Goodbye Phnom Penh and Hello Saigon

Tue, Jun 20, 2023

Goodbye Phnom Penh and Hello Saigon

As always, our day began with breakfast in our hotel in Phnom Penh. I decided to go Asian today and got the salad with the lovely sesame dressing and the noodle soup to make myself a super hearty meal before we returned to our room to finish last-minute packing and get ready for our flight to Ho Ch Minh City (to which I shall now be referring as Saigon—as I discovered that the locals call it Saigon and nothing else).

Pissat, our guide was waiting for us in the lobby as we checked-out. These hotels do a weird thing—at the time of check-out, they send someone upstairs to go over your room and make sure you have not made off with any loot! They returned our passports only after being satisfied we were not making out like bandits! We then piled into our car and were off for the airport. The airport was less than a half hour away. We said our goodbyes to Phnom Penh and looked forward to the next lap of our travels.

Flight to Saigon:

As always again, I requested a window seat as I have always loved to look at our planet from 35,000 feet above mean sea level. I also keep my camera handy to shoot pictures of the flying landscape and I discovered, pretty soon, that we’d be following the course of the mighty Mekong river for the entire one hour flight. And what a river it is! Not only does it curve sexily all across the paddy plains below but it bifurcates into a vast network of tributaries. This explains why the area is so fertile and such a bountiful rice-producer. I had almost clear skies and could get several great pictures before I discovered that upon descent, we’d be flying right over downtown Saigon. How cool is that? Of course, it meant that I switched to video mode and shot really good footage of our landing that was super smooth under cloudless skies.

Actually, for the very first time in my flying experience, the aircraft took off a half hour ahead of schedule. I have NEVER known this to happen. The result was that we landed half an hour ahead of schedule and, to our great good luck, actually managed to clear immigration far ahead of schedule. This meant that the person who was meant to pick us up (a man called Vin) had not yet arrived by the time we emerged out of the Arrivals Lounge and began looking for a placard with my name on it. He said later that he was amazed how quickly we had cleared immigration formalities (we had obtained e-visas online while still in India), put us into his waiting car and we were off. It was a 45 minute ride from the airport to the hotel, he said, as landing time was 3.00 pm and there was heavy traffic everywhere. We were amazed at the army of helmeted Motor-bikers all over the city and we soon discovered that there is a population of 30 million people in all of Vietnam with 17 million motor-bikes in the city of Saigon alone! Go figure! True to Vin’s prediction, we were at our hotel, the Harmony Hotel and Spa, in the Dong Khoi area of Saigon about 40 minutes later. We checked in and were presented with a welcome drink—a lemongrass-ginger concoction with snacks and nibbles in the lobby-bar of our spiffy hotel and told that the mini-bar in our room was free! Again, never have I stayed in a hotel where the mini-bar is free! We found it stocked with water, flavored water and beers! Super luck!

No sooner did we stash our backpacks in our room and use the restroom than we were off. We had the evening at our leisure and decided to do a walking tour of the area around us. Using Lonely Planet’s notes and a map provided by the Receptionist, we set off. We had about two hours of day light and wanted to make the most of it.

Walking Self-Guided Tour of Saigon:

Our walking tour was our first introduction to a fascinating city. I have to say that my accounts of the city have been derived mainly from seeing the musical, Miss Saigon, many decades ago on Broadway and from the rather sketchy information I had about the US occupation of the city and their eventual dramatic exodus. So I was keen to learn much more and indeed this visit provided every bit of historic detail I’d craved.

The area of Dong Khoi is chaotic and busy. Traffic whizzed around us like crazy and bikes whipped by just millimeters away from us. Our first stop was a local bank as we needed to use the ATM to get local currency. With that mission accomplished, we set off for Ben Thanh Market. This iconic building features a clock tower and dates from the 1800s. It was constructed by the French soon after their colonization of Indo-Chine in 1863 and it continues to stand today, a bustling covered market, filled with all manner of merchandise from tourist kitsch to local fruit—think of Crawford Market with an Oriental ambience. We circumnavigated it, found our magnets and made our way out.

Our tour then took us to the Fine Arts Museum—another lovely colonial building built in decidedly French architectural style, However, since it was long after 5pm, it was closed and we merely had a chance to admire the building from the outside.

Moving on, we followed the streets to the unmissable skyscraper ahead of us—the Bitexco Financial Building, the newest, most distinctive building on the Saigon skyline. Depending on which angle you view it, it looks like a CD rack with a CD (its SkyDeck) ready to be inserted into its side. It took several blocks of walking before we actually reached it. We obtained information on how we could get to the 60th floor Observation (Sky Deck) and thought we’d do it on another evening, time and inclination permitting. Hence, we used the rest room on the first floor of the main concourse and then, to give our feet a rest, decided to get a drink in the bar on the ground floor. With Diet Cokes for both of us, we felt suitably refreshed and ready to continue our walking tour.

Dinner at Mama Pho:

By this time, we were quite hungry as we’d had nothing but snacks since our huge breakfasts this morning. It made sense to look for a substantial bowl of Pho (pronounced Fur)—a massive rice noodle soup with the addition of meat and fresh herbs and condiments—sour lime juice, fish sauce, chili sauce. As it turned out, there was a place called Mama Pho that had an opening offer for one week—bowls of Pho were half price! It was a no-brained to enter there and feast on steaming bowls of the national soup (65,000 VND which is approx $3). Yes, prices for the smallest item go into the millions here—so if you want to feel like a millionaire, all you do is convert your bank balance to dong and you’re in business!

The Pho was really really good. Beef bones are simmered for as long as 18 hours coax flavor out. The fresh herbs add enormous freshness and flavor and in a very cute place, which was suitably quiet and filled with really lovely Chinese lanterns on the ceiling, we enjoyed our first real meal in Vietnam. There’d be many more to enjoy in the days to come.

Our Walking Tour Continues:

Fortified with our meal, we were ready to continue our walking tour and we followed the map along one of the swankiest streets in Saigon and one packed with American-Vietnamese history: Dong Khoi Street. This took us past some of the fanciest five-star hotels including the Caravelle, from whose bar American journalists had reported for the US press from their bar stools! This hotel had a beautiful flower arrangement of orchids (my favorite flower) and pink chrysanthemums in its lobby and I had to take a picture there. Not far away stands the building from whose rooftop the last American GIs and diplomats were airlifted on their evacuation from Saigon in 1979.

The Caravelle is also directly opposite the Opera House and, to my enormous delight, I discovered that it is almost an exact replica of the Opera Garnier building in Paris, named for Charles Garnier who designed it in such a way that all four sides have a completely different aspect! This was not the case here, but the facade is decidedly Garnier! Again, we walked all around the building and then continued our course along the Dong Khoi boulevard passing up some of the classiest boutiques in the world such as Hermes, Baccarat, Christofle, etc. I really enjoy looking at the windows of these boutiques as their decor and dressing is always so creative.

At the end of the boulevard, where it ended in a rotary, we saw the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Saigon right in front of us—sadly, fully enshrouded by scaffolding as it has been under renovation for the past six years. We could go inside and Mass continues to be held in here, but, of course, being that it was almost 8.00 pm by this time, it was closed.

There was nothing much to be seen as darkness descended upon the city—so we continued using our maps to find our way back to our hotel. In doing so, we walked right by the vast property of the Independence Palace which we would see, in daylight, tomorrow.

About 20 minutes later, we were back at our hotel. We were truly dead beat but had received a perfect introduction on our own to Saigon and were highly impressed by what we saw. The city is modernist in its aesthetic and obviously prosperous. It reminded me very much of other affluent Asian cities through which we have traveled such as Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo.

With showers behind us and the TV on, informing us about the tragedy of the loss of the Titan submersible, we called it Lights Out and went to bed

Until tomorrow.