Vietnam
Ho Chi Minh City is divided into urban districts, known as quans. We stayed in Quan 1 and Quan 7.
Part 1: Quan 1
We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) – finally, after our two-day delay due to entry visa issues. First impressions, even though we had been in French Polynesia, Singapore, Indonesia… were of the extreme heat and humidity! Days were approximately 34-37 degrees Celcius when we visited. Luckily, we got an air-conditioned Grab (like Uber –in fact, someone told us that Grab acquired Uber in SE Asia!) and got to our very extravagent apartment lobby replete with giant red cut glass chandeliers, huge hunks of amethyst geodes, and sculptures galore. We later found out that the building was owned by Vietnam’s richest woman and while we were in HCMC, she was sentenced for a massive fraud and embezzlement scheme. Apparently some of the money had been hidden somewhere in the building?! Who knows. But it made for some interesting conversations!
I can comment little on the first three days of our time in HCMC, as I was severely ill. Sean and the kids ventured out to explore, to play foosball in the building’s game room, to swim in the pool, and to pick me up soup; Vietnamese broth was the only thing I really wanted for a few days. I couldn’t sleep well and can attest to the fact that the massive amounts of motor scooters that whizzed under our balcony all day long did not cease, even in the middle of the night.
When I had recovered enough to venture out, we set out to explore around our Quan (District) 1 neighbourhood, which was a great place for first timers in HCMC as it is very central to a lot of the things we wanted to see and experience. We especially loved the Central Post Office and Book Street (Nguyen Van Binh), as well as local craft breweries like Heart of Darkness and Pasteur Brewing. We got swindled by a local selling coconuts (he said he’d had no sales so he would give us two for free, which of course then made us want to give him a bit of money, and then he named a price which we later found out was exorbitant for two coconuts! Sigh), discovered delicious street food snacks like roasted lotus seeds and rice cakes with syrup and freshly grated coconut, and stopped many times for cold drinks.
One day we explored the Ben Thanh Market which was huge and full of clothing, purses, souvenirs, housewares, food, drinks, spices, dried fruits, teas, produce, tech gadgets… and I’m sure a lot more. We had to remind the kids not to point out anything because as soon as they did, we would be approached by multiple sellers with that item or similar wares. We saw a lot of cockroaches. I could have spent a day in there; so colourful and busy!
One evening we had happy hour on a patio overlooking a busy intersection in the ‘party’ neighbourhood, Pham Ngu Lao… what great people-watching! We observed every manner of tourist (including multiple social media influencers in very fancy dresses, skipping and twirling down alleys and pausing for photos in the middle of scooter-drenched streets). We watched scooters carrying whole families, and even one with a chest freezer strapped to the back of it (!!!). We marvelled at the intricate dance that is traffic control there: buses and scooters and cars and pedestrians all navigating their way forward (and sometimes around) each other with no slowing down. And, we saw one very, very giant rat make its way back and forth between a hole in the wall of our café and the street vendor’s cart just outside of our patio. Not kidding, its tail was the length of my forearm.
On our last day in Quan 1, we toured the Reunification Palace which was the site of the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. It was a very cool step back in time, seeing the old rotary telephones (all lovely pastel shades!) on which President Nguyen Van Thieu talked to Presidents Nixon and Ford during the Vietnam War, and the coolest 1960’s furniture and art in the living quarters. There was a big camo helicopter on the roof which was the evacuation point for the last foreign journalists and American civilians as the city fell to the Northern Forces. Plus, some tanks and a fighter jet on the grounds outside the palace which Kieran loved, of course.
We finished off our last day in Quan 1 with some cartoon ice creams at RoseIce (kids) and vegan banh mi (parents). And then got our packed bags and headed to our next location in the city, which was way out in Quan 7. More on that in the next post!
Part 2: Quan 7
During our time in Vietnam, we had hoped to go to Ho Chi Minh City (MCMH) as well as Da Nang. Sadly, our flights to Da Nang got cancelled just as we were dealing with our entry visa issues and we didn’t think it pertinent to book other flights within Vietnam at that point. In the end, we decided to stay in HCMC the whole time but move to another district to switch things up. We had booked the second apartment a bit hastily; without doing the usual amount of research on location, I relied on other guests’ reviews (this was all before we arrived in Vietnam). So, you can picture us all looking a little worried in our Grab car on the way to our second location, a week into our time in HCMC, as the car took us farther and farther (and farther) away from the centre.
Our first apartment (in Quan 1) had been spacious, airy, and clean. So we weren’t too impressed at our next place to discover rotting fruit and a bag of garbage on the kitchen counter, the owner’s used toothbrushes, combs and shower shoes (to name only three of myriad personal items) in the bathrooms, dirty mats outside each shower, and a general air of a rather messy someone having just stepped out minutes before we’d entered. Yuck! Luckily there was a REALLY great rooftop pool there, which slightly redeemed the initial impression.
Sean has always been interested in the Vietnam War, so one day we organized a day trip to the Cù Chi Tunnels. It was quite surreal to hear from local guides about this huge system of tunnels used by the Viet Cong, the military campaigns and offensives we’ve read and watched movies about, various methods of combat employed, and the community infrastructure built underground (like hospitals, food caches, uniform stores and more). After a long, hot day (the drive was a few hours each way), we had a drink at the open-air 5th floor bar of the Caravelle Hotel, which is where foreign journalists would all hang out, drink and file their stories during the war (the hotel was home to the Australian and New Zealand embassies as well as the Saigon bureaus of various news outlets like ABC, NBC and CBS). Also inspired by Sean’s interests, we signed up for a Muay Thai class one afternoon via AirBnB Experiences.
Some of the brightest highlights of HCMC were food related. Having a major sweet tooth, I adored the mango sticky rice and condensed milk coffees. There was a cute little coffee cart below our apartment building, where we would enjoy coffees in the mornings and Italian sodas in the evenings, watching families stroll and socialize as the heat of the day broke. We ate a stunning Vietnamese seafood meal at Ma Quán (after finally finding it, in an alleyway, inside a market, and up some stairs!). We also took a traditional cooking class with a wonderful host named Lua in her beautiful apartment with a stunning view of the river.
One afternoon, we joined a street food tour with Back of the Bike Tours which was so excellent, I wish I had written it a dedicated blog post directly after we’d returned; so much to say about that day. We each got on the back of a motorbike with a driver and were zoomed through the city’s districts. We visited five different street food vendors and tried everything from finger snails to morning glory greens, delicious steamed crab and noodles with pork, savory pancakes with prawns and herbs, and an incredible green papaya salad with a homemade beef jerky garnish which has been made by the same woman at the same stall for decades. It was all so delicious! At first, the kids weren’t sure about being on the back of a motorbike in the wild HCMC traffic, but we all came away gleefully recounting the rides just as much as the food.
Our final night in Quan 7 was punctuated by a power outage and screeching fire alarm. We couldn’t understand the robotic voice echoing through the hallways’ PA system, but we followed the crowds down (and down, and down… we were on the 31st floor!) and outside. When we were out safely, Sean realized he had managed to grab us each a beer (“in case we were stuck outside for a while”) but not the keys for the apartment. An hour, and many Google Translate conversations with security guards, later, we finally got through to our AirBnB host who was thankfully able to give us an entry code.
And with that, our time in Vietnam came to an end! We weren’t sure what to expect before we arrived in Vietnam, but in the end we came to love the food, the friendly people we met, the fascinating histories of the city, and the bright, noisy, colourful chaos that was HCMC. We’d love to go back again one day to explore more of the country – but with plenty more advance time for visa processing next time!
