A Week In Ho Chi Minh City

A Vague Attempt at Travel Writing

From the laid-back surf beaches of Sri Lanka to the dense, smog-soaked city streets of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), our world tour continues. We breeze through immigration and receive our 45-day visa-free stamps before heading out to the crowded arrivals pavilion. I order a Grab (which I’d already downloaded during our layover in Kuala Lumpur) and head over to the car park. I look up and see a squat and sweating Vietnamese man waddling towards us. He asks where we’re heading, takes my phone out of my hand and cancels the Grab. He then picks up one of our bags and walks to his SUV. El throws a concerned glance and I shrug my shoulders, quite taken aback by this aggressive attitude. I confirm the same price that we were expected to pay for the Grab and he nods. Once in the car, he drives towards the exit and demands cash for the tollgate. We only have 500,000 dong (about £15) notes which, at first, he doesn’t quite believe. The idea that two travellers don’t have the smallest denominations of currency after less than thirty minutes in the country seemed to baffle him. He was so baffled that he demanded to look inside El’s purse as if she was so stupid that she couldn’t read the numbers on the notes herself. After thirty seconds of this bizarre back-and-forth, we get out of his taxi and head back to the centre of the car park, where we pick up a Grab without issue.

We’ve been in HCMC for almost 10 days now, and this is still, by far, the most unpleasant character we’ve had the misfortune of meeting in our time here.

Since then, our time here has passed without complication. Our accommodations have been spacious, comfortable, and CHEAP. The food and drink is a refreshing change from curry and kottu.

God bless the Vietnamese for banh mi and pho and egg coffee and salt coffee and ice tea and all the other delicious salty, sugary shite that’s taking days, weeks, maybe even months off my rapidly declining life expectancy.

It seems as though people don’t spend too much time here when they travel through Vietnam, and this is understandable. There’s the War Remnants Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, and Notre Dame Cathedral (not that one, although every brick was imported from France, so it’s just as French as the one in Paris - maybe more so, since the original burnt down live on social media a few years ago).

There is one other attraction that I feel deserves more than just a paragraph, but I’ll try and do it justice nonetheless. Bui Vien Walking Street is a bizarre attraction, a street lined with bars, nightclubs, massage parlours, and dozens of nationalities gawping at HCMC’s most disadvantaged and exploited women and children. It’s one of those places where you can’t help but stare at the blank-faced gogo dancers whose bodies gyrate lifelessly on their podiums of derealisation. Then there are the girls outside the massage parlours, soliciting their services with damp eyes and blurred make-up to men of all ages, even those holding their girlfriends’ hands. Few of them look older than the age of consent. I suppose all of this is quite ordinary in Southeast Asia. Maybe it’s just something I’ll have to get used to, I’m not sure yet.

One thing that I couldn’t quite believe, however, was the industrial-scale employment of children for profit. Well after midnight, you had children who looked no older than 8 or 9 years old walking up and down this street of sin touting sunglasses, fans, magnets, and other trinkets. What made it worse was how confident they were in their role. Pulling on the shirtsleeves of European strangers and waving their goods in their faces, perma-puppy dog eyes on display as they trudged up and down, unable to fully conceal their innate childhood boredom. The more you sat and watched, the more you saw how co-ordinated it all was. The older children kept an eye on the younger ones and the few adult minders cast a watchful gaze from a distance, selling nothing and relying on the sympathy dong doled out to the tired and exploited children.

There were also the men with roses, who carried their two-year-olds in their arms, trying to sell their flowers while their children yawned into their necks. It all begged the question, “How much money are they really making to sacrifice the well-being of these children?”.

Then there were the fire-breathers. These women walked up and down Bui Vien Street with a bottle of petrol and a stick on fire. They shoo tourists away and blow flames into the air, grimacing their way through painful performance after painful performance. The heat pricked my skin some five or six metres away, and I couldn’t help but think about the anguish that they couldn’t even hide from their expression. After blowing another blaze, they’d walk around anyone who might’ve seen their feat, holding out a basket for money. In the two hours that we sat there, I didn’t see a single person pay up for this unwanted spectacle that they’d involuntarily bore witness to.

I’m not one to judge how other people make their money. I understand that desperate circumstances call for desperate measures, believe me. But it didn’t seem like they were earning anything with these hopeless, despairing tactics. Maybe I’m approaching this from a position of privilege or naivety, I’m not sure. It just seems that in a city overflowing with low-skilled, minimum-wage work (the number of cafes I’ve been in with two staff for every customer), there are better options than spending your nights breathing fire for no one or ruining a child’s sleep cycle for extra pennies.

I found the whole experience quite surreal and ultimately depressing.

This is one street, though, and in no way bears any reflection on the city as a whole. I’ve been to two incredibly impressive gigs - one indie rock and one hardcore - and the people are overwhelmingly wonderful. We also stumbled across the Teqball World Championships that were being hosted in the city. If you haven’t heard of Teqball, don’t worry - neither had I. It’s essentially a cross between football and table tennis, with a slightly curved table. Thailand dominated the finals, winning the men’s, women’s and mixed doubles, as well as the women’s singles. It was a truly international affair and reinforced my love of live sport, something I’ve missed profoundly over the past 12 months. We were also fortunate enough to attend a magical Christmas concert with an international orchestra and choir which gave us a taste of festivity that we’ve missed so much this year.

HCMC is a city that I’ve found so much more delightful than I have despairing, it’s only the despairing is far more illustrative, and I’ve always been better at complaining than I have at showering praise.

Speaking of complaining, the plastic! Oh, the plastic. If the rest of Southeast Asia is anything like HCMC then I see the urgency of our global situation. If either us or our children are expected to drown in a sea of plastic then these guys will be the first to submerge. Most people here seem to be born with at least one iced tea in their hand and they’ll die sucking on a plastic straw in a plastic cup in a plastic bag in a plastic grave.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

But this is just Ho Chi Minh City. I’m sure I’m yet to see the ‘real’ Vietnam, and I can’t wait to discover more of this perfectly paradoxical country.