The ship docked at Phu My which meant a 2+ hour bus ride into Saigon - now officially Ho Chi Minh city but the guide said Saigon. The highway, without lane markers for much of the time, was more chaotic than any other traffic in my experience.
Imagine a 2-hour-long strip mall, with buildings, shacks, huts, at least 2 enormous gated communities with luxury villas, regular villas not gated, 3 or more shrines, a statue of a black male saint (St. Martin?) on a building next to the 3rd Communist Party council building complete with a hammer and sickle plus a beefy worker holding a poster of Ho and a Vietnamese flag aloft, followed by hundreds of happy workers, more shacks, coffee shops without walls but with hammocks (?) all punctuated by rice paddies, in different stages of growth - home of the famous (in Vietnam) rice rat.
According to our guide on the bus ride, the rats which live in rice paddies are eaten by the southern Vietnamese. He said that if you eat a Saigon rat, you will die but the rice rats (which eat, of course, rice) are clean, tender and tasty. If you were not a vegetarian before now........ On the other hand, the practice does preserve more of the harvest.
The strip-mall-highway has a carpet of plastic trash which people walk on, over or through but in the 5 hours on the highway, I never saw anyone picking it up. From a distance, it might actually look like a carpet but up close, it's just rubbish, often wet and muddy.
The coffee shops consist of thick poles supporting a thatched roof. Hammocks are suspended from the poles - I really do not know why. Normally coffee wakes you up. The thatched roof is home to rats (cousins of the ones in the paddies?) and where there are rats, there are snakes. During the rainy season, it's quite common for the rats and snakes to get washed out of the roof and fall onto the patrons, thus ruining a coffee break, I suppose.
My memories of Vietnam were in suspended animation from the 1970's - whole families on bicycles, sacks of rice, furniture, a sheep, pig. Fast forward to now - whole families on Vespa or Hondo 50-type motor scooters/cycles: man driving, wearing a small, skull-cap helmet, cigarette dangling from his mouth, child in front of him (no helmet), child (no helmet) between man and woman (no helmet), child behind woman (right, no helmet) or a Vespa-type with 4 women - yes, they are slender but not that slender.
Sai Gon (written apart most places in the city) is like Hong Kong on crack! The traffic is overwhelming, extremely loud and totally chaotic. Traffic lights are treated like unwelcome suggestions and the thousands upon thousands of scooters compound the problem exponentially.
How to cross a street in Saigon? Slowly. Allow the traffic to weave around you. Start off, let the car coming from the left directly in front of you pass, take the appropriate number of steps to allow cars to pass behind you and stop to let the next car coming from the left know your position. It can take a while on boulevards with unmarked lanes but what the hell - it's too hot to run anyway. It's step-pause-step-pause until you reach the relative safety of the sidewalk - relative because some scooter drivers use sidewalks as shortcuts.
I had booked a shopping trip - yes, me - less for shopping than to see the city. We were first taken to an enormous covered market, somwhat like the souk in Turkey, but dirty and smelly. The first item I saw was a bottle of wine containing an entire snake, in the act of biting a scorpion. And it was all downhill from there. Lots of clothing in Vietnamese sizes which I would not have bought anyway, knock-offs of luxury brands which I will never buy, and things which smelled odd. I left quickly, crossed a boulevard obviously planned by the French to mirror paril boulevards - no marked lanes but about 9 lanes at any one time - went to an electronics store, a real clothing ship and a bleaching studio.
The guide told us that most Vietnamese women want to have light complexions and wear masks and floppy hats to prevent suntans. The bleaching shop had before and after photos which looked eerily like Michael Jackson. I didn't go in. There was a fruit vendor selling fruits I did not recognize and did not try.
I am adventurous about many things but not food which is probably why I switched from majoring in anthropology to linguistics. I won't go to American chain restaurants on g.p. but got through the entire day in Saigon on a small breakfast and grapes from the ship.
We were subsequently taken to a lacquer factory - my favorite. The various processes of production were explained, demonstrated and we were then escorted into a showroom and left alone - no hard sell.
The last stop was "get around downtown on your own for about 90 minutes". I got postcards, stamps, mailed the pc, crossed an incredibly busy street - it was only 1:30 in the afternoon but looked like rush hour anywhere else - visited a department store, then walked past 2 of the 7 luxury hotels in Saigon, featuring boutiques from most luxury brands, and full of Asians as well as Westerners. Americans comprise the largest number of tourists to Vietnam - go figure!
The cathedral (French, of course) was closed - it would have been open in France.
I did not buy much but everything I bought including postage was paid for in U.S. dollars. What undoubtedly has Ho spinning in his grave is the rampant capitalism, the disdain for the Vietnamese currency and the insatiable hunger for dollars. He won all the battles but lost the war.
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