When we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), we noticed stark contrasts between Southern Vietnam and Hanoi in the North. Southern Vietnam is more developed, more capitalist, and more Westernized. In Hanoi, our hotel was in an alleyway across from a small local market where locals bought rice, vegetables and raw meat. In Saigon, there is a Pizza Hut directly across from our hotel, and bars that serve pizza and pasta during “happy hour.” Despite Saigon lacking the “quaint” factor, we have still found that the city is pretty laid back, and apart from the few sights that we’ve visited (the War Remnants Museum, Reunification Palace, “Notre Dame” Cathedral), we’ve spend most of our time walking, shopping and eating around the city.
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| Central Saigon |
Walking everywhere has been easy and fun since we’re conveniently located in the backpacker district of Saigon, so we’re within a few kilometers of the main city attractions. We’ve visited local parks where teenagers play hacky-sack, narrow backstreets where locals eat pho on little plastic chairs, and affluent areas with Cartier, Prada, and Tiffany’s on each corner. The motorbikes here are even crazier than in Hanoi, but we’ve still walked through the central parts of the city for the past few days which has given us a good overview of Saigon.
In Saigon we’ve also done more shopping (read: spent more time looking through markets and malls and but only buying anything when we barter it down to a reasonable price). The best local shopping in Ben Thanh Market - an enormous tented shopping area, where you can buy food, shoes, clothes, flowers, jewelry, or souvenirs. Because there are so many tourists, salespeople are reluctant to lower their prices, so we’ve mostly just browsed the different stalls. We also visited two modern, high-end malls – the Diamond Plaza which has an arcade, bowling alley, and movie theatre on the top floor, and the Saigon Centre, in front of which we were “interviewed” for Ho Chi Minh City TV on a whim.
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| Ben Thanh Market |
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| Saigon Centre |
We’ve had a much greater variety of food in Saigon, with international choices lining the streets (but luckily, there is still Pho24!). Thanks to French influence, the city also has amazing desserts and baguettes, which means we’ve hardly paid anything for breakfast or snacks (usually about 20 cents per pastry). There are also other options, including Indian, Mexican, and Italian restaurants, but we preferred to stick with Vietnamese. We’ve eaten at a lot of local restaurants that serve good rice and noodle dishes, taken advantage of cheap beer prices at the pubs on our street, and broken down and gone to Pizza Hut once (surprisingly good). The laissez-faire side of Saigon is definitely built for backpackers.
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