Ho Chi Minh Still Saigon To Many Full Of Memories For Many Travelers, Today’s Vietnam Offers Many Westerners A Taste Of Home
Among the bottles of Bacardi, Jack Daniels, Gordons and other elixirs beneath the mirror at the River Bar sits a gallon jar of snake wine, the black coils of the reptile visible in the murky brew.
Across from the bar, two Brits and a Vietnamese woman play at an old, ornate pool table, the kind with nets to hold the pocketed balls. A small lizard breaks from behind a potted fern, runs up the wall and disappears behind a speaker pumping out Whitney Houston music.
The bar opens onto the narrow, humid street. A light rain beats a wet tattoo on the dark pavement, reflecting the red neon glow of the New World Hotel across the way. Mosquitoes mill about in the heat, too tired to bite.
Cyclo drivers, recumbent on the seats of their battered buggies, motion furtively at the three dozen Germans, French, English and Americans inside, hoping to earn a $1 bill by selling a 20-minute ride or a flip-top box of 20 filtered marijuana cigarettes.
The bureaucrats call it Ho Chi Minh City. But to nearly everyone who lives there, this is still Saigon.
There are more and more expatriates swirling about in the eddy of humanity on the streets of old Saigon these days, particularly since the U.S. embargo was lifted in February.
Backpackers hike by in twos and threes, passport cases dangling from their necks, following copies of “Lonely Planet” guidebooks like divining rods. Middle-aged French tourists wander about, taking in glimpses of their lost colonialism.
A former GI ambles by, having returned to the scene of his shattered youth, still lean and fit from a war once forgotten by many and now revered by some.
Western business executives cruise like big ships in a vast pedestrian sea, towing beggars in their wakes.
Most who come through town are immediately awed by the place. By the sudden explosion of 100 motorbikes roaring off from an intersection. By the soup sellers who serve their salty, fishy basil stews from sidewalk kettles. By the entrepreneurial determination of 7-year-old postcard sellers who call you “Cheap Charlie” on your way up the block and smile at you like you’re an uncle on your way back.
All of this can be very new and exciting. But the sheer energy of the place saps even the most hardened travelers. Most get so homesick that at times it seems they might even consider selling their briefcase for a good hamburger and a cold Corona.
Thankfully, there are a pleasant handful of bars and restaurants that cater to expats without losing the frontier feel of this honky-tonk town.
Next to the River Bar, which is at No. 5 Ho Huan Nghiep, a few steps from the Saigon River’s inky waters, is an Italian restaurant whose interior is adorned with Italian travel posters and a mural depicting junks on Ha Long Bay.
Two women from Marseilles savored plates of fettuccini al basilico Genovese and spaghetti with olive oil, olives and green peppers. One of them, a frequent visitor to northern Italy, said the pasta was cooked to a proper chewy firmness, and the basil tomato sauce was a richness of pleasant spices.
The restaurant’s prices were a little less than $4 per entree. The two women were back two days later. The food is so popular that River Bar patrons have it served to them at one of the River’s wicker tables.
The River Bar attracts an assortment of people in their late 20s to mid-30s who are mostly in town on business. A shipping executive from Los Angeles was at the pool table, his skill with a cue stick declining in proportion to the beer he consumed. A dark-eyed Indian journalist from New York chatted with a marketing executive from Huntington Beach, Calif.
The patrons idled about, shouting conversation over the din, scanning the room for new faces and sipping beer from brown bottles whose labels have soaked off. In this town of minimal refrigeration, the bottles are chilled in vats of ice water, which by closing time are devoid of ice but full of limp labels.
The crowd is a bit different at the Apocalypse Now bar, a few blocks away at 29 Mac Thi Buoi St.
The Apocalypse Now is a darker, grungier, funkier place where backpackers and curious former GIs mingle with young Vietnamese. The cyclo drivers drift about close by the door, offering all manner of vice to patrons passing in or out. Pool players hunch by a felted table in the back, enveloped in concentration and cigarette smoke.
A Vietnamese barmaid with a radiant smile helps run the place. She shares bits of her life with the expatriates she gets to know. She says she will soon be married to the bartender, a handsome young man who lights the cigarettes of bar denizens with a shy grin. No, she says, within earshot of her betrothed, she does not love him, and is not sure if he is fully in love with her. But she says he is a good man who is good to her, so she will throw herself into the marriage with all she has.
She tells her story over the din of a stereo, which blares pop music beyond the reaches of distortion. The noise sends many patrons searching for a quieter drinking hole, which can be found at the Rex Hotel.
A former parking garage that was converted to a top-end hotel decades ago, the Rex has seen Vietnamese history march past in the square below it. Today the square is adorned with red posters of an avuncular Ho Chi Minh, who urges adherence to Marxist principles, while in front of him, street entrepreneurs sell model airplanes to Westerners. The toy planes, which are crafted from discarded Coca-Cola cans, fetch $1 apiece, helping Vietnam build its new market socialism from the scrap of capitalism’s most familiar icon.
The Rex lounge is a safe haven high above the street on the fifthfloor roof, a legacy of the time when sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Saigon could cost an American his life.
In these quieter days, though, the biggest danger at the Rex seems to be the possibility of suffering an overdose of kitsch. The place is an open-air patio adorned with great gray elephant figurines, fountains teeming with exotic fish, and other glitz. There is even a stuffed bear, its fraying pelt in need of a taxidermist.
Most people don’t seem to mind, however, and rather enjoy the idea of being able to get away for a quiet drink and a view of Saigon’s low skyline far from the noise and the crowds of the street below.
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with story: If you go HANG YOUR HAT: The riverfront Hotel Majestic was renovated recently. The Continental is also elegant, with rates around $100. The Caravelle across the street is less elegant and less expensive. Both are right in the heart of downtown. The Rex Hotel has rates in the $75-$100 range. READ ALL ABOUT IT: For information, get Insight Guides’ “Vietnam,” “Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia Handbook 1995” (Passport Books) or Lonely Planet’s “Vietnam.” For atmosphere, read Tela Zasloff’s “Saigon Dreaming” (St. Martin’s Press), and, of course, Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American,” (1956, Viking Press).