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We really enjoyed Saigon. Officially Ho Chi Minh City nowadays, but everybody we talked to still call it Saigon.
A nearly mythical place in my imagination thanks to TV news and documentaries of late 60s and 70s, American war movies and series like China Beach. On the surface it looks like any big city, and it is much larger than I had expected.
And it certainly does not look like a communist community, on the contrary. The stores are full of typically capitalistic goods: electronics, furniture, appliances, jewellery, but most of all, as all over SE Asia it is of course about cloths and handicraft.
Vegetables, fruit, meat and fish are plentiful, fresh and displayed very tastefully at the enormous Ben Thanh Market. People socialise outside on the sidewalks, particularly in the evenings, where they bring chairs and tables, and often prepare their food in the open or buy small meals from ubiquitous stalls.
I have never seen as many motorcycles, scooters and mopeds as in Saigon, and they are transporting almost anything, between a family of five and six enormous (dead) pigs or a king sized matress. The traffic is really crazy – makes you think of a giant ant burrow.
Saigon has certainly come a long way since the Vietnam war and I can’t avoid comparing Vietnam with Cuba and feel sorry for the Cubans. If they’ve had had better leaders, life in Cuba would be a lot happier and easier than it has been for the past 50 years and still is.
Prices are very cheap, we had a lunch for two, including a glass of wine and a beer for 4.5 USD total (= 2.25 per person).
We do not think there are many sights worth exploring in Saigon, but we loved walking around or sitting in a cafe, sipping our favorite beverage and just watching people around us. A visit to the War Remnants Museum for a look at the Vietnamese view of the war is probably mandatory.
One evening we went to watch a water-puppetry performance, which was wonderful. This ancient art is more than 1000 years old and was developed by rice farmers, who used waterfloded rice paddies as their stage. Wooden puppets are manipulated by puppeteers under the surface and the performances are accompanied by music played on traditional instruments.
Vietnam is not a democracy of course, but we saw very little evidence, except for the red flags, either with a golden star or the arm and the hammer. If it hadn’t been for the Facebook incident, where the government blocks a non political web site, we would have departed the country with only good memories.
Only two hours after I uploaded the post telling about the blockage of Facebook (March 18), the internet connection at our hotel broke down and didn’t work anymore during our stay. Can this really be a coincidence or am I being paranoid?
