Vietnam/Cambodia Trip: Part 4 - Ho Chi Minh City

Over the summer holidays, my family went to visit my Dad in Vietnam for a holiday (he is based in Ho Chi Minh City), and we decided to head up to North Vietnam and Cambodia as well. This is the fourth of a six part blog series on the whole trip!

Part 1 - Siem Reap
Part 2 - Ha Long Bay
Part 3 - Battambang
Part 4 (this blog) - Ho Chi Minh City
Part 5 - Sapa and Hanoi
Part 6 - Mekong Delta and Cu Chi Tunnels


This blog is more of a picture blog, as it was the most chill and least touristy part of our holiday. My dad stepped up to be our tour guide and just took us to random places, so there's not much to talk about here.

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Ho Chi Minh City, VietnamHighlights:

Christmas Eve in a communist country was surprisingly very exciting and crowded

The general overstimulation of everything in your body; the panic you feel when you need to cross the road, the constant honking you hear from cars and bikes around you, and the sheer volume of motorbikes swamping the road

War Remnants Museum; it was an eye-opening experience that ripped my heart out of my soul

The shopping was fantastic because I could finally buy clothes that fit me!

Lowlights:

The food poisoning

Which meant we were too terrified of eating street food until towards the end of our holiday, so we didn't each much of that stuff :(

Weather/Environment:

Very humid and hot

A bit dusty, but not as bad as in Cambodia

Accommodation: We stayed at my dad's apartment here, yay for free accommodation!


Overall:
There isn't too much to do here so I wouldn't spend too long in Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon, for the older people, or for those who do not want to refer to the place by its communist name), unless you wanted to focus on the food and shopping. It gives you a good understanding of Vietnamese culture, but there are more interesting places in the rest of the country.

Christmas Eve

We arrived Christmas morning, and so Christmas Eve was our very first night in Vietnam, and what a night to experience Vietnam! It was seriously INSANE the amount of people that come out to celebrate a Christmas holiday, considering Vietnam is not a Christian country.

Here we were thinking that this was just a typical night in Ho Chi Minh City, when even my dad is stunningly surprised, yelling out to us over the roar of motorcycles, "I have never seen anything like this! There are SO MANY motorcycles!"

(Sorry, I'm not sure why you can't fullscreen it, but just click it to play/pause)
We went to the Nguyen Hue Mall, which is an outdoor pedestrian strip in the heart of the city, and it was incredibly crowded.

The City Hall

Statue of Ho Chi Minh himself
We also had dinner at the Bitexco Financial Tower, which is the tallest building in Ho Chi Minh City. It was a cross between my belated birthday dinner and a Christmas Ever dinner, together with a "We are finally reunited with Papa Lim" dinner.

We had the buffet there, and it was pretty great, although we do believe that this may have been one of the sources of our food poisoning.

Bitexco Financial Tower, tallest building in HCMC

War Remnants Museum

The War Remnants Museum is arguably the thing that stood out to me the most on my visit to Ho Chi Minh City.

It has really cool displays of military equipment, ranging from planes, to weapons, to little personal belongings of soldiers, which was all pretty cool.

There is one section where they show the torturous tiger cages that the Americans used on their Vietnamese prisoners, which was horrific and terrifying.

Description: "Tiger cages" are in fact special cells for the detention of political prisoners considered "stubborn" by the Saigon authorities. There are 120 cages of such type in Con Dao Island. Each cell measures 2,70m x 1,50m x 3m. During the hot season about 5 to 14 prisoners were kept in one cell. In winter time there was only one of two of them kept in it with their feet shackled to a long iron bar. Eating, drinking, sleeping etc... are only allowed in this place.
Narrow passages were reserved to jailers who went back and forth and were ready to harass the prisoners. Talking, laughing, coughing, even slapping on mosquitoes might serve an excuse for the jailers to use violent measures against the detainees. They injured them with sharp sticks or shovel lime on them. A lot of prisoners received serious burns or vomited blood.
The detainees' meals consisted of handfuls of rice of very poor quality and small pieces of decayed dried fish. Vegetables and meat were definitely non-existent. Each prisoner was given half a tin can of drinking water a day let alone water for bathing or washing. The lack of water was really a punishment inflicted on women, specially during their menstrual days.
Prisoners' health got worse day after day. Obviously, casualties among the political prisoners kept in "Tiger cages" were high.

The different torture techniques they used on prisoners. Definitely worth the read (click to enlarge the picture)
The most outstanding part of the museum, though, was the Agent Orange section, which was just a gallery of images of those affected by Agent Orange. It was so incredibly sad that I couldn't help but cry... a lot. In the end I just couldn't take it any longer and I had to go out and sit down, wiping my tears away.

"Only as little as 85g of dioxin could kill a whole city with a population of 8 million."

Reunification Palace

The Reunification Palace was pretty cool too. The outside looks really incredible, and when you go in there's one floor where you can look out and have a stunning view from the balcony.

It's so called because this was the building where the communist North Vietnamese came to an agreement with the South Vietnamese people, thus reunifying the land. It's also sometimes called the Independence Palace.

Apart from that, the building isn't that amazing to look at; it's mainly just an exhibition of how all the rooms of the building look. It can be interesting since they're done up really formally and neatly, but many of the rooms look quite similar and you can get a bit tired of it. I did enjoy the private cinema room they had though (of course).

Oh yeh, they had a tank out at the front too.


Miscellaneous

The Rex Hotel: dining on the rooftop made me feel like I was in the middle of a Hercule Poirot story and someone was about to drop dead at any moment. Oh, and they make a mean clam chowder, too.

Saigon Central Post Office: a pretty cool pit stop as you walk around the city

Inside the post office

Saigon Notre Dame Cathedral

Saigon Opera House

The American couple we met in Ha Long Bay recommended us this crab shop and it was actually really great. The place is PACKED and we had to go up to the fourth floor or something just to get a seat. It's also so good that another crab shop opened RIGHT NEXT TO IT with the EXACT SAME NAME (ain't no such thing as IP in Vietnam). The only way we knew which crab shop to go to was because I looked at the phone number on the business card and made sure it was the correct one.