excited about exploring the city after our night’s adventures and what we had seen on the way in so it was up for breakfast on the 5th floor and then off.

We had a chore to run first though and that was to try and get the washing up to date so after a bit of goggling we headed off by foot about a mile away from the hotel and handed over our 6kg of washing.

Ho Chi Minh with the light of day does look very different. Last night we had imagined a very modern city as that is what it looked like but in all honesty on our walk to the laundrette you can see that is is really mixed.

It’s not old in the French way like Hanoi but 1960’s buildings presumably put up after the war with America line the streets. It’s a real mixed bag with some buildings from the Indochina days with the French influence then skyscrapers and glass buildings fighting to reach for the sky. At night what you see is bright lights and led screens attached to buildings so in a way the city is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing as it night it puts a shiny illuminated dress on.

Washing dropped off (hopefully they will be bringing the washing back to the hotel for us tonight) we headed back into the centre, through a park absolutely rammed with

scouts both male and female. They were all there in their tan uniforms and scout badges emblazoned on their uniforms, their proud parents lining up on the pavements.

We stopped off at a Starbucks to decide on our itinerary for the day.

As a side note here, Facebook has stopped working, apparently the government don’t allow it so we had to turn our VPN on to trick it in to thinking that we were elsewhere, that worked so we are back in business.

Ho Chi Minh is split up into districts (a bit like The Hunger Games) so you have district 1 (the centre) then 2 and three etc etc. and the map that the hotel had given us showed us the important buildings to go and see that were in our area of district one so we headed off on foot with the map with aa plan of getting round as many as we could.

The first stop was the City Hall (right outside our hotel) and then the gold statue of Ho Chi Minh (the leader of the communist party) that also stands outside our hotel. The statute was actually being guarded by military personnel off to the side in their pea green suits and we were quite lucky as the crowds had not started to form around it, yet later in the day whenever we passed it again there always seemed to be hordes of people.

The city hall is a huge French inspired building with a big central spire with a clock on. It has really decorative moulding around all the doors and windows and reminded us of some of the building we had seen in Hanoi. Just around the corner form here was the national theatre/opera house, again very similar to what we had seen in Hanoi with the French style design.

They are building a metro system (underground trains) at the moment here in the city and the excavation works are taking place all around our hotel and these building. You don’t hear a sound but a huge area is all screened off and looks like Crossrail in London did when they pulled down The Astoria. It’s being built in conjunction with the Japanese and judging by the artist impression that surround the site it’s going to be really impressive when completed.

As we walked around we nipped in and out of a few department stores and shopping centres and I have to say that we were quite astonished after our time in Hanoi, just how much more of a western influence there is down here. You get all your top end brands like in Hanoi but you also get your mid-priced labels etc. and the department stores feel like walking into House of Fraser or something like that, they even have M&S here!

Our next stop on the map was the central post office. This building s again from the Indochinese time as was actually designed by Gustaf Eiffel (him of the tower fame in Paris). It has a huge glass dome at its heart and feels really grand when you walk in. All patterned tile to the floor, highly decorative with mahogany redwood private phone booths to either side of the entrance. Desks ran either side of the length of the building all with different functions and you really got a sense that actually the way this building was used had not changed that much over the years, obviously the architect got it right and mail is still processed the same now as it was then. It’s a real gem of a building and you can literally feel the nostalgia oozing out of its walls.

Right opposite the Post Office stands The Notre Dame Cathedral (it’s that French theme again). Now this place has actually seen a few additions over the years such as steeples etc. but it’s a red brick church which you don’t see very often and that is its main point of difference. Yes, its impressive and big, it was closed when we got there so I have no idea what it’s like inside. The cathedral led us to our next port of call, down a tree lined avenue to The Palace of Reunification. This was originally the location of the Palace from way back when but what we saw here is actually something that was built in the 1970’s and it looks far from palace like. Its importance though is in the name, The Palace of Reunification as it was here that the documents were signed that bought Vietnam back together again as one country after the war that America stuck its nose into. Again we had arrived at the palace at the wrong time (it’s a Sunday here) and we could not go in. It does open but was closed for hours over the midday period but to be honest after the other museum that we did visit I don’t think that we are missing too much. The descriptions are very much written with a government tongue.

Our next stop on the cultural trail was that of The Ho Chi Minh City Museum. The museum itself was once home to a high ranking officer in the times of the Indochina state but now this grand French inspired building was a museum. Outside were many war relics like captured American helicopters and a tank and two jet fighters. Inside the museum was a real mix of old Vietnam, the lost palaces and temples but mainly it was a state propaganda museum full of messages about how great Vietnam is and how strong its people are.

They were rooms dedicated to manufacturing and showing crafts through the years and then upstairs room after room dedicated to memories of the unification war and its fight with America.

All fascinating stuff and the Vietnamese are obviously a very very proud race and so they should be.

Of the eight things marked up on our hotel map showing the important places to see we had now completed five of them and feeling pretty tired and hot we headed back to the hotel for some chill out time. We have been on our feet every day now for over a week and starting to show signs of a little weariness, and we had jobs to do.

Back at the hotel Trev started to go through and sort out the mountain of photographs that we have taken so far whilst I performed my role as a domestic goddess and ironed all the stuff that had come back for the laundry.

This took a good few hours so you can’t really call it down time but we were cool in the room so it’s as close as we were going to get.

As the evening came neither of us was feeling particularly hungry but we forced ourselves out on the street for food and an evening’s drink. Once again the city had come alive at night with families and kids and teenagers racing around on hover boards and skateboarders trying to learn new tricks on the pavements. At night the city feels so brand new, so exciting and the atmosphere is really contagious and fun, so different to the day time where the main avenue is empty and a little soul less. We found a restaurant that had a menu more like a book. They served Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese food and I have to say what we ordered was a real taste sensation (although Trev would have quite liked a bigger portion). We sat out on the balcony on the third floor gazing down at the activity below.

Music came up from the street, all western pop here and the tall buildings put on their individual light displays, the camouflage of the night.

Post dinner we headed back to The Long bar and Trev ordered a plate of spring rolls as he was still feeling hungry and then we polished off two gin and tonics each (along with two bowls of dried coconut that the bought out as a free bar snack). Jonathan wanted an earlier night tonight, just a little down time not spent drinking or eating or walking…. some well earnt television time just to chill.

Trev carried on sorting out the photographs whilst I laid on the bed with my iPad and watched another Homeland.

That was it, another day over here in Saigon. So what do we think? It’s really hard to sum up to be honest as there are so many positives about Saigon as a place, it’s easy compared with Hanoi which has all the rough edges. Saigon is a westerner’s version of the east, maybe they are reaching for that? A real blur between east and west, still changing and still re identifying itself as the major city of Vietnam.

The war really had an effect on the city as its more new than old, more western influenced than eastern and that is still a work in progress. You just have to look at the amount of cranes in the sky to see its ambition. The old Saigon will lose to Ho Chi Minh even though they are the same place, you can feel it creeping through the streets.