After all the reports I’d heard from fellow travellers passing in the opposite direction, Saigon was not a place I was planning on exploring for long. You’ve already read my diatribes on city life and, by all accounts, the traffic, noise and pollution in HCMC were supposed to be three, ten and fifty times worse than Hanoi (depending who you spoke to). I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find it far more to my liking than Hanoi. I have a theory on this…it stands to reason that, wherever you’ve come from prior to Vietnam, your first city experience is going to be pretty full-on. Whether you’ve come overland from Cambodia, China or Laos, Hanoi and HCMC are going to seem like pure bedlam compared to the rural experience. Similarly, if you’ve flown straight in from the normality of your home country or after peaceful weeks in the Philippines (a la moi!), Vietnam’s major cities have a frenetic, chaotic rhythm that can’t fail to grate on the nerves for the first day or two. Of course, by the time you’ve travelled through Vietnam (north or south, depending on your point of inception), the constant clamour and hustle has become part and parcel of your daily life and your final city destination seems comparatively more bearable than the first. Suffice to say, I felt a lot more in tune with HCMC than Hanoi. There was also a feeling that I’d been there before – not so much a déjà vu, but a familiarity brought about by the congruence of reality and fiction. From the snapshot images of films, books and musicals my subconscious expectations of Saigon were suffused with a peach-tinted light. Much to my surprise, as our ridiculously slow coach headed due west into the city, the clouded sunset was producing a shade of peach that could have been used by Dulux as an industry standard. The whole sky above the sprawling, neon-punctuated conurbation had a surreal luminosity…almost as if someone had taken a sheet of tinted gel and fastened it over the housing of the sun’s spotlight. In the city itself, there were fine colonial boulevards and avenues, lined by stately trees and imposing European architecture. Fleeting glances down side-alleys and behind construction fences gave away the continuing developing nature of the city…while towering blocks and shiny department stores gave the impression that development had already been and gone. I found myself disappointed by the fact that the traffic appeared to be so much more regulated than in Hanoi – cars, bikes and cyclos all waiting patiently at red lights; one side of the road being used for one direction of travel. When moving, traffic was gaining hazardous speed…and drivers seemed less inclined to keep their eyes peeled for stray pedestrians. While side-alleys teemed with activity and tightly-packed construction, the main streets were airier and gave the appearance of having been recently cleaned. In Hanoi, every street corner had been an opportunity to kick over a bag of rubbish or pick your way through a minefield of precariously parked motorbikes. Here in HCMC, I felt less hemmed-in…better able to breathe…which is ironic, as the alien colour of the evening sky owes itself primarily to pollution! ;-)
As luck would have it, the bus dropped us off slap-bang in the middle of backpacker land…and right outside the travel agency I had decided on for my Mekong trip. Delta Adventure tours was highly recommended by the LP and, when I looked at their brochures, I was pleased to find a trip that incorporated everything I wanted to see in the Delta and dropped me off in Phnom Penh two days later. Without further ado, I handed over my passport and some dollars to allow them to obtain my visa for me…paying $2 extra certainly beats standing around in the embassy for several hours when there’s sight-seeing to be done. I had no further plans for the evening other than checking out the quality of internet access and getting a bite to eat. My visa would be ready for collection the following evening and my boat departed the following morning. The only place I really wanted to see was the War Remnants Museum (formerly the American Warcrimes Museum)…not that HCMC doesn’t have plenty else to see, but having seen and done so much of the tourist route in Vietnam, I was itching to move on to Cambodia.
I was sat, poring through my Cambodian Lonely Planet (the gift from Melanie and Jamie in Sapa) over a plate of spring rolls in a street-side café, when who should walk by, but Robyn – the Canadian girl from our boat-trip in Halong Bay. She stopped for a chat and we agreed to meet with her new travel buddies for a drink later on. I’ve ceased to be amazed by the small size of the travelling world in Asia…how many times had we bumped into Ziggi through Vietnam, or met people who had spent a week with someone else the week before we did? At the bar that evening, Robyn showed up with a Midlander called Dan and the crazy Irish guys we’d met in the DMZ bar in Hue. Not really in the mood for a comprehensive lashing, I nevertheless spent a pleasant couple of hours shooting pool and comparing notes on Vietnam.
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