Happy equinox and official first day of spring! I hear it went up into the 20s in Montreal this weekend. Unseasonably warm though it may be, it sounds enticingly cool compared to the mind-melting heat here in Saigon. It’s so hot and humid, a one-block walk to the corner feels like a trip to the sauna, and I’ve started seeking out air conditioning in the same way that magnets seek the north pole.
Flying south
This morning, I woke up in Hoi An and, after breakfast and such, spent an hour or so reconfiguring my backpack to fit all my recent clothing acquisitions. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to wedge everything in, and so I checked out and caught my transfer to Da Nang Airport for my flight south. Goodbye, Hoi An, it’s been real! I’d love to come back someday.
Da Nang’s airport was mostly used as a military base until 1975, and these days, it’s the third busiest (civilian) airport in the country, sitting as it does at the halfway point between north and south. I find that statistic a bit incongruous with the small airport feel and near-empty check-in area. My flight was delayed by an hour, but the free WiFi gave me a chance to catch up on some blogging while I waited. My one-hour flight south was uneventful and much more pleasant than the overnight bus or train would have been.
The city so hot they named it twice
The wave of heat hit as soon as I got off the plane, and I had officially arrived in Saigon. Well, technically, I had arrived in Ho Chi Minh City. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, it was renamed in the Communist Party’s effort to stamp out the past. The new name never caught on — Uncle Ho was never too popular in the South — and the locals quite sensibly still call it Saigon.
My first impressions of the city, viewed from the window of a taxicab, were that it’s extremely big and modern. Saigon is the largest city in the country and is overwhelming even compared to Hanoi. Big buildings, industry and commerce, wide tree-lined boulevards filled with staggering amounts of motorbike traffic, and the hustle and bustle definitely not found in the sleepy resort towns like Hoi An… yep, I’m definitely in a city again. And what a city! Saigon has shaken off the vestiges of having lost the war and being taken over by the Communist north, and has driven most of Vietnam’s aggressively-paced growth in recent years. It’s a modern city in every sense of the word, far removed from most of the media images that people have of the place from the 1960s and 70s. Save for the heat (and the Communist propaganda posters on nearly every corner), it could be any generic American city. Even the traffic here seems more orderly, with vast quantities of motorbikes actually stopping at red lights.
Cyclo-don’t
I checked into my hostel, which is located in a backpacker district that feels depressingly like the way I imagine Khao San Road in Bangkok. I was tired and sticky and my allergies had returned with a vengeance so I was sneezing and blowing my nose a lot. I was tempted to just crash out, but really, I felt vaguely guilty that I’d done nothing much all day. So instead, I jumped on a cyclo tour offered by the hostel. It’s an almost painfully, touristy thing to do, sitting in the back of a carriage led around by a bicycle driver. And nearly as soon as we’d set off, I realised the error of my ways. Saigon’s traffic is designed for buses, cars and – most commonly – motorbikes, but definitely not for bicycles. The third or fourth time the driver cut across traffic, I stopped panicking about getting clipped or killed, and resigned myself to the ride with a fatalistic shrug. Still, if you’re reading this and thinking of getting on a cyclo taxi in Saigon, I have one word for you: Don’t.
Anyway, the tour gave me a bit of an orientation of the city as we took in some of the key sights, including Reunification Palace, the Notre Dame Cathedral, the Central Post Office, Rex Hotel, the Opera House, and the requisite giant statue of Ho Chi Minh. It was nothing more than a drive-by view, but I’ll be here until Friday so I will have adequate chance to check out the sights on my own time — preferably those with air conditioning.
By that point, I was exhausted from the heat. Feeling a bit burnt out on rice and noodles, I had an embarrassingly western-style dinner at a Starbucks-like coffee shop, which cost me six times what I’ve been paying for a typical meal, but I didn’t care. I just parked myself in front of the A/C, ate my panini sandwich, sipped on my iced coffee, and gradually started to feel like myself again. Maybe that makes me a bad traveler, but so be it; sometimes a girl just needs a break.