First Visit To Vietnam

First Visit To Vietnam

Vietnam has been one of the emerging tourist destinations for some time so I decided that it will be the first stop on his four country tour in Southeast Asia. He kind of knew in advance that Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon) is full of traffic and is hot. But these didn’t fully hit until I actually arrived in midday after two days of flying from Canada via London and Singapore with hardly any sleep.

Daytime temperatures at 33 degrees C here was hot enough to make me sweat just waiting for the airport bus to take me into the city. I had a feeling it was going to be like this in all the other countries I’m traveling to on this tour since they are all in the same region. I ended up staying indoors at my hotels napping whenever possible during the afternoons while I ventured out early mornings and nights after sunset when temperatures were cooler. Turns out that I wasn’t the only one with this strategy as nights in Ho Chi Minh City and other places on my tour were often quite busy with evening crowds of both tourists and locals alike hitting the streets. Still, I had to take 3-4 showers each day after venturing outside because of the heat.

The other big issue of course is the traffic here in Ho Chi Minh City. Although I saw videos, being here in real life watching all the motorbikes (motorcycles and scooters) out there became quite overwhelming and even laughable. There are more motorbikes here than cars and trucks. With everything mixed together along with less than North American safety standards like riding without helmets, having 3-4 people including kids on one motorbike, traffic wildly swerving in and out not staying within any lanes on roads and much more, the traffic here was quite an unbelievable sight to see. Crossing streets was often challenging so I chose to walk beside locals whenever possible since I figured they knew how to cross without getting hit.

Ben Tranh Market & Bui Vien Street

I didn’t have a lot of time in Ho Chi Minh City so I chose to just walk around to the local big market called Ben Tranh Market, check out the Bui Vien party street and take a food tour (to be covered in the next post). My hotel was steps from Bui Vien Street and about ten minutes walk to Ben Tranh Market so I was in a very convenient location within District 1 which is the main downtown area of Ho Chi Minh City.

Bui Vien Street is pretty quiet during the daytime but when night arrives, it becomes a pedestrian street party with open air bars blasting with techno dance music and live rock bands. This place is also the main tourist area at night as it was very crowded and loud. Although some of the dancing girls were nice to watch, I personally found Bui Vien Street too crowded and noisy for my liking. It was mainly where people came to drink outside at night.

Ben Tranh Market on the other hand, was quite enjoyable as it is a huge indoor market selling everything from souvenirs, clothes to cheap knock offs of brand name watches and purses. I came mainly for the food since I learned from my Latin America trip, markets like this will often have authentic local food at cheap prices and I wasn’t wrong about Ben Tranh Market. The setup there was very similar to the big market I found in Cusco, Peru where many locals were spotted eating there. Full meals were at $5-6 Cad and I ended up eating there for all my meals with the exception of the food tour.

I also found much to my delight, many of the local Vietnamese women are very pretty and feminine. Even the older ones seem to age quite gracefully as my eyes got a treat each time I went to Ben Tranh Market to eat!

I also took quick visits to the pedestrian walkway Nguyen Hue Street where the colonial style city hall and statue of Ho Chi Minh were plus the small district of Japan Town or Little Tokyo.

And finally just for fun, I did manage to shoot one short for Toronto Maple Leafs nation.

The main highlight of my visit to Ho Chi Minh City was the food tour which I’ll cover in the next post. By the way, if you like the background music to the videos, check out the full songs at our music section.