Cholon area of Saigon
The preferred currency in Vietnam is the US$. Surprising , Isn’t it? All major prices are in US$ and the only reason you may need dongs is that sometimes you have to pay under 1US$ and probably coins do not go. The higher rank hotels and restaurants quote first in $ and latter in dong, the local currency. Finally I went today to the bank and I exchanged $200 in dong, in this way being easier to buy pineapple or papaya on the street. Even in such a situation, in the market or even on the sidewalk, the change may come in US$ and dongs! The Americans are still in vogue in spite of the war and the past sufferings, Saigon is swamped by foreign investments. The inflation is high, the rate being somewhere around 1$=16000 dongs so today I got 3 millions dongs from the bank. I decided to stay in the city for the day.
The first part of my visit, that ended up taking almost the entire day was Chinatown named here Cholon. It’s a large area in District 3 that has lots of temples, Fujian style most of them, that are spectacular. I saw many other temples before but I think these are the best. All of them hang on their ceilings fumigating spirals and the fumigating sticks are everywhere giving a spectacular and mystical look inside. Also, they are the khang, a sort of oven outside, where they burn offering papers for the dead, this is being part of the ancestor cult where you mainly offer fake money that you may have to buy in advance. Even here the most desirable are stacks of copied US$100 bills that you can buy in the stores and burn in the khangs. I started a walk but eventually I hired a cyclo, samlor in Thailand, that brought me for a long drive to Cholon market. He dropped me in front of the market, and I paid him $3. He schemed me with the typical fifteen/fifty but when I was in the cyclo I was starting to feel bad because the road was very long just for less than a 1$. The market is spectacular, for most of the stuff from there I have no idea what they are. I roamed the market and shot spectacular footage, interesting stuff. Lots of tourist also in the market, being part of the city tour. The city tour was added in the recent years by the agencies but is rushed and incomplete so I decided to skip it. After I finished the market, I roamed the streets around it and I started to visit , first a church, Catholicism being extremely strong in South Vietnam, and latter all the pagodas one after another ending at the Cholon mosque. Some of the pagodas were hard to find so I went back and forth repeatedly to locate them. I took a motorbike to bring me to the center but this was lost in translation, if it existed something like this, and I ended up in Pham Ngu Lao, where is the hotel. Arriving there, I took a short pause for a beautifully decorated French ice cream, lots of fancy places like this being in Pham Ngu Lao catering mainly for foreigners, and I started to read the guide and noticed that I missed two more pagodas close to Cholom that are very important. So, I hired a motorbike for 40000 RT and I went there.
It is hard to describe the traffic in Saigon, a city with 8 million people and 3 million motorbikes that roam like flies the boulevards, streets and soys. The traffic is super chaotic, there are lights but most of the times motorbikes and cyclos run them. The only similarity would be a Brownian motion looking of lots of flies in a jar. To cross the street is an adventure and is a technique that you have to master; the flow of motorbikes is continuous and if you would wait for a lull maybe you may get one at 3am. So you start walking relaxed and slow in the middle of this mayhem and as long as you don’t make abrupt moves or want to be somehow creative, like stopping, the traffic will flow around you. If you choose to run, you get creamed. Period! The same rules apply when you are on a motorbike and you want to get into traffic on the other side of the street. No matter how heavy the traffic is you start getting out and crossing. The horns will blow out, there will be some screeches but you will be safe, hopefully, on the other side. Otherwise, forget about going out! There are very few cars in comparison with motorbikes, first because is impossible to park, and the motorbikes are parked in paid parking everywhere in town, and second you move slower in a car because you cannot get ahead. So, a lot of people prefer to buy motorbikes, that are more like mopeds than Harleys. The price is low, you can get one locally made with $300-400, but when you ride it you take your life in your hands , somebody told me that only in the last 10 days 200 people died in traffic in Saigon. In any case, the guy I hired brought me back safe from Cholon’s Gai Lam pagoda, a feat for which he tried in the last moment to add another 10000 dongs to the bill, the bonus that I was alive and I even shot video in traffic from the motorbike. After a short stint at Kim’s cafe to make arrangements for the Mekong trip I left in the center of town to go to Rex Hotel, that was the defacto command center for the Americans in the War. It has and had a terrace on top that is very neat. Now the Rex is just one of the hotels but still one of the glitziest.
The center of Saigon is in a boom and the landscape changes when you come from Cholon , that looks like a regular Asian town, or even from Pham Ngu Lao that is the backpacker area. Suddenly , when you come to the city center, restaurants are sporting prices 3-4 times higher that in the backpacker area, clubs abound, chicks roam the streets asking if you want massage and pimps come directly to you to ask if you want a lady. It is not exactly sleazy but definitely is a little unpleasant. When money talks , bullshit walks and this is valid in the Workers’ paradise that is Vietnam, that like the Communist China is a brutal capitalist society from where USA looks like a social state. I ate in a Korean BBQ restaurant, the ubiquitously bibimbap that was great and comes with tons of additions here, plus the local Saigon beer, and after I gave another tour shooting a little video, avoiding the girls and the pimps, I went back to the backpackers ghetto where the atmosphere was quite different. Obviously , the girls are looking for money and you cannot carry too much in a backpack, so in the backpackers area you are not hassled. After that again, the internet stint that was painfully slow last night and unusable in the entire area, a call home and a good sleep, and I was able to wake up at 4:00am. 2 more hours and I get in the right time.
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