The Johnsons' Journal

Well its actually both!

HCMC is the official name of the entire metropolitan area but Saigon is the name of District 1, which is the central area of the city and both railway and flight tickets will most likely refer to Saigon.

For the final stop on our North to South tour of Vietnam, we stopped in Ho Chi Minh City. Even though I think we would have preferred taking the train because its a bit more relaxing and romantic way to travel, but the journey from Hoi An would have been about 24 hrs by train which didn’t really sound like fun when we could take a 1 hr flight for about $60 instead.

This sounded like a great idea, until our airline, Jetstar, cancelled our flight and told us by email while we slept the night before our flight. Luckily we checked our email that morning before going to the airport. After a morning of hassling with re-arranging our hotels and arguing with the airline customer care. We ended up sorting ourselves out and flew to HCMC the next morning for the last time we’ll ever fly with Jetstar! Bitter? Me? Nah…

Since we arrived in the morning, we had most of the day still to tour around, so we made the most of it by checking out the War Remnants Museum. This museum, like in Hanoi and Hue had some military relics (mostly American uniforms, weaponry and vehicles) but also housed an extensive collection of very confronting photography showing the the tragic side of war including some very disturbing photos of victims of Agent Orange and malformed children which were attributed to the chemical’s use. It was a thoroughly depressing place and though one could infer a biased view of the events, it nevertheless painted a very thought provoking picture of the conflict.

Afterwards, we wandered around to a couple other tourist sites including the Reunification Palace, where the war ended. But nothing else was as interesting as the Museum.

As it turns out, there is really not a lot to do as a tourist in HCMC, as such, we were at a loss for what to do to occupy ourselves the next day. Until we read about the Saigon Hash House Harriers.

What is that you ask? Well, its a group of ummm, runners? Yeah we’ll call them runners. That get together every Sunday afternoon in Saigon, take a bus out to some more remote, natural area outside the city. And run (or walk for some). But not just any running. Its kinda like a game. Its a bit like orienteering, but instead of maps and compasses, there is just shredded paper on the ground as markers that you’re going the right way. Sometimes you get fooled and stray off on a side road until someone finds the right way and calls you back. Its actually quite fun, and was a great way for us to get a bit of exercise. Afterwards, the runners turn into drinkers and there was beer and rice wine aplenty to go around, including “punishments” for just about anything they can dream up, which basically require you to drink a bit more.

We all headed back into the city for dinner and some more drinks. It was a really fun afternoon and evening and we will probably be looking out for a Hash in other cities in the future. Apparently there are quite a few around.

The next day we decided to check out part of Saigon’s large Chinatown.

It was nice to get out away from some of the tourists, we got to see parts of the city that you just wouldn’t see if staying only in the central area, some good but some less so, but all interesting.

We made our way back to our hotel for the evening by motorbike taxi, as you do in a city so full of motorbikes.

We enjoyed HCMC and I think we were able to make the most of our short time there.