Ho Chi Minh City, day one

Travel Truth #2: It pays to have friends. 

The light in which you first see a city is important. No unfamiliar metropolis looks attractive under grey, cloudy skies. Maybe some of the towns in Western Europe could pull it off, but definitely not Asia. 

I first saw Ho Chi Minh City (which from hereon I shall interchangeably refer to as either "HCMC" or "Saigon") under the pale pink light of dawn, and it was already bustling. Scooters—even more numerous than they'd been in Hanoi—warred for room on the roads with trucks and cars and taxicabs. Shopkeepers, fruit sellers, noodle-mongers, and other vendors were just opening their doors. The city was stretching and yawning wakefully under the warm, steamy, slanting light of the morning sun, which leaped above the horizon with equatorial swiftness. I observed all this as I rode in a cab from the Saigon Railway Station in District 3 to Cong Quynh Street in District 1 (which, I believe, was named after a popular scholar who lived during the Le-Trinh dynasty). 

It was barely six-thirty. Check-in time wasn't for another nine hours. But my road had been paved ahead of me. A Geordie friend whom I knew from my Geoje days, Adam, knew the morning receptionist at Green Suites. He'd greased a few wheels for me, and she admitted me to the hotel for no extra charge. Pays to have friends, see?

I had to wait a couple of hours for a room to be cleaned and prepared for me, but hey—no extra charge! 

Green Suites was infinitely better than the Asia Star in Hanoi—bigger, brighter, cleaner rooms, an enormous bathroom, a double bed whose mattress eschewed the usual Asian adamance, and more tasteful interior décor. Gratefully I flung my baggage down and took a long shower. I considered a nap, but I was too excited. I hadn't seen Adam, Jeff, or Jenn in something like six months, and now here we were in an entirely new city in an entirely new country and about to go exploring. Hell yeah. Just you try to sit still, mister. 

Adam showed up to get me at half-past noon, and we walked through a crooked series of shade- and sun-drenched alleys to Jeff and Jenn's hotel. They'd had a hell of a time getting to Vietnam from Indonesia; their Tiger Air flight had delivered them safely but their baggage was still stuck in Singapore. To mend their stressed souls we wended our way through the twisting alleys to a nearby café and had us some Vietnamese coffee. 

Now perhaps you haven't heard about Vietnamese iced coffee, or cà phê đá in the local lingo. To quote Wikipedia, it's "coarse-ground Vietnamese-grown dark roast coffee individually brewed with a small metal French drip filter into a cup containing about a quarter to a half as much sweetened condensed milk, stirred and poured over ice." 

And that's about all you need to know, really. Aside from the fact that it's freaking delicious.

And you know what else is freaking delicious? Bacon sandwiches. 

This place was called The Hungry Pig, started by a wet-behind-the-ears English university grad who obeyed the call to "Go east, young man, go east" and, like so many of his British peers, became an entrepreneur in the Orient. This little grub shop at 144 Cong Quynh was the flagship store for what is hoped will be a country- (and perhaps continent-) spanning enterprise someday. If they keep making sandwiches that good, they'll do it just fine. You could order any fixed item on the menu or even customize ingredients to create your own Frankenstein of a sandwich. I had maple bacon and chorizo on whole grain bread with lettuce, tomato, green pepper, and red onion, plus cheddar cheese and HP ("brown") Sauce. And a little Saigon beer, of course. Fantastic.

But who can be satisfied with only one breakfast? This was HCMC and we were all on vacation. We walked down Cong Quynh, crossed Nguyen Cu Trinh, and had some cơm tấm Sài Gòn—Saigon-style broken rice, a signature dish. I got shredded pork on top of my rice and some kind of soft tofu ball with meat inside. We had 333 Beer and some excellent conversation with Stacey, Adam's girlfriend. 

By and by Stacey had to leave to do lesson plans and Adam had to go to work, so that left Jeff, Jenn, and me free to do some exploring. We wandered through District 1's notable areas, including Twenty-Three September Park and Bến Thành Market. 

Bến Thành Market, one of Saigon's oldest buildings, is that building with the clock in the left background. 

There were some pretty cool T-shirts that I wanted to buy, including one with a silhouette of a B-52 and that famous quote by General Curtis LeMay—"They've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age"—but as usual, nothing fit me properly. Even the XXL shirts fit me like a tailored vest, with my ample stomach sticking out by a mile. So I had to quit on the business. Jeff and I wandered through the vast shopping arcade with its lofty French colonial ceiling, humid air, overworked oscillating fans, its overflowing shopping stalls stuck way too close together, and the stumpy saleswomen who kept plucking at our elbows and sleeves as we walked by. To escape these personal intrusions Jeff and I went across the road and waited for Stacey at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (yes, they have those in Vietnam) to sample what Westernized commercialism has done to indigenous culture. Then we went back to our hotels for a rest.

At 5:45 we met Stacey at a place called L'Usine on Dong Khoi. It was a French-style wine and cheese sort of place, with faux-stucco walls, iron rails, potted plants, and strange realist paintings of geared devices on the walls. ("L'Usine" apparently means "Factory" in French.) We drank wine (house red and house white) and ate baguettes, cheese, figs, quince jam, marinated olives, frites, and calamari. The prices were exorbitant—for Southeast Asia. For foreigners like us it was dirt cheap. Leave it to the Brits to sniff out French wine-and-cheese joints while they're on holiday. I added L'Usine to my mental list of "places to take Miss H later" and enjoyed myself to the fullest. 

Then it was time for another break. Walking around in the hot streets and still, humid air of Southeast Asian megacities really takes it outta ya. 

We met Adam (finally off work) at 10 p.m. near my hotel. Green Suites occupies an alleyway just off the main thoroughfare of Cong Quynh, and said alleyway happens to be full of streetside eateries. One of these, Oc Trang, seats its customers on little blue plastic lawn chairs and stubby metal tables beside a cracked, crumbling, white-plastered cinderblock wall. Then it gives 'em as much phở and Bia Saigon (83 cents a bottle) as they can eat. The four of us sat around, staring out at the brightly-lit street behind us, tucking in our elbows and knees whenever a scooter roared down the alley, enduring the stares of the old women and young boys skulking in corners, watching geckos crawl across the cinderblock wall to eat gnats attracted by the floodlights, while the patrons of Oc Trang ate gaily-colored snails, prawns, and frog legs. I think that's what I'll remember most about my time in southern Vietnam, besides the cheap beer, dirty streets, and hordes of honking scooters—those geckos. They were everywhere in Vietnam and Cambodia and Thailand, sitting under the eaves near light sources and gobbling bugs by the bushel. 

Stop by next time if you want to hear about the Cu Chi tunnels.