Ho Chi Mihn City

Vietnam’s largest city with a population of about 6.5 million, Ho Chi Mihn City is a bustling hub of commerce. Lacking the charm of Hanoi, it’s a jumbled city of run down buildings next to modern ones, an endless sea of motorbikes and pedestrians in flip-flops. Exploring the city is quite an undertaking as it requires covering long distances and crossing intersections by inching your way across the street, dodging motorbikes and hoping that they dodge you. Here we discovered the brilliance of motorbike taxis! For under a dollar, you can get practically anywhere around the city from the safe perch upon a motorbike, behind its trusty driver. Most drivers speak some English and offer impromptu tour commentary and personal histories along the way – though this concentration on language rather than traffic made for a few abrupt stops and near crashes.

While the motorbikes are loud and unpredictable, I actually prefer their traffic to the car traffic of China. The motorbikes make for less serious traffic jams as they can squeeze through tight spaces unlike a car, and they prove less intimidating to pedestrians. It’s amazing to see whole families piled on a single motorbike with the smallest child in the front, dad driving, older sister or brother behind him and mom holding up the rear on the very edge of the seat. Most women on motorbikes wear face masks, some that come all the way down to their chest like a large bib, and long gloves to protect their arms from either pollution or dirt. One young woman I met explained that a motorbike is the key to happiness in Vietnam as without one, she couldn’t meet guys or socialize.

With the recent history of former Saigon, now Ho Chi Mihn City, there are some interesting museums and landmarks associated with the American War (what in America we refer to as the Vietnam War). The War Remnants Museum offers a gruesome look at the lasting effects the war has had on Vietnam and its people. The most difficult to ingest were the photographs of the victims of Agent Orange – something that is still plaguing the people with the birth of severely deformed babies. After seeing these images, I began to spot victims on the streets of Vietnam who were obviously affected by this horrific chemical.

We also toured the Reunification Palace, a deserted building that formally represented the pride of the South Vietnamese government. The architecture and interior design is very 70’s retro and the two-level basement is filled with tunnels, instruments of communication and tactical maps. On April 30, 1975 North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the palace gates and rushed a VC flag to wave from the 4th floor where General Ho Chi Mihn became the new head of state – putting an end to the war and reunifying the country. This same day the city’s name was officially changed from Saigon to Ho Chi Mihn City.

Perhaps the most amusing activity we did here was to spend a day at the Saigon Race Track. My first time at a race track, I admit that I half expected to see society ladies in big hats and men smoking expensive cigars. Quite the contrary, the place was filled with working class Vietnamese, mostly men, who were excitedly pouring over the horse statistics and slurping bowls of noodles. In the mounting and viewing pen, we watched 10-year-old jockeys mount their pony-sized horses and prepare for the race. Minimum bets were 75 cents, so we joined in the game and bet on a few horses, though none of them won.

We also spent some time exploring the Cholon District, the city’s Chinatown. Because of the approaching Tet Festival, the numerous temples and pagodas in the area were filled with Vietnamese lighting incense and offering gifts such as cooking oil and in some instances, a whole roasted pig that they carried from alter to alter.




But our favorite aspect of the city was the weather – HOT! Sometimes a bit too hot, the locals have created a perfect solution for cooling off. There are numerous cafes that are filled with blasting fans and reclining lawn chairs all faced towards several different televisions either playing soap operas or football (soccer) games. We hit up a few of these in between sightseeing. We also found a fantastic watering hole that spills out onto a busy street for some excellent people watching and serves up mouthwatering seafood dishes and pitchers of draft beer. It felt like we spent far too much time in Ho Chi Mihn City (six days altogether) but with the hot weather, our cheap and comfortable guesthouse and the good eats – it was actually hard to leave.