Saigon / Ho Chi Minh City
A tinder date took me the first night to get banh mi which sucked, thought I could trust a local. Was pissed I ate those carbs.
"Wow how do you know what banh mi is, this is your first trip to Vietnam."
....they have Vietnamese people in America.
I spent 45 min the first morning trying to find 22 Ly Tu Trong. I wanted to find a place to see the Fall of Saigon helicopter pic of the US Embassy...which I learned was not actually the US Embassy. Instead it was a CIA safe house. The building is home to a petrochemical company. A little down the street was a building full of art galleries, boutiques and cafes. I climbed up the main stairwell as much as I could until I got to the dead end at the top, I found an open door towards the back and went up 3 more flights to come face to face with history.
Grabbed lunch at Relish & Sons.
Just needed some CCR to complete the G.I. 'Nam vibe.
Chanel and Socialism!
I planned to go to the gym and saw it was near Dinh Doc Lap so I stopped there on the way. Named "Independence Palace" after the South was liberated it now stands as a furnished time warp to the 1960s. I thought it was pretty awesome.
One thing does seem a little out of place/time.
You can also go down to the bunker command center.
You can also play a joke on your Mom and text her that this is your hotel room to which she will frantically ask if your wallet got stolen and you need to get wired some money.
I was able to dodge the rain and get a workout at Mach's Gym. Not bad for $2.50/day.
Walking back and a little hungry I stopped in here. Not bad, geared towards tourists.
Played "Count the UA Tulips" on the way back.
Walking out and about to get dinner I ended back up at Saigon Center which has a Takishamaya dept store and typical food places like the rest of SE Asia malls. I'm a sucker for Pepper Lunch so had one for dinner.
I had an issue with my Stealth Topas Rimowa again. In Krabi a little pin nearly fell out of one lock and then I noticed the other one was cracked. In Feb it came off the belt at HKG broken in half, luckily they have an entire service center in HKG. Bangkok couldn't fix it but it seemed liek it was fine. When I checked it at REP I noticed a lock was cracked. I was worried it could break in half again so I saw that Saigon has a Rimowa "retail corner" in the Caravelle Hotel. I popped in and he said it would take 3-4 days to fix it. Going back to get it and bring it over I saw around the corner next to the Sheraton was a much larger, actual Rimowa retail store. He said he could fix it in 5 min.
On the way back with the case I was also on the eye for a laundry place...that's when a lady approached me with a card asking if I needed laundry. Perfect. I got the suitcase fixed, she drove me back to my hotel an waited while I brought down my 4.5 kg of laundry. $16 USD and she would have it delivered back in the morning...sure enough she did!
She saw me later in the week and came across the street to say hi and ask if everything was okay. Apparently she's at that corner across from the Sheraton every morning.
Sunday would be fun because an old classmate from NY moved back to VN. She was going to take me around to eat and then also dinner later in the evening.
First stop we went to Cong coffee shop which was actually in that arts center building I climbed up to to see the roof top. "Communist era feeling" she billed it as.
Then we got some banh xeo.
Also a much better banh mi.
Went to District 2 to Mekong Merchant which she said was a much more gentrified Western area.
After freshening up we met some of her friends 3 min walk away from the hotel for some "real" VN food including pig ears, frog curry and other things including make your own kumquat rum drink.
Just across the street was a swanky cocktail place The Ramcha Room. I had the "Smoke and Mirrors" which was quite literal.
Got to bed early because at 8am I was meeting a tour group at the Opera House to head down to the Mekong Delta.
I actually booked this tour and the Cu Chi tunnels through Viator which was my first time finding out about this TripAdvisor branch. This was billed as a small group tour capped at 14, there were 12 of us. Took us about 1:45m to get down to where we would get on a boat.
We went across and over to one island to taste some "local fruit", see a bee thing and then made our way to a coconut candy place.
We also got to taste some coconut liquor, banana wine and...snake whiskey.
From there we took a "tuk tuk" to lunch.
From there we got on smaller paddle boats making our way down a little inlet to where the larger boat was waiting to take us back to the van.
This tour ended up being operated by Urban Adventures. Our guide was great and it was nice to go down there...but it wasn't what I expected. I felt we were just led through a bunch of things that weren't particularly interesting. I thought it would be more cruising up around the delta, maybe stopping at a small place here or there and watching more local life unfold. I also would have preferred to do one of the tours where you take a boat all the way from Saigon down there as I found out from a woman on the Cu Chi Tunnel tour.
I had a decent dinner at Ganh which seemes to be a chain of 3-4 in SGN.
Up even earlier the next morning to be picked up at 7:15am to take a speed boat up the river to the Cu Chi Tunnels.
Operated by Le Rives this was worth the money. It would take us 1:20min to get up. While they can't control the weather it was still a comfortable ride up. They had banh mi, fruit, coffee and drinks for us as we sped up at 28mph.
I didn't get in for this photo op because I saw how dirty it made the other people.
Pretty interesting stuff. Moved through one of the tunnels for about 100m...which they said was increased almost 2.5x wide from the original size. No way some all American boy from Iowa deployed in the war was going to fit down the original size chasing one of the Viet Cong.
They make their money by selling bullets for 40,000 VND/ea with a min buy of 10 bullets. AK-47, other riffles and then the jeep and post mounted M30 and M60. I gave the M60 a blast. My dad has most of the other riffles so there was no novelty to shoot those.
Before we left on the dock they had a great lunch set up for us also.
I really enjoyed Saigon. People were friendly, I was in a really good mood the whole time. I will say holy traffic hell was some of it intense. Swarms and swarms of scooters. Crossing the street was not for the faint of heart, I just waited for a local and hid behind him/her. This trip has made me feel really comfortable about coming back for a few weeks, buying a motorcycle and going all up and down the country.