Back in Saigon

At Bangkok airport I once again found myself unable to check in until I showed proof of a ticket out of the country to the airline. This time booking a $10 bus ticket was sufficient. Immigration, when I arrived in Saigon didn’t want to see any proof of onward journey and didn’t ask me any questions.

Seventeen years is a very long time in a city that develops as fast as this one. There’s a new airport terminal, there are international fast food and coffee chains next to the terminal, and (totally amazing) there’s a bus from the airport to the city centre. No longer are you surrounded and accosted by a dozen taxi drivers immediately you leave the terminal and have to haggle a price as your introduction to Vietnam. It’s still very busy outside the terminal but it’s not the total chaos that nearly had me turning round and going home the first time I arrived here!

I’m staying in the centre, not far from where I lived. I went for a walk around to check out the area. Everything is different. Many of the buildings are taller (when people have money, they add an extra storey or two to their house/business). The area was always the backpacker area but it’s expanded. Many more hotels, different and swankier cafes and restaurants, lots more bars. I’m 99% sure I saw the woman who I rented my room from and who brought me iced lime juice every day when I got back from work. I tried to talk to her but she doesn’t speak English and my Vietnamese is far too basic to explain anything.

After finding a mobile phone shop where they told me the sim card I bought in December has expired because it hasn’t been used and buying a new one, I got a xe om (motorbike taxi) to the main part of the city centre. It’s also changed. Designer shops everywhere, one of the main streets is a construction site – they are building the first metro line (it’s desperately needed!). Some things haven’t changed: the Continental Hotel where Graham Green wrote ‘The Quiet American’ still looks exactly the same, as do the Opera House across the road and the People’s Committee building on the next block. But surrounding them all are skyscrapers that weren’t there before.


It was starting to get dark before I realised I’d been wandering around, gaping and noticing all the changes and I hadn’t taken any photos. I took a few in low light before going for a drink on the roof of one of the hotels next to the river. Then I walked to Pasteur street which is now the place where lots of restaurants are and I had a delicious meal in a packed restaurant. I then walked back to where I used to live and took some photos of what it looks like now. I lived down the alleyway between the Saigon Pho and Mon Hue cafes. Neither of which were there then. Mon Hue was a very different cafe – no glass front, neon lights or A/C. It was called ‘333’ and I met friends for drinks there a lot (we didn’t eat there as the food wasn’t good and they had a bad rat problem but the staff were lovely and it was a very friendly, social place). I don’t remember what was where Saigon Pho is now. It definitely wasn’t a cafe and it was half the width – quite a few places have had walls knocked down so they are the width of two original buildings.