Whoever said that New York City was the city that never slept, has never been to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
We had no plans today other than to walk around Ho Chi Minh City. Our primary destination point was the wealthier tourist district. We walked from our hotel through the busy streets down to to Saigon River.
A local Vietnamese man stopped us to ask if we were from Vancouver (he saw my Canadian flag on my backpack). He was friendly and told us places to go in HCMC. We chatted a bit and then he invited us get on his scooter with him and drive on the rod that goes under the Saigon River. It went from friendly to stranger danger in about 3 minutes.
We stopped at fancy cafe restaurant because we've been told that Vietnam is famous for their amazing iced coffee. Fact: Vietnam is famous for their iced coffees for good reason. Fact 2: Vietnam makes the best iced coffee (they used sweetened condensed milk instead of sugar and milk). Seriously, it was amazing. Okay, so I don't drink caffeine but Alicia does and I sipped her. Jealous doesn't begin to describe how I felt. But it's okay, I ordered a mint lemonade which was also fantastic and equally refreshing. We also got French fries cause why not?
We wandered around the rich district for a while, walking past Burberry, Chanel, Cartier and the likes of those. The Ho Chi Minh City city hall is a beautiful building with detailed architecture and bright colours. Today's blog won't be exceptionally wordy as most of our day consisted of wandering and taking photos of the city, trying to capture images that reminded us of how the city looked.
As I mentioned daily, HCMC is an incredibly busy city. It's population of 8.6 million people shows at every corner. Where there's sidewalks, they're often too crowded by parked scooters and people to actually walk down so you gamble your cards and just walk on the street. We're getting used to the streets here and getting much bolder in crossing them. It's not nearly as scary as it was the first day. Stores of every variety line the streets. The stores here have no fronts. They're just open to the sidewalk and out front almost every store is some kind of food kart. Food carts offer a broad assortment of foods from sandwiches to bread to meat to fresh fruit and beverages. Stacked on top of every store are stories of apartments where we presume the store owners live.
The smells of Ho Chi Minh City are unique. Because food karts are so frequent and their food is their culture, every few steps you get a whiff of a new aroma, sometimes sweet, sometimes appetizing, sometimes you wish you hadn't smelt it at all. For a city so heavily populated and with streets so busy, there's very little litter here, even though public trash cans are few and far between.
Often in the middle of the busiest roads will be beautiful parks lined with trees, articulately sculpted Shrubbery, and colourful flowers and host to benches and workout equipment for relaxing and exercising. They're a breath of fresh air from the otherwise dense and developed city streets.
Our hotel is in what is called the back packing district. Around the corner from us is a street filled with American influenced cuisine and hostels. This is where you'll find many of the tourists our age. This is also where our favourite restaurant, "Gotcha", is.
At night, Ho Chi Minh stays pretty much the same, by the sounds of it. It's hard to say exactly what it's like at night because we're usually in bed by 8:00pm (heat, humidity, and tourist days really makes you appreciate an early bedtime). But all night long from our hotel room we can here horns honking on the busy Saigon streets (Ho Chi Minh City was called Saigon originally but it's name was changed to Ho Chi Minh). The honking horns and melodic hum of the thousands of scooters frequenting the city streets has become somewhat of a comforting methodical noise. We people watched from one of the bars on the Backpackers strip this evening and I found myself not evening noticing the noise (and let me tell you, it's loud here). Women often walk up to you on the strip trying to sell cigarettes or bracelets and men will try and sell you hammocks or sunglasses (even if you're clearly wearing a pair). While enjoying our dinner at Gotcha we watched the most adorable young Vietnamese boy skip jumprope across the street. Our hearts melted at the chubby child's valiantly heartfelt but failed attempts to get his little legs over the rope. We also met the manager of Gotcha tonight. He was a large middle aged man from California. He'd taken early retirement after multiple knee injuries on the job and instead of risking homelessness in the streets of California he moved to Vietnam two years where he's been managing Gotcha and the hostel overtop it. He was kind and friendly and surprisingly this first North American we'd encounter thus far in our trip.
We called it an early night tonight (not that that's anything new with us) and headed back to our hotel to pack up. Tomorrow morning we leave at 7:45 and go on a two day trip to the Mekong Delta where we will visit the rice fields and take a bit along the river and experience the floating market. We expect there to be wifi (there's wifi everywhere here) and so this blog will stay updated. For those of you on snapchat I have been uploading stories everyday (itsmarenolivia) and for those on Instagram, if you're not already doing so I'm posting photos a couple photos a day there (@itsmarenolivia).
Thanks for following along and as always, prayers for safety and healthy are more than appreciated.
Until tomorrow
-mo
Days total hits by scooter: 0
Trips total hits by scooter: 1
I thought this would be funnier when I started the blog, turns out I'm stealthier on the streets than I imagined.