All Summer Long

“That’s the Ho Chi Minh way of life… rushed”.  This bud of wisdom from our hotel encourages us to get up early and slip on our running shoes for yet another breakneck tour of a city. Traffic is insane in Ho Chi Minh. Green man, red lights and crossings practically mean nothing. Cars, buses, scooters, they’re just going to cruise through anyway, or they’ll mount the pavement. If you want to cross safely, you have to perfect your glide; no hesitation or running blindly into the middle of the road, you simply glide at a consistent speed and let everything filter around you. Having already been steeped and imprisoned in traffic in Kuala Lumpur (our baptism of chaos and aggression) we were well prepared for this. There just seem to be less rules here in Vietnam. Ride on whichever side of the road you like, collide softly with the other vehicles and don’t bat an eyelid. If you’re a pedestrian, smile confidently and glide. Don’t even get me started on roundabouts; they’re the kind of nightmare carousel that you enter and never leave.

Once we’ve crossed a few roads, our first stop is the markets. We went to the Russian Markets in Phnom Penh and experienced what are known as the “wet markets”: curtains of raw meat hung everywhere, frantic crabs running sideways through the corridors, hot dreams of slaughter stinking in the humidity. So here, we avoid the food and just stick our heads into the aisles of fabric, knock-off purses and magnets. A hawker grabs me by the arms and asks me to buy her boxer shorts. I must look like the type of person who’s desperate for underwear of all things.

We duck out and head into an elevator at the Bitexco tower, another massive skyscraper with an observation deck. This one’s been constructed in the shape of a lotus flower – Vietnam’s national symbol of beauty. They use every part of the flower for cooking and medicine. The seeds will induce you into an eternal sleep. The building looks out into the hazy distance over the Saigon River. It even has a helipad. There’s a new CBD in development, which seems a shame as its the only patch of greenery in sight, apart from a bottle-green billboard advertising Heineken.

Next stop is a tour of the French colonial buildings. There’s a surprising stretch of relief from the traffic on the boulevard leading up to the City Hall. The Opera House is getting geared up for a performance of The Nutcracker Suite and outside there’s a bike that looks like a massive porcupine. The post office and Notre Dame Cathedral are probably the most impressive buildings. We tick them off and move on, thriving in the rush.

We get confused about the pricing of the Independence Palace and spend our time there noosed with an audio tour. It’s an uninspiring history of the place, but we soon find rooms that are interesting. Like the bunker, filled with vintage radio equipment, and the president’s private apartments adorned with animal carcasses, and a pleasant square of recreation space in the courtyard, designed to emulate the serenity of true nature.

We take a look round the Ho Chi Minh City Museum, this time silently. There’s tons of maps for those interested in cartography and reams of graphs, statistics, historical narratives, war equipment, traditional Vietnamese garments, old city photography, fake crocodiles, dissolved wooden boats.

When we get back to our hotel, we fall into a deep lotus seed sleep. We wake up and check out. The taxi is late, the traffic is awful, and it drops us at the wrong terminal.