A night on Le Than Thon

An article titled A nocturnal crawl through Saigon’s Japanese ghetto on the fun district of Le Thanh Ton, previously reported on the blog here.

Crosstown traffic

Gods of Saigon

 

Back to Saigon

Almost ten years ago, on my first visit to Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City, the terms seems interchangeable), I wrote:

“(Saigon) is a city of 12 million people – and three million motorcycles – and the commercial capital of Vietnam, the place where everything happens first, where fashions come from and money is made. The Big Time. It sounded exciting. I had high expectations for the city.

But I was to be disappointed. I found it noisy and hectic, but somehow that “buzz” was missing – the fashions were drab and cheap looking, there were no supermarkets or convenience stores, restaurants all seemed to have the same menu, and there wasn’t much choice in the stores. There were upscale areas – the leafy generic-expat-area of Dong Khoi for instance – but they had nothing that couldn’t be bettered in Singapore or BKK or even Phnom Penh.”

But this is no longer true. On my return trip, a decade later, I found that the city had changed immensely, and for the better. Or perhaps, in a slightly higher price bracket hotel and better informed, I was now in a better position to see those changes?

Saigon today has a definite buzz. It also has convenience stores, Mini Stops and Family Marts, and a vibrant restaurant scene. There are Brazilian churrascarias and Japanese sushi-yas and stunningly well-executed Australian style cafes. Skyscrapers had shot up and a brand new metro was under construction, as was a shiny new Takashimaya department store, catering to the needs of the blossoming Vietnamese middle and upper classes. People looked more prosperous and sophisticated, and the city better maintained. And there were surprises, like tattooed “Mexican” gangster barbers, graffiti-decked hipster bars, an under-the-radar architectural revival and local hip hop and house DJs, which seemed to promise a reservoir of creativity as yet barely tapped. The future for Ho Chi Minh seems exciting.

This time, I noticed too some of the advantages the city already has over its regional rivals: the proliferation of graceful old French buildings, the streets lined with immense centuries-old jungle trees and the city’s human scale.  I found Saigon surprisingly walkable. Unlike other sprawling Southeast Asian capitals, Ho Chi Minh is –  at its centre at least – surprisingly compact. For the average tourist staying in District One (the city’s numbered district system has a delicious dystopian ring) most places of interest are within twenty minutes on foot, and there is a cafe in which to stop on every other corner if you need it. In the cool of the rainy season, I pounded the pavements all day, enjoying the sense of space on the footpaths and the sky still visible in this mainly low-rise city. In all of these regards, I preferred Saigon to Manila or Jakarta, for example.

Of course the traffic and the noise are still there, the street vendors in their stereotypical bamboo hats, the baskets of live skinned frogs in the markets, the stalls of noodle soup and banh mi. Sparrows and annoyingly ill-disciplined children proliferate. Motorcycles scream down the footpaths in rush hour and change direction unexpectedly on the roads. Once out in the suburbs, the sense of space vanishes in densely-packed neighbourhoods of little lanes alive with the shrieking cicada-like buzz of the motorcycles. Women sell vegetables in muddy lanes. Charcoal smoke blends with exhaust fumes. And people still don’t know how to line up.

But I found Saigon this time to have recaptured its sybaritic former self. It is a city of pleasures. There is coffee, everywhere. Cafes are full of people relaxing, groups of friends gossiping and lone workers tapping away at their keyboards. There is great food, of course: broths of fragrant herbs, grilled pork, river fish and exotic tropical fruits. Ho Chi Minh City loves music, although its taste can be questionable : J.Lo and terrible Eurodance blast out of stores at incredible volume. And it has that very Indochinese sense of calm and restraint, one shared with Bangkok, Phnom Penh and Vientiane; it can be both lively and laidback at the same time. Saigon is not too small, not too big, relaxing but not boring, energetic but not overwhelming.

I left the city surprised to find myself a new fan.

 

Pretty in pink

Among its Cham mosques, Hindu temple, riotous Cao Dai shrines and Buddhist pagodas, this is perhaps the city’s most beautiful place of worship: the pink church of Tan Dinh.

Jade Emperor Pagoda

 

  

Viet bling

Vietnam is still a poor country – but with one of the world’s fastest growing economies for over two decades, it is no longer a country without rich people. Indeed, the city seemed much richer than it had been on my last visit ten years before. In the backpacker district of Pham Ngu Lao I noticed that many of the clubs and cafes were full of (presumably, middle class) locals. At night the Turtle Lake, a small pond in a traffic island, had turned into a mini-version of Bangkok’s Victory Monument, with milling crowds of young people meeting at barbecue restaurants and glued to their iPhones. Luxury condos were going up by the river. I was intrigued by this new wealth – who were these people, I wondered?

I had read that Vietnamese tourists were now the biggest spenders per capita in Tokyo, and that demand for rhino horn from wealthy Vietnamese is the engine driving the animal to extinction. President Obama had recently been in town spruiking American products to a newly affluent market, the city’s most upmarket shopping street, Dong Khoi, was lined with boutiques for Hermes and Chanel and during my visit the city was just about to open its new Takashimaya department store (before Bangkok got theirs).

Those Vietnamese who did have money, I noticed, liked to flaunt it. They were outblinging  the mainlanders, shopping at stores like Runway with its over-the-top interior of plaster bas relief tigers and disembodied legs and and arms protruding from the walls, and hanging out at hotels like the Reverie, which boasted a vulgarly opulent lobby of hanging crystals and a five metre-long purple ostrich leather recliner.

 

Saigon chic: feminine

Images by An Le for Tush magazine.

 

Saigon chic: masculine

 

Huy Nguyen, the star of Tam Bui‘s beautiful recent photo essay Erotika and a pretty good photographer in his own right.

Old and new: in the mix

One of my favourite pasttimes in Saigon was wondering through the cavernous old French colonial apartment buildings in District One which have been converted into collections of hipster coffee shops or clothing boutiques, or alternatively left to rot, or sometimes an appealing combination of the two.

 

The buildings are full of atmosphere, and surprises: feral tribes of cats playing on the balconies, surprisingly chic little clothing stores tucked into dingy passageways, an open door into somebody’s cramped apartment, a sudden vista across the neighbouring rooftops. You walk up and down great curving stairways of chipped stone, often dim with little natural lighting, and along corridors of exposed wiring and rising damp.

And sometimes, you will stumble into one of the city’s superlative new generation of cafes. Here, digital nomads tap away on gleaming Macbooks and sip on coffee in first-rate establishments better than their equivalents in Hong Kong or Bangkok.

My favourite of these was L’Ursine, which I first found up a back staircase down an arcade, or alternatively when it was raining I could access it by going through an alleyway, a gallery and the kitchen of a restaurant. Inside there is an immaculately beautiful space, with retro French posters on the walls, gleaming white tiles, soaring ceilings and little green succulent plants on wooden tables. I would go every day for breakfast (or I’ll be honest, sometimes more than once per day) and read magazines and sit on the balcony to watch rain falling over the Opera House. I later found that there was another version on the nearby street of Le Loi, which is above a Monocle-esque homewares and clothing store.

  

I can also recommend Workshop for its coffee and grilled vegetable salad. Its found up above a motorcycle parking bay.

 

Staircases of Saigon

Through the looking glass

This amazing expanding oshibori washcloth at a recommended restaurant called Ngoc Chau Garden, where I ate deliciously tender grilled squid with mint, and catfish in pepper and chilli oil.

 

Fruit of the gods!

The mãng cầu Xiêm also known as soursop, guanabana or custard apple. Yum.

Street scenes

  

Suoi Tien

Suoi Tien is one of the highlights of – I would say – Southeast Asia. It is a vast and bizarre fantasyland of gaudy Buddhist sculptures, neon shrines and concrete oversized fruit, dancers in monkey suits, a water park with a wave machine, houses-of-horror and live crocodiles (which you can buy and take home!) and dolphins jumping through hoops of fire. It is also, inexplicably, not mentioned anywhere in the Vietnam Lonely Planet guide. Really? Someone should really get fired for that, as it is hands down one of the most bizarre, mind-boggling sights on the planet and an absolute “must-do.” Read more on my previous visit here.  To get there, just hop on the number 19 bus opposite the Ben Thanh market. It takes about an hour and drops you right at the door which is marked by a gigantic frog, and therefore unmissable. When the city’s subway is up and running it will get a stop nearby so it will be even easier.

The aerial drone video below should provide some more inspiration to visit (if that could possibly be necessary) although ignore the misleading claim that the park is “abandoned”  – it was just filmed after closing time, I would say.

Saigon tropical

Two houses, each alike in dignity …

Ho Chi Minh City is home to (at least) two superb palaces, each providing a contrasting superlative example of a completely different style of Twentieth century architecture.

  

The former palace of the South Vietnamese president, since re-named the Reunification Palace, is nothing short of an Acropolis of modernism. It is widely considered a masterpiece, the model of a forward-looking sixties building for the tropics, open and full of wide breezy spaces. But there are also bizarre touches like a Mad Men-style in-house “nightclub,” a helicopter on the roof and a Benz in the basement,  as well as sumptuous meeting rooms and serene private apartments, linked by the airy gleaming corridors and staircases.

Many of the furnishings look like they come straight from the Thunderbirds. It’s a trip.

 

I had visited the palace on my trip to Saigon ten year previously ( I wrote about it here) but was happy to return, under glowering tropical skies and intermittent fits of cold rain, to see it all again.

  

The Museum of Fine Arts, on the other hand, was new to me. It is housed in a trio of stunning art nouveau mansions just opposite the Ben Thanh market. The galleries contain many paintings and drawings of human figures, Cubist water buffaloes, war scenes (of course) and a strangely-named section of “ancient contemporary art” but much of this is frankly of poor quality and the real stars, undoubtedly, are the buildings. With chipped stained glass windows, elegant wrought-iron staircases and metallic grills, shuttered windows and walls painted canary yellow or deep red, the buildings were built in the 1920s and thirties for an (apparently ridiculously wealthy) local Chinese merchant family, and they are beautiful.