Travel Diaries #44 - Sài Gòn
Comparison is the thief of joy, and take care when you travel to always be grateful for home
Welcome to the Travel is Dangerous newsletter - essays and stories about travel and what it does to us
20.
I have arrived.
Hồ Chí Minh City is the official current name for the place formerly known as Sài Gòn. Many people here still call it the latter, especially the ones who resent the communist takeover and hostile post-war renaming of the city in honour of the north’s venerated leader and liberator. A visiting friend once asked me why I call it Saigon and not Ho Chi Minh City, and once I’d thought about it it’s quite simple and apolitically motivated: one of the names has two syllables, the other has five, and I believe my brain and mouth have instinctively chosen the path of least resistance all this time.[i]
There’s a rivalry between the capital of Hanoi and the most populous city of Saigon, which goes back to the war and the bitter divide that once marked the country (North Vietnam and South Vietnam were two separate nations from when Vietnam gained independence from the French in 1954 and the end of the ‘Vietnam War’ – which of course is known as the ‘American War’ around here – in 1975), a divide which for many is still overtly evident in the cultural, social and economic divide between the two – the old North vs. South debate that I’ve been curious to learn more about throughout my trip.
‘They’ (who could be anyone from know-it-all ex-pat to fleeting tourist to Vietnamese native) tend to say that northern Vietnam is more conservative, more ‘traditional’, ‘more communist’; the people more reserved, colder, less friendly, less ‘Westernised’; southern Vietnam is the opposite to all of these things. To many, the two ends of the country are as distinguishable culturally and socially as Vietnam and Cambodia, or Vietnam and Thailand or Vietnam and any other country in the region.
I’ve been unsure how much of this difference I’ve observed myself so far, though I have only been in ‘South Vietnam’ for about 10 days. My fascination with these alleged idiosyncratic differences occupied much of my mind from when I crossed the now imaginary border between north and south somewhere between Dong Hoi and Da Nang. As I’ve found thus far, the spiritual line between north and south was blurry to the point of being completely arbitrary, if not backwards in many cases, and I’ve experienced incredible hospitality for the most part, along with the odd bit of belligerent hostility and rudeness of unfathomable sources, much like everywhere I’ve been in Vietnam, north, south, east or west.
Still, there are bound to be some colloquial differences between places as far apart as this elongated dragon-shaped land, my own eyes and ears in my relatively diminutive homeland being keen enough to tell the difference between the accents and the gaits and the distances between the eyes of people born and reared in neighbouring parishes that are no more than three miles apart, or so I believe. The tendency to compare when we travel is inescapable, even places that have no real right to be compared with each other, other than the fact that you’ve been to them both.
I arrive into Saigon by bus at 6am and look for somewhere to eat or grab a coffee until I’m allowed to check into my bedbug-infested hostel, in a cramped dorm with 20 beds, the sort of place where there’s too many people for anyone to talk to each other, though at least it forces me out into the city. Some young Vietnamese people sit on stools outside a narrow café on Lý Tự Trọng wearing sunglasses and smoking cigarettes, with long faces looking like they’ve been out raving all night and are resigned to psyching themselves up for a rollover today. The guy behind the counter also looks like he was on drugs last night – maybe this is what they mean by ‘more Westernised’. A shirtless guy staggers up to a double parked taxi and pisses on it, though I can’t see if he’s a local or a foreigner, and despite my curiosity I’m unsure why it matters which; either would have their pros and cons.
I’m not sure what to do with myself and so I revert to type and walk around in the muggy heat looking for the ideal café in which to sit and write. I continue to play “Who is the friendliest Vietnamese?” Against my wishes I immediately and constantly find myself wondering what it would be like to live here. I’m sure if I did I’d spend much of the time wondering what it would be like to live in Hanoi, and try to convince myself that the only thing Ho Chi Minh City has going for it are its nightlife and more abundant conveniences, compared to Hanoi’s lakes, green spaces, unique architecture, proximity to the countryside, diverse districts, small-town feel, navigable proximity to the jaw-dropping landscapes of the north, and the all-encompassing everyday culture shock that comes with living in the once-far-more-globally-isolated and traditional capital of Vietnam, that you really can’t buy anywhere else, not to mention the life and community and friends I’ve built up there having lived there for the last year and a half.
Still though – a change might be nice.
For old times’ sake I stroll down Bùi Viện street, the local version of Bangkok’s Khao San Road, i.e. a seedy backpacker hellhole, where I stayed for several days upon my first arrival to Vietnam at the beginning of last year, and thoroughly enjoyed.
I’m shocked to see that the rate of development down here is just as rapid and totalising as back in Hanoi, if not more so. You kind of assume some places have ‘arrived’ by the time you have gotten there, and that they must surely have already succumbed to modernity and globalisation to the extent that you are seeing them in their final form. In Vietnam I believed Saigon and Hoi An to be in their most evolved state the first time I visited them in 2016, and others to be less developed and therefore more susceptible to the impending gentrification so that they might catch up to the others (e.g. Hanoi, Sapa); though if anything the opposite is the case, and forward momentum seems to be self-perpetuating. Everything here looks like it was opened in the last year since I was in town, and the famous roundabout in front of the Ben Thanh market resides behind construction walls and is littered with cranes[ii].
Some things never change though, and the spirit of Bùi Viện is as I remember it, and no doubt has been for a generation or two. Although the actors behind the backpackers’ facades have no doubt changed in the intervening 18 months, the characters remain the same.
I tell myself I want to explore the Vietnamese side of the city and I do, and that I’m only on backpacker safari while I’m looking for somewhere to drink coffee and write alone, and watch the tourists file up and down the strip like herd animals. Maybe I wouldn’t mind talking to some of them, though I resist the urge.
I find myself envying their freedom, despite knowing nothing of their lives and not bothering to find out.
Ignorance is bliss, after all, and comparison with ignorance is the thief of both joy and wisdom.
Maybe I envy the fact that at some point – most likely one that’s already defined in advance – they can go home.
I don’t know what I want anymore.
To keep travelling or go home.
To follow the enjoyable road from safe harbour to safe harbour, have a few beers and act like you’ve seen the world.
Or to dust myself down every morning and keep ploughing dutifully on into the unknown.
To reach for the comforts of home and familiarity and tedium and stagnation, or to continue to explore ‘the real Vietnam’, as myself and everyone claims to aspire to want to do, though few ever get as good an opportunity to do so as I have had the past few weeks. It comes to mind as I sip a damp green bottle of Bia Saigon in an empty café that it’s been worth living in Hanoi for the last year and a half if for nothing else than what I’ve gotten out of this trip as a result of my familiarity with the country, rather than as a completely innocent and ignorant tourist.
But there’s a price to pay for familiarity as well.
To wake up or go back to sleep?
To go back to Hanoi and continue to try and make it a home away from home.
Or to pack it all, give up on the sunken costs, and go somewhere that I just know, from afar, I’ll fall in love with immediately, where life will be so much easier, where people will be – so they say – so much friendlier, where everything is idyllic and peaceful and simultaneously exciting and life-affirming.
You could have it all, if only you could decide where to go next.
I can’t decide what I want anymore.
I can’t even decide what to call this bloody city.
I’m just going to walk around and write some more.
21.
I go back and fetch my bike and try to drive around as many of the city’s districts as I can, which are numbered 1-24 in a way I always found crass, if not dystopian, and prompts an unconscious sort of touristic materialism that makes you want to visit each one for the sake of saying you have visited all of them. I drive along canals and drink coffee in cafes even more varied and abundant than back in Hanoi, which to be fair, is enough of a draw alone for me to visit any city. I enjoy the spicy foods, working out the different names for things (the vocabulary of the southern dialect differs by as much as a third from Northern Vietnamese), and comparing and contrasting everything between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
People seem happier here than there but sure how the hell would I know, it’s not like I ask them “Are you happier than people in the north of Vietnam?!? Tell me!”
What the hell does it even mean to go through a country and declare all the people to be ‘happy’? Surely it’s the dumbest f*cking thing you could think of in any given environment. I’m sure every last one of the nine million residents of Saigon is ‘grateful for what they have’ as well!
One thing that is fairly apparent is that it does feel like a ‘big city’, which is all in the vibe of a place rather than size; Hanoi does not have it, even though it certainly has the vibe of population density – it is spiritually a village. A café owner explains to me that “people move here” – that is, they move out of their parents’ homes and come to live here on their own. Some people even come from Hanoi just to do that. It seems that the northerners tend to live with their parents until marriage, and even then multi-generational living is the norm, though it sounds like it’s not necessarily the default here. Hung told me his son had moved here from Da Lat, actually, and works in IT, though I think I remember him saying he was ‘lazy’, or that he worried about him in some way. If my 18 year old son moved to Saigon I’d probably worry too.
I’m still trying to discern who the friendliest Vietnamese are, the sort of thing you grow to wish you’d never read or heard about, though feel like it’s okay to harbour prejudices about because so many of the locals do too. I think the north might be a simpler place, more conservative. I’m starting to get the whole ‘more Westernised’ trope, though it’s more a sense than something I can articulate – though maybe that’s exactly what it is: a spirit. Though as I walk along crowded roads past family shops, restaurants and stalls, the unmistakeable palate of smells and colours as distinct and deep as the bánh mì, I’m sceptical of the notion that this place is ‘less Vietnamese’ than Hanoi, or anywhere else – it’s just a different expression of it. If anything, it might be more Vietnamese than Vietnam itself, a hyper expression of it, no culture being ultimately idyllic, after all.
Beyond my naïve (ignorant, foolish, offensive) anthropological assumptions one thing I can categorically state as fact is that the bánh mìs here are exquisite, worth the trip alone. The ones in Hanoi are, like much of the food, functional and one dimensional. Here the patés and the spicy sauces burst with memorable flavours, the whole package of textures in the baguettes and vegetables a multi-dimensional feast.
The traffic is worse here, believe it or not. It’s more ordered, but there’s far more of it, and every block people slow down to wait in a crowd of hundreds at traffic lights, which I hate. I’ve grown too used to Hanoi’s ‘Just don’t hit anyone’ golden rule of the road, and the de-facto diplomatic immunity to traffic offences which (urban legend and ex-pat gossip has it) comes from most of the Hanoi police force not knowing enough English to give you a fine.[iii]
Saigon is brighter than Hanoi, which could be either due to present weather conditions or the city’s inherent state, though I believe it to be the latter, for the same reasons that one of Hanoi’s defining qualities, even on bright bluebird and smog-free autumn days, is that for all its Asian techni-colour and holistically sensual intoxication, it is a decisively grey place (it could be the East Berlin factor, the spectre of communism still hanging in the air).
On recommendation from some former-resident friends I cross the bridge from Bùi Viện to the hive of District 4, and realise that my notions of population density, overcrowding and the ‘community living’ of Hanoi’s labyrinths of alleyways is somewhat quaint when compared to the hyper-city living of the country’s most populous city (and one which is spiritually most definitely a ‘City’. The alleyways are somehow narrower, the homes smaller, the families occupying them larger in number, their members almost spilling out onto the roads from their bunkbeds which tower over gas stoves and kitchen implements – somehow, the population is even denser. Bikes whizz by at even closer quarters, people barely seem to take any notice of the near misses and tight squeezes. My friends told me they had a neighbour, a very elderly woman in her eighties, possibly her nineties, who had never left District 4 once in her entire life, not even to cross the river to District 1. It sounds bizarre, impossible even, especially when you consider practical and economic obstacles aside, the sheer abundance of wonder to be experienced in this country, which surely even familiarity of nativity can’t diminish entirely. Though I’ve had the sense from many people over my time in Vietnam that there are plenty of people who rarely leave their own district of Hanoi either, everything in their worlds being contained in little corners of cities, neighbourhoods and streets, all often possessing the noticeable quality of having all the same things as every other street (outside of the central area of the Old Quarter and its individualised traditional merchant guilds), and therefore all the essentials of daily, and even generational living, present for many people.
Still, that she may never have even seen the jungle that defines this wondrous place is a baffling consideration.
I visit the War Remnants Museum again, my first time of attending having been on my very first or second day in Vietnam, in early 2016. It’s still powerful, interesting, beautiful, horrifying in places, worth a second visit, and I would go again when I visit Saigon again. You’re a different river each time, and so on. By now I’d seen victims of Agent Orange, for example, and had travelled through regions I could see named in captions of photographs of devastation and war atrocities, and met so many old war vets still proudly dressed in fatigues with one leg cocked on the dash of their military tuk-tuk, motoring around Hanoi with a fag hanging off their bottom lip and a massive grin on their face beneath wispy moustaches, not a care in the world, visibly happy and just grateful for what they have.
Or so it would appear.
I go to the train station and send my bike back to Hanoi, and am resigned to spending the next day or two walking around on foot.
I wish I could drive the whole length of the country back to where I started, and take twice as long, though maybe it’s just because I’m dreading going back to Hanoi, back ‘home’ and back to work.
I continue to walk around and look for the ideal café to write in.
I try to write down all the ways I’ve changed on this trip, though it’s only been three weeks, and I’m not sure if I’ve changed or just think I should have because I’ve been on a road trip. Instead I end up making lists of resolutions of how I’ll change over the next few weeks when I go back, one of which is to ‘appreciate Vietnam more’, which is not really something you can just will into existence, despite what the Gratitude Practicers and the Yoga Pants Wearers would have you believe.
Or maybe my trip has just been a temporary escape after all, a holiday, and I’ve just being playing the role of tourist on a bike like all the others, even like that annoying German guy in Phong Nha, and when I go back to Hanoi I’ll just resume my role as another English teacher, an Irish guy in a shirt on long-term holiday like all the others, the settled backpackers of Hanoi.
Nothing changes, everything stays the same.
22.
At night I stroll down a wide boulevard and visit the Japanese district which is like a miniature version of Tokyo’s Golden Gai. I’m obsessed with Japanese things, since far before I visited the country for the first time earlier this year, since I was a child addicted to the dizzying rushes and mind-blowing adventures of Nintendo games. I’ve always wanted to live in Japan, and living in Japan was the main inspiration for me moving to Asia in the first place, though I ended up moving to Vietnam for practical rather than cultural reasons, even though Vietnam is about as far from Japan, culturally and by plane, as Ireland is from Istanbul.
I walk around imitation Japanese alleyways and wonder again, what it would be like to live there.
The Vietnamese staff in izakayas speak Japanese fluently, even having adopted the mannerisms and affectations of the language, all affected gasps and grunts of “Hai!”, which means something else in Vietnamese (it’s the number 2). The network of alleys in District 1 actually does resemble the back alleys of Tokyo. I drink a couple of beers in a Japanese bar and talk to the Japanese bartender about Japan. His name is Masumi. He’s polite and his mannerisms and command of English are kind of quaint even though he’s the same age as me. He’d like to travel to Europe and America but he’s worried people look down on Asians, and mimes spitting. Our conversation is stilted and a bit awkward, albeit genial. I get excited overhearing Japanese businessmen talk in groups, and recognising certain common phrases they use, though I don’t understand what they mean, and eventually it gets tedious not being able to talk to or understand anyone.
Still though, I really wish I lived in Japan.
I leave the bar when I accept that there’s no-one else in here to talk to and walk back out into Vietnam.
By now I am smoking heavily, drinking beer throughout the day and spending more time looking at my phone than at my surroundings.
I spot ex-pats from 100 yards by the way that they walk overlain their skin tone, a sixth sense I now possess. I wonder what it would be like to live here in Saigon, and not only that, what it might be like to never have lived in Hanoi, and if my life now would be better if I’d never made that decision, if I’d chosen Saigon instead, or some other country, if I’d gone back to Canada, or if only I’d gone to Japan, despite perhaps the slightly greater difficulty in following through on that dream, the ’practical reasons’ for choosing to live in Vietnam being that it required less effort to get there and would theoretically give me more opportunity ‘to travel’ – which is to say: go on cheap holidays around South-East Asia – and wonder too what the point of it all was.
In the morning I while away one last hour peeling the moist label off a green bottle of Bia Saigon at a street side stall on a blue stool. I’m still on holidays after all.
I’m done with the journey. I’m over it. Hanoi to Saigon by motorbike: the trip of a lifetime, though also a job I felt obliged to do just because I live here. Fed up with the adventure. That’s enough for one summer, for one trip. I’m burned out. I’ve no interest in anything here anymore.
By now I just want to go home. Back to Hanoi.
But really, I don’t.
I don’t know what I want to do.
I don’t know where I want to go.
If you enjoyed this, then make sure to Subscribe Now for more
Or feel free to share or leave a comment
[i] Sài Gòn is the Vietnamese spelling, most Vietnamese words having one syllable, place names like Ha Noi, Da Nang, Sai Gon and Hoi An and so on often being squished together so they resemble Western place names. If I alternate between the two it’s because I’m trying to honour the Vietnamese as much as possible, though often get lazy or careless, and the multi-syllabic English spellings of the renowned cities of Hanoi and Saigon are so prevalent as to be more ingrained in my mind than the Vietnamese spellings.
[ii] Note: this was in 2017; by the time I’ve written this and you have read it, whatever was built there is probably obsolete by now, and might have already been torn down so that a newer office block or shopping mall can be erected in its place.
[iii] Don’t take this as legal advice if you’re there in 2023
Good one. Let me know when you are in Japan. I moved 5 years ago.
Loved it....