Ho Chi Minh City

After breakfast we left the quiet sanctuary of our hostel’s alleyway to enter the organised chaos of Ho Chi Minh City. At the alleyway’s entrance, a morning market was in full swing; foods, flowers and household items all being sold from stands, carts and mats lain across the pavements. Sellers in conical straw hats nattered in a streaming dialect as shoppers bartered for goods.

Squeezing through the maze of bodies, their noise was quickly drowned out by the collective deep throb of the city’s endless flow of scooters. Moving like schools of speeding fish around the bigger vehicles, lumbering like manatees in comparison, they filled the roads almost indefinitely. Although the city has some traffic lights, these are limited and not always adhered to. So if you want to cross the road before you see your 50th birthday you have to throw all safe road-crossing convention out of the window and simply start walking across the path of the oncoming traffic…

However DO NOT run. Run and you’re dead. Instead walk and the scooters will confidently brake and weave their way around you until you reach the other side. As we described at the start of this post – it is organised chaos.

The temperature sat at a sticky 30 degrees as we continued through the streets. We had wanted to take a cyclo (bicycle with a seat for passengers on the front) but politely declined the roadside hawkers, deterred by the well-documented scams and hassle that this very often involves in the city. Hopefully we will get the chance to do this later on in Vietnam.

Walking through the Ben Thanh Market we turned down the Nguyen Hue avenue, at the top of which sat the well-attended People’s Committee Hall and the statue commemorating Vietnam’s communist revolutionary father, Ho Chi Minh. The avenue’s lampposts were hung with red communist and Vietnamese flags. Propaganda posters, commemorating 70 years since Vietnam’s declaration of independence from its French colonial rulers, decorated the walkway. Other posters explained, in both Vietnamese and English, the victory to unite the country under Communist rule as well as the success of current public works. It may have been propaganda but it gave the impression of a proud and thriving city. If not this, then the multiple towers of glazed glass and marbled stores selling designer labels certainly inspired confidence in the city’s fortunes.

Yet we couldn’t help but wonder what Ho Chi Minh might have made of it all as we left the office blocks behind to walk back past the city’s own version of the Notre Dame cathedral and the French colonial architecture of the Central Post Office and the grounds of the Independence Palace. The peeling plasters and colourful shutters restoring a sense of romance that we felt lost walking down by the industrial bank of the Saigon River (perhaps we just walked in the wrong place?).Read more