My god, what a town. Maybe I was feeling particularly ready to fall in love again after the news I’d received the day before, but I didn’t expect it to be with a city, head over heels, the very next day.
I woke up at about 5am and got into a taxi to Don Muang airport, the budget carrier terminal I’d landed into a few weeks ago from Krabi. I arrived much earlier than I needed to thanks to some borderline maniacal driving along Bangkok’s elevated expressways. I could swear the vehicle got some air off the crest of one of two hills.
I killed time at the airport with a fast food breakfast (is it really an early morning flight without a mcmuffin in the departure lounge?), and on the plane I got chatting to my seat neighbour, Emma. Both of us were flying in to visit Vietnam for the first time and fed off each other’s excitement to touch down in a brand new country. We compared plans for our first day or two in the city, and agreed to share a cab from the airport.
After landing I experienced for the first time something I’d go on to do many more times over the next few years - completing the visa on arrival process at Tan Son Nhat airport. On this occasion it was relatively quick and painless, and afterwards my new friend from the plane tried to make friendly small talk with our unsmiling immigration officer as we passed through, asking for pronunciation help on the Vietnamese for ‘hello’ (xin chào) and ‘thank you’ (cảm ơn). He was unmoved by our poor but well meaning efforts.
I’d been chatting with an old co-worker a lot that week in anticipation of arriving in her hometown, and as well making plans to spend some time together she also gave me a few tips, like only taking a Vina Sun or Mai Linh taxi from the airport and avoiding all others like the plague. With that in mind I swiftly dodged the dubious operators looking for naive fresh arrivals to rip off, and guided Emma towards the domestic terminal where I’d been told we’d have much more luck getting a trustworthy ride.
Backpacks in the boot and legitimate metre running, we took off from the airport. Within minutes I was staring, wide eyed out of the windows at the tree lined streets, the gorgeous old houses and shopfronts on either side of them, and the sheer madness of the motorbikes swarming all over chaotic intersections. I was smitten already.
Emma and I marvelled to each other about how pretty it was, and how our already high expectations for the place had been exceeded thus far.
The journey from the airport isn’t a long one in Saigon, and we soon arrived in Pham Ngu Lao, the area of the city’s District 1 where most hotels, hostels and backpacker bars are located. Emma and I bid each other farewell and I got lost in the alleyways (or hẻms) off the main road looking for the small hotel where Jess (the local friend with the taxi advice) had booked me a room through a friend who worked there.
I walked back and forth down the hẻm a few times, taking multiple wrong turns and asking multiple people for help finding the correct address before actually making it. I took my backpack off in my room and fired off some more excited messages to Jess, finalising our plans to meet up in a few hours time.
With some time to kill before then, I went for a stroll through the backpacker district of Pham Ngu Lao and Bui Vien streets, spending about $1 on a local sim card and discovering for the first time the wonders of bánh mì heo quay (crispy roast pork baguettes), picking up one of the glorious sandwiches from a street vendor while wandering through.
After covering most of the ground through the Pham Ngu Lao area, I sat down at a table at one of the many near identical backpacker cafes lining Bui Vien street, with chequered table cloths and a tv showing pop song videos (impressively for Vietnam, no Westlife!) on the wall.
Not wanting to spoil my appetite before my first proper Vietnamese meal for dinner, I just got a soft drink and sat and watched the late afternoon activity along the street with motorbikes streaming past, backpackers hopping off buses and searching the street for places to stay, and street vendors and bar workers starting to set up for the evening. I smiled to myself, basking in smugness at having reached Vietnam after looking forward to it for so long.
A while later Jess and her boyfriend came to meet me at the hotel, handed me a spare helmet and I hopped on the back of one of their bikes to go out to a place on the other side of town known for it’s duck noodle soup. Although only a passenger, I loved my first experience on a bike in Saigon traffic, the endless stream of them flowing through city streets as dusk fell over the city a surprisingly beautiful sight.
It’s basically a given that the food was incredible, the first of many bowls of noodle soup goodness I’d consume over the next month. Catching up with an old friend, a thousand miles from where we knew each other from (we worked at a coffee shop together when she was studying in Melbourne) and getting to know the hometown version of herself, was even better. She told me about the differences between her life in Melbourne and back at home, the challenges of dating when you live with your parents in a conservative, gossipy culture, how much she missed McDonalds (which arrived in Vietnam about a year later) and Nandos, and promised to show me a few places around the city and take me out for more amazing meals before I left.
After dinner we had a quick tour around some of the major tourist landmarks in the city, including the Notre Dame cathedral and old Post Office building. I admired them lit up in the darkness, but quietly looked forward to going back during daylight hours in the coming days.
I was pretty tired from the early morning flight, so Jess and her boyfriend then dropped me off back on Bui Vien street to head back to the hotel. Bui Vien looked completely different now - heaving with backpackers and locals alike, drinking beer on plastic chairs on the side of the road and spilling out from various bars along the street. It looked like a lot of fun, but I was exhausted and had booked a half day tour for the next morning that started quite early, so resisted the temptation and went straight up to bed.
In the morning I had a quick breakfast in the same cafe I’d been into the afternoon before, and went into the big Trung Nguyen coffee shop near where the bus for the day tour was set to pick me up. I was pretty skeptical about the local style of coffee (iced and mixed with condensed milk, aka cà phê sữa đá) but Jess insisted it was good, and having worked together making coffee I trusted her judgement.
I sipped my coffee on the minibus once we got going through the city and onwards to Củ Chi. I was...unimpressed. The coffee tasted quite bitter and didn’t mix well with the milk, and I had to wait for some of the ice to melt and dilute it a little to make it more drinkable. It was the strongest coffee I’d had in months though, which was welcome. I’d soon come to realise that cà phê sữa đá was in fact a magnificent way to drink coffee, and I’d just had a bad one (going to a chain store was a mistake, like wanting a good latte and going to Starbucks), but for the time being was left longing for a cappuccino from a Melbourne laneway.
It took around 2 hours or so on the bus to reach the Củ Chi tunnels, left in place from the Viet Cong during the Vietnam/American war, and turned into a semi educational tourist attraction. We were shown demonstrations of the creative and torturous booby traps that were set throughout the jungle, had the opportunity to crawl through some of the larger tunnels, and shown a few informative videos about the brutal jungle warfare that had taken place throughout the area just a few decades ago.
There was also a shooting range where tourists can pay to fire a range of different firearms, which I honestly felt was pretty crass for a place that demonstrates in such clear ways the sheer brutality and needlessness of war. That didn’t stop a few of the people from our group having a go, it actually seemed to be the highlight for some of them. I sat around in the cafe alongside it and had an ice cream instead, pondering how I’d gone so far in life knowing so little about one of the most well known and controversial wars of the modern era.
Back in the city shortly after lunch time, I spent the rest of the daylight hours walking all over the city. I found a Phở restaurant with a promising local to tourist customer ratio, and was rewarded with a delicious bowl of the brothy stuff.
I walked through the Ben Thanh market and onwards through much of the central Districts 1 & 3, admiring the architecture and leafy boulevards, slowly teaching myself how to safely cross the road among the swarms of motorbikes. Saigon was making me feel alive in that magical way only the places closest to your heart can.
I stopped by my room for an hour or so in the evening to drop my camera off and charge my phone before heading back out onto Bui Vien for the night, keen to find a sports bar showing the Wimbledon final with Andy Murray up with the chance of being the first Brit to win in something like 12 million years.
After treating myself to a pizza at a backpacker restaurant named Cappuccino on Bui Vien, I wandered up the street to Spotted Cow, a place that looked to cater more to older expats than backpackers but heaving with customers and showing the tennis on a giant screen behind the bar.
I squeezed into a space along the bar to order a beer, and shouted my order over the noise to the barman, my eyes firmly fixed on the big screen. When he returned with my beer he pointed to someone at the other end of the bar.
“Your friend is over there.”
Huh? I don’t have any friends here. Well only know Jess, but there is zero chance she’s in here.
“I think they’re looking for someone else, I don’t know anyone here.”
“No, no! He tell me you, look!”
So look I did, expecting to see a random face react in disappointment on realising I wasn’t who they thought. To my surprise though, I did recognise the face at the other end of the bar.
It was Jasper, who along with a couple of girls he was travelling with had been on the fringes of our little Langkawi crew almost 2 months ago. I hadn’t spent loads of time with him there, but was nonetheless excited to bump into him 2 months and several border crossings later. I thanked the barman and apologised for dismissing him initially, and made my way over to where Jasper was stood.
He was still travelling with the girls, but on his own for the night as he wanted to watch the tennis. I told him I had sought out the bar to watch the match as well, so we shared the tension of an epic match together over about far too many beers, exchanging stories of what we’d been up to since Langkawi in between shouting at the big screen, and celebrating wildly while downing a handful tequila shots each when our man won the trophy.
Already well past drunk and in the mood to continue the celebrations, we moved on to another, cheaper bar where we could sit outside and chat over more drinks. We stayed out until closing time, more beers and more tequila shots steering us through to the early hours as we discussed how what we’d just witnessed would rank among our great sporting memories. Conversation steered towards deeper subjects like relationships and real life plans for the future until the bar staff asked us to leave so they could pack up our chairs and go home.
We took that as our cue to end the night and said our goodbyes. I picked up some snacks and water from a convenience store in a half arsed attempt to minimise the inevitable hangover, and passed out shortly after hitting the pillow.
It had been less than 48 hours since I arrived, but Saigon already had me hooked.