I have so much to say about Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) that I’m having trouble boiling it all down for this blog post, so we’ll see how this goes. I was really keen to have Vietnam on our itinerary because I have such warm memories of visiting here as a solo backpacker in 1998. Foreign tourists were only allowed to travel freely in Vietnam starting in 1997 so when I was here last, there was very little infrastructure for tourists, but I remember very kind people who did everything possible to make me feel welcome. The internet was blocked to most Vietnamese at that time and economic development was slow. Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) was a busy town, but still felt decades behind most western countries. Fast forward 25 years and it’s a completely different place. I haven’t seen another country develop and grow this quickly, it’s astounding. It’s definitely a place of contrasts however, with some streets looking like they belong in the fashion district of Paris and others that look like a 3rd world country. For example, we are staying in an area that has international brand stores (Addidas, Crocs, The Body Shop) with people selling noodles at small set-ups on the sidewalk right in front – a place in transition for sure, although it’s hard to tell how things will change from here. Construction is everywhere and the city has 7 million motorbikes with limited public transit so you can imagine the craziness.

We are staying in a tiny guest house called Alley Stay 39, owned by a friend of a friend’s relative. It’s located in a small alley off of a busy street with a number of micro-business storefronts that operate right out the front rooms of the houses. The store owners sit on their front steps while behind them you see their daily lives with laundry hanging, homework being done, pets playing, etc and patrons sit on folding chairs in the alley having their coffee or beer with motorbikes cruising by. Kind of a quiet neighbourhood enclave in the middle of chaos.

I can’t write much more without mention the HEAT here which I think will be a common theme over the next month at least. We had thought Indonesia was hot but it was nothing compared to here. Temperatures here are 38C daily plus humidity which makes it feel like 44C (~110F) and it doesn’t cool off much at night. Most places don’t have air conditioning either and our Canadian bodies aren’t handling the heat well, so it’s been tough. We’ve discovered air conditioned shopping malls and have lingered in them on a couple of occaisions. Rookie mistake: we have tried going jogging twice – once at 7am and once at 8:30pm and wow, I can’t find the words to describe how we felt afterwards. I will be hanging up my running shoes for a while, that’s for sure. So, it’s been difficult to get out and about but we’ve been leveraging the slightly cooler mornings and evenings to see the sites.

So far on our stay in Vietnam, we stayed four nights in HCMC and then had a break at Cat Tien National Park for two nights. Now we’re now wrapping up another four nights in HCMC. Here are a few of the fun things we’ve done/seen.

Food and Markets

One can’t write about Vietnam without mentioning the food, which has been incredible. One our second night in HCMC, we did a street food tour with a local and tasted 13 different dishes over the course of the evening from different food stalls. It was an excellent immersion in local food and built up our confidence to be more ambitious when ordering at restaurants and shopping at markets. We are lucky in that the two older kids will try anything – including snails, frogs and all sorts of random fruits, vegetables and fried things. Again the markets here are so fun with every type of food you can imagine, along with clothes and souvenirs. We are getting better at haggling too!

We had two very fun dinners with company while here. The great uncle and aunt of one of Lucas’ friends from Toronto took us out to a lovely Vietnamese restaurant and were such kind hosts despite their limited English and our non-existent Vietnamese. We learned so much about Vietnam from them. We also met up with one of my Dutch (now in the UK) classmates from my MBA at INSEAD (20 years ago!) who happened to be in town on business and we had an adults-only dinner out. (Jelle – it was so nice to catch up with you!!). That night the kids especially enjoyed being on their own at the pizza restaurant in our friendly alley by our hotel, where they could talk about video games and have bad table manners without a parent nagging them. They liked it so much that they asked for a repeat, and last night we happily obliged and left them having pizza while we had a quiet dinner of Pho in a sidewalk restaurant nearby.

War History

We’ve spent some of the trip learning (and refreshing our knowledge) about the myriad of conflicts here in the last century with so many involved groups: the North and South Vietnamese, the Chinese, the French, the Dutch and the Americans. It’s a complicated past, and here all of the information is one-sided from the voice of the Communist Party government, but it’s been great learning and has prompted good discussion for all of us.

A couple of war-related tourist stops were particularly interesting. We visited the Cu Chi Tunnels, in the jungle a few hours outside of HCMC, with a very engaged guide who led us through a detailed history of the war, and of the tunnel system built by the Viet Cong to ultimately take control of the South. Since I visited the same site 25 years ago, they have widened the tunnels to be “tourist sized” and we got to climb through a tiny portion of the hundreds of kilometers of tunnels that were built over decades of conflict. We also visited the War Remnants museum which is a must-see in Saigon. It’s has especially blunt displays of the atrocities of the war including the impact of Agent Orange. Quite shocking for all of us but I think important to see.

Local Fun

One of the advantages of staying in a city for a week is that you start doing things beyond the standard tourist circuit. Especially since Saigon isn’t a particularly touristy, we’ve had the time to try out some of the more local activities. One of simplest things we did was to go kite flying one evening in a park by the Saigon River. We’d been seeing kites be flown frequently all over Bali as well as Vietnam and been keen to join in. It wasn’t easy to figure out where the locals do this, but we were lucky to stumble upon a park at dusk when we were actually trying to find a place to play soccer, and there were dozens of kites flying. We bought a kite at the local corner store and joined in. And although not officially allowed, the kids also did squeeze some soccer in — especially cute was when Lucas (wearing his Messi jersey) was approached by another little boy wearing a Messi jersey to play soccer together.

On the holiday Monday we headed out to the suburbs to visit the most hilarious Buddhist-themed theme park and water park. Not targeted at foreign tourists at all, it was filled with local families on the holiday and turned out to be surprisingly nicer than we expected (and perhaps kitschy-er too). The water park saved us from the heat, but another highlight was the “snow palace” which was kept at about -5C and had a snow slide for tubing. We also tried the “fish massage” which we couldn’t resist despite various warnings… when in Rome….

What’s also made this stay interesting is that it’s the “Reunification Day” holiday period which is a celebration of April 30, 1975 when the North and South officially reunified. Lots of street shows, flags and fireworks tonight!

Cat Tien National Park

As I mentioned earlier in the post, we took a quick side trip to Cat Tien National park for two nights to have a break from the city. Cat Tien is largely a tropical rainforest and although it was affected by extensive chemical spraying during the war, and subsequent logging into the 90’s, it finally is under a protected status and is well set up for conservation and restoration. It was a relief to have a break from the poor air quality of HCMC, but the heat was just as bad, so with the park’s limited air conditioning, it was a tough stay. We stayed at this awesome little lodge called Green Hope Lodge right on the Don Nai river by the park entrance.

The lodge organized a number of tours for us in the park. One was bird/animal watching boat tour where we traveled in a very rickety boat, but saw piles of birds, monkeys and lizards – very cool. Another was the park’s famous “wild gibbon trek”. Gibbons are a type of ape famous for their incredibly unique call that’s loud and siren-like. The way to see gibbons in the park is to get on the ferry to the park at 4:30am (!!) and hike through the jungle until sunrise listening for their calls to figure out where they are hanging out. Unfortunately for us, while we heard a lot of Gibbon calls and sweated through hours of jungle walking, we never found the group. We did see a few from a distance but were disappointed. After the trek however, we visited the park’s primate rescue centre and were able to see a number of gibbons up close, so that made up for the miss. (Many of these gibbons were confiscated from illegal traders and people keeping them as pets in the city). The park offered to let us do the trek again for free to try to again for better gibbon sightings, but we knew we couldn’t do 4AM wake ups two mornings in a row!!

A milestone

We just reached a trip milestone that indicates we’ve been away for a while: the boys/men in our group had their first haircut of the trip! Their hairdos were pretty slick…

Next up Mekong Delta then Cambodia

We are excited for the next leg of our trip!