Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City: Don't Miss Saigon

We enjoyed massive burgers at Black Cat restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), with Maureen and Jennifer from our guesthouse
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To get to Vietnam from our last Cambodian destination, Phnom Penh, we booked ourselves onto a bus and in five fairly quick hours we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). For ease of writing, we will henceforth refer to the city by the name Saigon, as we don't really like the Communist name given to the place by a certain you know who. Saigon was a breath of fresh air after a week in Cambodia, as the city was quite modernised in some areas, and we had an immediately comfortable feel to it when we arrived.

We were able to watch a Cao Dai mass on a day trip we took outside of Saigon
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Sunday Guesthouse, where we stayed in Phnom Penh, booked our bus ticket to Vietnam. The friendly girls running the place booked us on a nice, comfortable air-conditioned bus and our journey included a lot of reading as well as some sleep. When we arrived in Saigon, the bus dropped us off right at the backpacker area of town, right around the corner from the guesthouse we had booked!

Many parts of the tunnels are so small that the Vietnamese had to crawl through the tunnels on their stomachs, elbows and knees

We visited a handicraft factory which employs handicapped people to make all of their art; this woman was using eggshells to create an image
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In Saigon, we stayed at Luan Vu Guesthouse and all of the staff there were super friendly. The guesthouse was very modern and clean, with all amenities we could ask for, and gave us great value for money. This would be the first of many excellent accommodation choices for us in Vietnam - it was nice that this country (unlike Thailand) offered excellent quality rooms for a great price, without taking advantage of backpackers and tourists.

The first thing we did in Saigon was look at our options for travelling north in the country towards our final destination before entering China - Hanoi. As the country is similar in length to Italy, we knew that several hundred kilometres were in store for us - approximately 1600, in fact! One thing that the Vietnamese have done well is organise their travel options for tourists, and before we knew it, we had purchased "open bus tickets" for £9 each (about $16) that would provide us with travel from Saigon to Mui Ne, from Mui Ne to Nha Trang, from Nha Trang to Hoi An, from Hoi An to Hue and from Hue to Ninh Binh.

The traffic in Saigon was very thick with motorbikes and cars everywhere
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Considering the number of bus journeys we would be undertaking, and considering the distance we would be travelling, the price was an excellent bargain. Thailand's transportation from place to place is much more expensive than Vietnam, and even travelling by bus in Laos and Cambodia works out to be more expensive the more places one visits.

In addition to the low price for travel, Vietnam tour operators allow travel on "open" dates, which means that you can book your bus ticket the day before you would like to leave the place you are visiting. All of the buses are air-conditioned and pretty new, and it is a great and convenient way to travel very cheaply throughout the country.

The Cao Dai temple we visited contains a mix of several different religion influences in its architecture, and is only found in southern Vietnam
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There are a few points of warning with this type of travel, however - (1) if you book an open bus ticket and are unhappy with the service or quality of a bus, you are stuck with the same tour operator throughout your open ticket validity; (2) from talking to many different people, it seemed much cheaper to book open bus tickets in Saigon, with prices between $16-25 for a ticket covering the majority of travel destinations in the country, compared to prices up to $40-45 when booking in Hanoi; and (3) be sure that, if you are getting off a bus at an earlier stop than the final stop, you constantly remind the driver that you need to exit the bus earlier than everyone else (you will be able to read more about this in our upcoming journal entry from Tam Coc).

An entrance to the 200km long Cu Chi tunnels which were used by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War
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Before seeing some of the sights of the city, we decided to have lunch in our first Vietnamese establishment. We ended up eating Mexican food on the main backpacker street where we stayed (Bui Vien Street) and it was surprisingly good, thus enforcing our belief that Southeast Asians understand a thing or two about that style of cuisine. After filling up on food, we went for a walk past Saigon’s main market, Ben Thanh, before walking around the northern part of the central district in town.

When we visited Dam Sen amusement park on our last day in Saigon, we passed this extremely strange-looking but cute primate
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Whilst walking around, we passed Saigon’s very own “Notre Dame” church on the way to a large shopping mall called Diamond Plaza where we spent a few hours that evening. Just next to the church, we were able to watch a little bit of a small pop/dance concert in front of a small gathering of people surrounding the stage. There may have been some famous Vietnamese pop stars on stage, but we have no idea whether or not we experienced a brush with fame that day; it was most likely a group of students or some exhibition performance of some kind, as the calibre of dancers was not that great.

Dam Sen amusement park had a "House of Ice" which contained many ice sculptures inside, and it was freezing cold!
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Our first evening in Saigon, we welcomed the modernisation of some parts of the city and visited Diamond Plaza, a large multi-storey shopping mall with a large department store, supermarket and cinema. There were a couple of English films on and we ended up watching “Ghost Rider”, the English version since we hadn’t learned enough Vietnamese yet to understand the voiceovers in the dubbed version of the film. After the film, we went to the local YMCA and used the internet room there to plan our stops in Vietnam and to check emails. There, we were surrounded by at least 20 young adults and students playing computer games and chatting on MSN with each other.

We saw Nicole Kidman in Saigon and she had a couple of lizards in her hair - enlarge the photo by clicking on it if you cannot see them
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On our first full day in Saigon, we decided to leave the city on a tour to a large Cao Dai temple and to the Cu Chi Tunnels. On the way to the temple, we were taken to a handicraft factory whereby handicapped employees create works of art for sale to Vietnamese tourists. This sort of thing is not uncommon on tours, with many tour companies including a stop somewhere to “allow” foreigners to spend their money, and we usually don’t succumb to spending any of our cash in these places. However, we were feeling quite generous on the day of the tour and the quality of the handicrafts was very high.

We tried our first Vietnamese "pho" (noodle soup) in Saigon
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The people working in the factory were making many different items and each of the items was very intricately made. What captured our attention most were pictures made out of cracked eggshells glued to a piece of black wood that has been lacquered with a glossy substance. Each tiny piece of eggshell must be sized correctly and glued in such a way that a beautiful image of Vietnam appears to the eye, and some of the designs we saw were truly amazing. We left with a purchase and there may be one lucky winner this year who receives a special gift at the end of our travels… perhaps the person who reads the most journals and posts the most comments online!

One of many people in Saigon pushing their their goods for sale through the busy streets
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After we left the handicraft “museum”, our bus headed towards a large Cao Dai temple. Our friendly and informative tour guide explained Caodaism, the religion followed by people of the Cao Dai faith, to us. “Cao” means “high; “Dai” means “palace”. Cao Dai then refers to the supreme palace where God reigns, and the word is also used as God’s symbolic name. It is the third largest religion in Vietnam after Buddhism and Roman Catholicism and it combines elements from many of the world’s main religions, including Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, as well as Geniism, an indigenous religion of Vietnam.

We enjoyed some delicious ice coffees in Vietnam, outside a large new shopping mall called Diamond Plaza, just behind Notre Dame church
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Caodaism has traditionally been unique to southern Vietnam with the main religious centre being located in Tay Ninh, which is 60 miles northwest of Saigon and also where we visited the large Cao Dai temple. There are currently 7 to 8 million followers in Vietnam and about 30,000 members elsewhere, primarily in Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States. The temple we arrived at was very large and beautifully painted with many bright colours, and was an immensely spectacular wonder.

Our Cao Dai temple and Cu Chi tunnel tour guide, Hai, fought with the U.S. in the Vietnam War as part of the Vietnam Republic Army
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One of the prominent religious symbols of Caodaism is an eye sitting within a triangle, and this “Divine Eye” represents God. They also worship Jesus Christ (Christianity), Sakyamuni (Buddhism), Lao Tse (Taosim), Confucius (Confucianism) and Khuong Thai Cong (Geniism). These symbols were prevalent throughout the temple and we saw very interesting mixtures of faith everywhere we turned. Our main purpose of visiting the temple was to witness the noon mass which is held every day and, during the event, a procession of many people dressed in mutil-coloured robes entered the temple singing and chanting to the music being played from the upper back portion of the building.

The entrance to the Cao Dai temple we visited was very colourful and intricately decorated, and everyone attending the mass was dressed in white, blue, yellow, red or green robes
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The Cu Chi tunnels, which were a self-contained network of tunnels built by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, as a means of hiding from the US and Vietnamese Republic military forces, were next on our tour. First, however, we stopped off at a roadside restaurant for lunch and a cold drink. We got our first taste of Vietnamese spring rolls, which we would end up ordering for nearly every meal in the country over the next 2-1/2 weeks, and we also enjoyed fried rice and noodles.

When we arrived at the tunnels, we watched an informative, but extremely dated, video explaining how, why and where the Cu Chi Tunnels were built. Then we were able to walk around the grounds of some of the Cu Chi tunnels and we even were able to climb down into a couple of the tunnels to experience what the soldiers and local villagers had to endure. The tunnels span a length of 200km and many of the soldiers and villagers trying to escape would spend weeks in the tunnels. This part of the tour was pretty touristy; the tunnels were set up to accommodate tourists who were ready to spend money on souvenirs and other things, but our guide was good and taught us a lot about the Vietnam War. He fought with the US on the Vietnamese Republic Army and we learned a lot from him that day.

There are no organs in the Cao Dai temple we visited; instead, the music is played on traditional instruments such as these in this photo
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The tunnels were built just large enough for the Vietnamese to squeeze through – quite literally, as many parts of the tunnels are so small that the Vietnamese had to crawl through the tunnels on their stomachs, elbows and knees. Whilst many of the tunnels are intact, the ones on display were enlarged so that foreigners from the West could crawl through them. Pretty much everyone in our group was able to crawl through the small, cramped and boiling hot tunnels, but there were a couple large people from Israel who didn’t “fit” and probably need to go on a diet when they get home from their trip.

This eye is one of the main religious symbols of the Cao Dai religion
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Dan’s good deed for the day was rescuing a lizard that was trapped in the one of the tunnels and was trying to climb out, but kept slipping down the steep vertical part of the bottom step at the exit. He picked the lizard up by the tail and carried it up the stairs to let it go free in the grass nearby, hoping all the while that the lizard would not turn its head around and bite him.

Some of the tunnels are blocked off because they are dangerous; apparently, poisonous cobras and other snakes have been found lurking in the dark tunnels and the tour company doesn’t want any lawsuits or deaths on their hands, so we had to stick to certain paths when crawling through the small spaces. It was pitch black inside the tunnels and we were not unhappy to obey the “follow the path” rules, even though we couldn’t see anything in the darkness that resembled a path.

Hai explained to us where the Cu Chi tunnels were located and where they led to, all 200km of them
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A couple of girls who were staying in our guesthouse were also on the tour with us, Jennifer from the US and Maureen from Canada. We all had fun laughing at how cheesy some of the displays were at the Cu Chi tunnels, we visited an area displaying death traps set in the ground by the Viet Cong soldiers, and we also were annoyed by the loud noises made at the gun firing range which was located at the tunnels. For as little as $1 a bullet, you could fire semi-automatic weapons. We chose not to do this, but we had to wait next to the firing area whilst others in our group took turns target practicing and blowing our eardrums away. The noise was deafening and really annoying and it didn’t surprise us at all that the women selling ice cream and drinks next to the firing range were very moody, as we would have been too, had we been forced to listen to loud guns firing all day.

We saw many gruesome traps on display like this which were used by the Viet Cong against U.S. soldiers and Vietnam Republic Army
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Anyone reading this journal entry who was around during the Vietnam War, or anyone who has studied about it at school, may have seen a photograph of a naked little girl running down a street in Vietnam, burned very badly by a napalm bomb dropped by the US. This infamous photograph, which incidentally helped change the US public’s perception of the war, was taken in a village near the Cu Chi tunnels and we stopped on the street where the photo was taken, as well as at the house in which the little girl lived. The little girl survived and is now a grown woman living in Canada, and we were told that an American soldier visited Vietnam and gave the girl’s brother $20,000 for the family, as a means of saying sorry to them for the atrocities which happened.

Crawling through the Cu Chi tunnels was cramped and hot, and the tunnels have been widened for western tourists, so we cannot believe how the Viet Cong soldiers were able to crawl through the tunnels on their stomachs and elbows!
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After the tour, we invited Jennifer and Maureen out for dinner. When we were in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, we had heard about a restaurant in Saigon called “Black Cat”, which is a hamburger restaurant that serves some of the largest burgers we had ever seen – we had to share one and Jennifer and Maureen shared one, due to the immense size of the meals. We mostly wanted to visit the place to get a good photo (check out the photo album for this entry and you will see what we mean), and the least we expected was a delicious meal. Our expectations were more than satisfied; we all agreed the burgers we shared were in a category of their own as they were delicious!

This young Viet Cong guard led us through the Cu Chi tunnels (okay, he is obviously not part of the Viet Cong, otherwise we would have to perform a public arrest)
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After agreeing that we would all walk around Saigon together the next day, we headed back to Luan Vu Guesthouse and called it an early night. Actually, we ended up using the internet for a little bit first and Jennifer and Maureen went out for some drinks, but we can’t really be bothered to go back and delete the first sentence of this paragraph. After the using the internet, we (minus Jennifer and Maureen) called it a night.

The next morning, we met the two girls for our free breakfast in the guesthouse before setting off on our walk around the city. First, we walked around Ben Thanh Market, where Kyle bought some cheap new flip flops to replace the ones that broke the night before. The market was one of the cleanest we had seen in awhile and the people selling things were very pleasant. After we left the market, we walked to the Reunification Palace, an ugly 1960’s building that the Viet Cong took over after the Americans and Vietnamese Republic Army evacuated during the war.

The market stall vendors in Ban Thanh Market in Saigon were very friendly
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Inside the palace was a gambling room which looked strangely like one of the rooms in Elvis’ Graceland mansion; perhaps they used the same interior decorator. Inside the palace, there was a museum which had on display a very famous photograph of a Vietnamese monk who burned himself to death in Saigon in protest of the way that monks were being treated.

When we left the palace, we walked to the People’s Committee Building, a French colonial structure in a busy part of the city that was very beautiful. On the way, we stopped to have a Vietnamese lunch of “pho bo”, which is beef noodle soup. We didn’t really like it as it was quite bland – luckily the food got better for us over the next couple of weeks, but we never tried any types of “pho” again. Now our friends Brett and Melissa in Seattle and Vynsie in Dallas are probably reading this and are disappointed with us, as they are strong “pho” supporters. Kyle had “pho” in Seattle with Brett and Melissa a couple of years ago and it was much better, so maybe we will give the westernised version of the dish a try this summer when we are in the United States.

The Ban Thanh Market in Saigon is one of our favourite markets to have visited during the past 3 months
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Before Jennifer and Maureen had to leave for the airport, we decided to visit a place described in our Lonely Planet guide as “quirky”. We found ourselves taking a 20-minute taxi journey from the central part of town before arriving inside the gates of Dam Sen Park, which was an amusement park of sorts with a rollercoaster, a small zoo and many fun things to see and do. In this cheesy park, we visited a “House of Mirrors” which was quite fun to walk around when they covered our shoes and hands with large furry mittens and boots so that we wouldn’t get any of the mirrors dirty or break them.

A view of one of the walkways inside Ban Thanh Market in Saigon
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We also walked through a small animal zoo which contained many animals living in poor conditions. The only positive part about visiting the small zoo was that we saw a new species of monkey which neither of us had seen before – if you are interested you can check our the photo album. Next, we donned full-length anoraks to shield us from the cold in the below-freezing room full of ice sculptures and buildings, and then we rode the main rollercoaster in the park. We had to leave after riding the rollercoaster, and we shared a taxi back to Luan Vu and bid goodbye to the girls, who were moving on from Vietnam to another destination before heading back to Japan, where they had been living for awhile, teaching English.

This is Notre Dame church in Saigon, a beautiful structure in the main part of town
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The next morning, we left Saigon and we were finally able to experience our first open bus journey in Vietnam. The second stop on our Vietnam itinerary was Mui Ne, a beachside town that is surrounded by many large sand dunes. We wanted to spend some time on the beach and visit the dunes before moving further north, and you should read our next journal entry to hear about our time in Mui Ne and what we were able to get up to in less than 24 hours…