Sightseeing in Saigon

Before meeting up with my new travel companions, I had planned to head south from Hoi An and hit a few additional towns in Vietnam, notably Dalat and Nha Trang. However, this was before I 1) looked at a map of Vietnam, and 2) spent a full night on a train getting between cities. Visiting these towns would have involved considerable travel and taken a lot of time, which Jemma, Leanne and I didn’t have. We collectively decided to head south directly to Ho Chi Minh City (still commonly referred to as Saigon) and spend four or five days there before going our separate ways. After a little research, we determined this was either a 20+ hour, $10 bus ride or a 45 minute, $60 flight. You can guess which we picked.

I made the executive decision to fly down a day before the girls. I thought I would be heading off to Cambodia sooner than they would and wanted to get a chance to hit the famous Saigon museums and explore the city, as we had planned some day trips for when Leanne and Jemma arrived. This turned out to be a terrible decision, as my flight was many hours delayed by a storm in Saigon and I wound up arriving after dinner, even though I had left Hoi An right after breakfast. Meanwhile, Jemma and Leanne spent a great day at the beach – not my best move.

I spent the first night in the hostel chatting with Liam, who was finishing a summer trip in China with a couple of weeks in Vietnam. We went out for pho, a typical Vietnamese noodle soup with chicken or beef. I called it an early night, and by the time I woke up, Leanne and Jemma had arrived at the hostel after a perfectly on-time flight in good weather.

Since they got in so early, we planned to do most of the in town sightseeing immediately and then explore the surrounding areas on our next few days. We walked over to the 19th century Notre-Dame Basilica but were more impressed by the massive central post office across the street, which was filled with hundreds of locals and tourists alike. Buying stamps here was definitely an adventure.

“Uncle” Ho in the post office

After lunch we headed over to the War Remnants Museum, which told the story of what Americans refer to as the Vietnam War. The museum courtyard is filled with American helicopters, planes and tanks captured by Vietnamese forces. The inside of the museum is broken up into a few different exhibits, and is the most incredibly one sided museum that any of the three of us had ever visited. I in no way justify the American invasion into Vietnam, but the stories and extremely graphic photos recount every evil done by Westerners (not only Americans), and nothing is said of the reverse. Every conflict has two stories, and this was much more clearly presented in the A-Bomb museum in Hiroshima, which outlined the motivations of both the Japanese and Americans. It was ironic (but not surprising) that the most prominently displayed newspapers and letters from government officials condemning the war were from Cuba, the USSR, and North Korea. I guess when the previous name of a place is the “War Crimes Musuem”, we should have known what to expect. It was enlightening, if only from the realization that the same story can be told so differently, and it definitely triggered many Google searches that night as we tried to get a more balanced view of what we had seen.

Downed US Aircraft