It took a lot of traveling to make it from the eastern United States to south Vietnam, and then my first full day after arrival had been spent on a tour outside of the city. This Friday was the first opportunity to explore Ho Chi Minh City itself, a vibrant and rapidly growing urban area with its own unique characteristics that stood out from the many other cities that I've visited before. Most locals still refer to the city by its previous name of Saigon which Americans tend to associate with its fall to North Vietnamese forces in 1975. That's ancient history to most of the people living here, however; the bulk of Vietnam's population is under age 30 and the Vietnamese War (or the American War as it's called here) doesn't have much relevance these days. Almost the entirety of Ho Chi Minh City has been built in the last 50 years and more new construction seemed to be going up everywhere. I only had one day to spend touring around the city and I planned to see as much as I could.
I was up early again this morning with the goal of getting a fast start on sightseeing. Liz had a few more work tasks to finish up so I planned to head out by myself for a couple of hours before returning back to the hotel and setting out together a bit later on. These pictures were taken immediately outside our hotel at the traffic circle where the Bach Suites Saigon was located. This place was known as Ho Con Rua, or "Turtle Lake" when translated, though there were surely no turtles here in the middle of this dense urban space. I wasn't exactly sure what purpose the central tower served aside from serving as a nice elevated spot to take some pictures of the surrounding businesses. It was a muggy morning which fogged up the camera lens despite my best efforts to keep it clean. And despite the early hour, Ho Chi Minh City's legendary traffic congestion was already building up to another fine showing.
My first stop of the day was the pictured War Remnants Museum (Bao tang Chung tich Chien tranh) which was conveinently located only about four blocks away from our hotel. This was a perfect place to visit first because it opened very early (8:00 AM) and it wasn't one of the attractions that Liz had much desire to see. As the name suggests, this museum is dedicated to telling the story of the American War from a Vietnamese perspective, complete with captured US military equipment prominently displayed in the outer courtyard. These include helicopters, fighter aircraft, bombers, tanks, and several artillery pieces. I arrived just as the museum was opening alongside a tour group, making it look as if I were part of their group even though I wasn't. The entry fee was very cheap which was a great bargain for one of the top rated attractions in the city.
The War Remnants Museum contained a series of numbered exhibits covering different aspects of Vietnam's struggle for independence. This period of conflict lasted for more than three decades, starting with the Japanese invasion during World War II and then continuing against the French colonial authorities before culminating in the war between North and South Vietnam, the latter with major American backing. The information presented in this portion of the museum was heavily biased to the point of being outright propaganda, with the United States constantly referred to as "imperalists" and the South Vietnamese government dubbed as "collaborators". By contrast, the North Vietnamese military was always presented heroically and as the rightful leaders of the independence movement blocked by traitorous opposition from the south. On that note, this museum was originally named the "Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes" before switching over to the more neutral War Remnants Museum title in 1995 after relations were normalized with the United States. I wasn't bothered by this clumsy, Soviet-style effort at slanting the information on display, just be aware for anyone traveling here that you won't be getting a neutral perspective on the very complex and confusing events that characterized this conflict.
There was a better exhibit in the next room which was dedicated to photography taken during the American War. This is probably because it wasn't created by the propaganda department of Vietnam's government, instead having been put together by Random Publishing House and gifted wholesale to Vietnam in 1999 as a reconciliation gesture. This exhibit had a collection of some of the best wartime photography of the 1960s and 1970s, with some absolutely mesmerizing images of the toll that the war was taking on the American GIs and the Vietnamese population. I was struck in particular by the picture of the plane falling out of the sky in the fourth image above; that's not a computer-generated scene, it's a real plane captured a split second before it hit the ground and exploded. Visitors should be warned that these are uncensored images and you will see some graphic depictions of dead people which I've avoided including here. The whole thing was a gripping showcase easily worth the minimal price of admission to this museum.
Other exhibits at the War Remnants Museum focused on war crimes that took place during the conflict. These were absolutely real and sadly tend to happen in every war, with the museum focusing in particular on the horrific massacre of civilians at My Lai. (There were plenty of photographs of the carnage inflicted by American soldiers which I will avoid posting.) The museum is right to include these events and bear witness to the abuses carried out by the American military. What it should not do is imply that these war crimes were commonplace which was not the case; the slaughter at My Lai stood out specifically because it wasn't something that typically took place, and attracted heavy criticism back in the United States once it became known. The War Remnants Museum would do better simply to present the facts of what happened (which were plenty bad enough!) rather than employ its over-the-top propaganda to each exhibit. This was more appropriate in the separate exhibit detailing the effects of Agent Orange, which the US military sprayed indiscriminately and led to horrible birth defects for many children in the affected areas. This was one place where the heavily biased tone of the museum was justified given what happened to local civilians for generations afterwards, and the exhibit also recognized the efforts that have been taken by the USA in the decades since to help the people and regions affected recover.
The exhibits on the ground floor of the museum were not as interesting. They leaned more heavily in the direction of propaganda, valorizing individuals who had fought on the side of North Vietnam and praising the efforts of its government to achieve victory in the war. I was amused that there was a whole section dedicated to listing the countries that had backed North Vietnam... only to see that they were comprised of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellite states along with Cuba and a handful of communist-leaning nations in Latin America. Generally speaking, I wouldn't go advertising that your closest allies were the USSR, East Germany, and Cuba! This portion of the museum was more skippable and I didn't spend much time here. The exhibits on wartime photography and Agent Orange were easily the best parts of the overall museum and I would recommend them to anyone with an interest in this period of history.
After wrapping up at the museum, it was a walk of only two blocks eastward over to this building, now known as Independence Palace (Dinh Doc Lap). Although this building is a tourist attraction today, it formerly served as the presidential palace and seat of government for South Vietnam from 1966 until its capture in 1975. Independence Palace is best known for being the symbolic location where a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates on April 30, 1975 to seize control of the palace and bring an effective end to the war. Sure enough, there's a North Vietnamese tank on display here on the palace grounds although I was disappointed to read that this was not the actual tank captured in that famous video footage. Entry to Independence Palace once again required only a nominal fee of a fee dollars and it seemed to be packed full of local school groups on the morning of my visit.
The interior of Independence Palace has been restored to the conditions in which it would have appeared in the late 1960s when it was serving as the government headquarters for the Republic of (South) Vietnam. These pictures were all taken in rooms used for various state functions which felt like visiting a time capsule and being whisked back to 1970. The room with the yellow coloring was the state banquet hall which could accomodate as many as 100 guests and was used for the inauguration of General Nguyen Van Thieu as president in 1967 (after his successful coup). The room with the circular table was the Cabinet Room used for meetings of the president and his ministers, and then the large room with the red carpet was a conference room where state receptions were held. There was one detail here which was not period-accurate: the flags of the Soviet Union and North Vietnam (now also the flag of the unified Vietnam) hanging on the wall. I feel secure in stating that those wouldn't have been present when the government of South Vietnam occupied this building.
These were pictures taken on the second floor of the palace which was used for smaller events with more exclusive guest lists. There were presidential reception rooms with some impressive designs on the carpets intended to symbolize the Republic of Vietnam. They also featured a bizarre throne-like chair for President Thieu to sit in which didn't really fit with the notion of South Vietnam being a nominally democratic country. (Which it was not; South Vietnam was more accurately described as a military dictatorship although North Vietnam certainly wasn't any better in terms of political freedoms.) The double staircase leading up to the second floor was certainly impressive in its own right, impressive enough that visitors were blocked off from using it and had to use a much less impressive set of stairs over in one of the side wings.
The upper floors of Independence Palace had an eclectic series of additional rooms on display for visitors. The room with the fancy wood paneling was the Ambassador's Chamber where foreign ambassadors would officially present their credentials to the government. The amount of attention lavished on this room may be a function of the fact that South Vietnam was heavily reliant on foreign support for its continued existence, and indeed it didn't survive for long once American military support was withdrawn. The palace also had its own small movie theatre for entertainment, complete with a very bulky film projector that definitely looked like it had come out of the 1960s. There were a couple of game rooms here with tables for playing mah jong or billiards, and then the roof contained a helicopter landing pad with a captured American helicopter as a wartime prize. A South Vietnamese pilot who was actually a communist spy flew overhead and dropped a bomb on the palace here in 1975, without causing any damage but which shook President Thieu enough that he fled the country a week later. He was right to do so too as he almost certainly would have been executed if captured.
These were a few pictures taken from the rooftop looking out at the palace grounds and the surrounding city beyond them. Independence Palace was maintained in excellent condition and the grounds served as a green space in the otherwise urban sprawl. Even though it was still morning, it was already starting to grow very hot outside and I was glad any time that I could get out of the sun. Ho Chi Minh City doesn't have hot and cold seasons (it's always hot), instead having wet and dry seasons due to the influence of the monsoons. The rainy season runs from May to November and our trip was taking place just as the dry season began. That was better than being inundated with constant rain but it did mean a couple of days with intense heat that reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit / 32 degrees Celsius with little cloud cover. I made sure to purchase a bottle of water here at the palace to stay hydrated.
The tour of Independence Palace also allowed visitors to descend down to the basement floors which were considerably less luxurious and intended purely for efficiency. This was where a bunker was built to shelter against bombings and where military staff organized the ongoing war effort. These rooms were full of maps detailing the position of various military units along with desks where secretaries would have collected information and typed up official reports. Several of the rooms still housed 1960s-era communications equipment, huge machines designed to capture and broadcast radio transmissions. The whole place felt dark and dingy and claustrophobic, a complete contrast to the official state rooms found on the upper floors. If the gilded rooms upstairs were intended to be a shining illusion about the vitality of the South Vietnamese government, these basement levels were the harsh reality of a nation caught in a death struggle for survival.
Included down here was the president's war room where President Thieu could retreat to direct operations if the situation was too threatening on the upper floors. There was also a bedroom down here for the president's use as well which I thought was a grim commentary on the whole situation. If the president of a country has to sleep in a reinforced underground bunker out of fear of being assassinated, that's a sign that the government probably isn't going to make it in the long run. The remainder of the basement contained an industrial-sized kitchen where huge meals could be prepared for the receptions upstairs, and then this presidential Mercedes-Benz which had been used by President Thieu in the early 1970s. It looked like it would have been a nice ride at the time and was surely a nice symbolic prize when captured by the North Vietnamese. Finally, there was also a gift shop here with the typical souvenirs for sale; I checked it out without finding anything that I liked enough to purchase.
Just across the street to the south of Independence Palace was Tao Dan Park (Cong vien Tao Dan) which is one of the most popular parks in downtown Ho Chi Minh City. This is apparently one of the largest parks in the city and previously used to hold a bird park which has since been removed. Tao Dan Park was not crowded on this morning as I strolled along its paths, finding a series of statues of different individuals including one to Gandhi for some reason. There was a small shrine in the center of the park which has the name Temple of the Hung Kings but which I wasn't able to find any more information about aside from the name itself. It was pretty in the park though and nice to get a chance to wander through some greenery amidst all of the buildings. From here, I headed back to the hotel to meet back up with Liz and head out together for the rest of the day's sightseeing.
Our first shared destination was Notre-Dame Cathedral of Saigon (Nha tho Duc Ba Sai Gon), a Gothic church from the French colonial period located only about three blocks east from our hotel. Notre Dame of Saigon was built during the 1860s and 1870s before being officially dedicated in 1880 and was one of the landmark structures in colonial Saigon. The French were long gone by the time of our visit but the cathedral itself remains, still ministering to the sizable Catholic community that lives in Ho Chi Minh City. Unfortunately the cathedral was under heavy construction at the time of our visit when prevented us from going inside; here's an image of the interior pulled off the Internet. Notre Dame of Saigon reaches a height of 58 meters / 190 feet atop its two bell towers, both of which were still working despite the construction as we could hear the bells tolling the hour throughout our time in the city.
The cathedral may have been closed but this pedestrian street next to it was very much open for business. This was the Book Street of Ho Chi Minh City (Duong sach Thanh pho Ho Chi Minh) with more than a dozen different booksellers grouped together with printed materials for sale. I enjoyed the bookstore operating out of an old bus as well as the colorful displays advertising individual books. There was a poster here for the Vietnamese translation of the Harry Potter series as well as something called the Little Cats Bookstore which had adorable kittens on their sign. I particularly liked this poster with an 1898 panoramic view of colonial Saigon which had many recognizable sights despite the massive changes that had taken place since then. The cathedral was visible, the old post office that we were about to visit was there, Tao Dan Park was easily spotted, and even Turtle Lake next to our hotel was present as a little circle! We had a good time wandering around Book Street for a little while though our lack of knowledge of Vietnamese kept us from purchasing any books.
Right next to Book Street and the cathedral was another structure left over from the colonial era, the Saigon Central Post Office (Buu dien trung tam Sai Gon). Still a working post office today, it was constructed between 1886 and 1891 and is now a tourist attraction. The building's exterior contains plaques commemorating important scientists and engineers from the 19th century, with names including Morse, Ampere, Volta, Ohm, and Faraday. Inside the building were two large paintings on the walls on either end of the structure, one depicting French Indochina and the other portraying a map of Saigon, both as they looked at the time of construction in 1892. These were snapshots looking back into the past when Saigon was the capital of a growing French presence in the region. When we visited we found that the post office building was still a flurry of activity, both full of tourists who had come to see the historic structure and also people looking to use it for actual mail. There was enough stuff on sale here that it felt more like a miniature shopping mall than a post office.
We were in the oldest part of the city by this point, officially known as District 1 as it runs alongside the Saigon River, and there were more historic buildings scattered all over the place. This was one of them, the Ho Chi Minh City Opera House (Nha hat Thanh pho Ho Chi Minh), which was another building constructed during the French colonial period and dating back to 1900. Despite the opera house name, this building served as the seat of South Vietnam's parliament between 1956 and 1975 before being converted back into a theatre again after the North Vietnamese conquest. It was designed to resemble the Opera Garnier in Paris and can seat up to 800 guests at a time for performances. On the way back from my tour the previous day, we had driven past the theatre in the evening and the whole building had been lit up with bright colors. That wasn't visible here in the daytime but the place still had an elegant (if somewhat gaudy) appearance due to its French fin-de-siècle stylings. The French might have built this place for their own use but the Vietnamese are the ones who get to enjoy it today.
Yet another building from the colonial building was this structure that today serves as city hall. Officially known as Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee Head Office, the city is governed out of this building which dates back to 1908. It is not open to the public and therefore we could not visit the interior, though I was able to take these pictures from the public square located outside, both with and without including the statue of Ho Chi Minh that stands on the grounds. City Hall sits at the end of a long public thoroughfare that runs down to the waterfront at its other end and which I should have tried to capture in a photograph. This historic building is apparently a very popular place to take photos in Ho Chi Minh City and the whole place looks great at night when it's illuminated in bright colors. There was hardly anyone here when we visited though, as 11:00 AM on a Friday morning wasn't the busiest moment for photo opportunities.
We walked down Dong Khoi street which is one of the biggest shopping areas in Ho Chi Minh City, noting with surprise how many of the businesses were decorated for the Christmas holiday. After a few more blocks we reached the waterfront area by the Saigon River where there was a small public park with a statue of the 13th century military leader Tran Hung Dao. I know very little about Vietnamese history prior to the colonial period and this individual wasn't someone familiar to me. We found ourselves arriving at a station for the Saigon Waterbus with views looking northeast towards a cluster of new skyscrapers headlined by Landmark 81, the tallest building in Vietnam. The Saigon River was the whole reason why a city existed here in the first place, and it looked much like yesterday's Mekong River with a brownish coloring and lots of plant debris floating on the surface. By this point we were looking for a place to get lunch and hoped to find some kind of restaurant along the water.
That hope proved to be a failure as there wasn't much in the way of commercial development along the river banks. The only building that we saw was a ferry terminal which had a small cafe inside, serviceable for getting coffee but not what we were looking for. Maybe there were more options further off in the distance, where we saw a building shaped like a traditional Chinese junk, but not here where we found ourselves. After walking around a bit, we ended up eating lunch at a place called Runam Bistro which served sandwiches and rice bowls. We were mostly happy to get out of the sun for a little while and have some water to drink given that the heat outside was only getting stronger as morning turned into afternoon. From here, we continued following the waterfront for a few more blocks until reaching one of the city's more modern attractions:
This was the Bitexco Financial Tower (Thap Tai chinh Bitexco), a skyscraper that was briefly the tallest building in Vietnam before being surpassed by the aforementioned Landmark 81. The building has a height of 262.5 metres / 861 feet and serves as a tourist attraction thanks to its observation deck on the 49th floor. The ground levels of the tower are essentially a big shopping mall which we had to pass through before reaching the elevator up to the observation deck, once again another place featuring Christmas trees and faux snow that would never fall naturally here. Once we made it up to the observation floor, we found a small exhibit on the traditional Vietnamese dresses for women named Ao Dai along with this gift shop with various tourist stuff for sale, including a game of "Saigon-opoloy" that did not appear to have been licensed by Hasbro. The main reason for coming up here was, of course, the views of the rest of the city:
They were truly spectacular from this high vantage point and helped capture the sheer size of the surrounding city. We could see the waterfront that we had just left, the City Hall building and Tao Dan Park, and then the endless sequence of apartment buildings running off to the south and west. Ho Chi Minh City is a gigantic metropole with an estimated 22 million people living in the region as of 2024. It's also growing at an explosive rate, having doubled its population just between 2000 and 2024. This is very quickly becoming one of the premier cities in Asia as it follows the path of cities like Tokyo, Seoul, and Shanghai from a generation or two earlier. There isn't much popular awareness of Vietnam in the United States outside of the war fought there, but seeing Ho Chi Minh City from up here really put the upcoming nature of the country into perspective. I'm sure that anyone visiting a decade or two from now will find further growth as the city and country continue modernizing at a furious rate.
We also stopped to take a quick selfie up here just to prove that we had been the ones visiting and I wasn't just grabbing random images off the Internet. Once again I want to emphasize that it was really hot for a day spent walking around the city! 
The one other destination that we wanted to visit while we were over in this part of the city was Ben Thanh Market (Cho Ben Thanh). This was Ho Chi Minh City's historic marketplace, one of its oldest surviving structures and an important symbol of the city. Ben Thanh Market had its origins in 17th-century street vendors gathering together near the Saigon River before being formalized with this structure, completed in 1912 after an earlier wooden version burned down. The market opens every day at 6:00 AM and stays open until 6:00 PM, at which time it converts into a night market and remains open for at least another four hours. The market is a pretty chaotic place but is loosely divided into four "gates" that specialize in different types of merchandise. We were arriving by the southern gate which features clothing for sale before passing into the northern gate which had fresh food of all types available. In all cases, the vendor stalls were packed extremely close together and it was necessary to shoulder past other visitors to get anywhere.
These are more pictures of Ben Thanh Market as we wandered around inside. Aside from the standard clothing options that I expected to see here (there were cheap knockoff soccer kits for pretty much any player imaginable), some of the goods on sale started to get more and more exotic. There were more coffee options here than I could have imagined, including some coffee beans that had apparently been given to animals to eat and then poop out which supposedly added to the flavor - ugh. If it was hot outside the market, it was absolutely unbearable inside between the confined spaces and the heat given off from all of the visitors. Readers can probably imagine that it didn't smell too great in the market either, between all of the people and the massive quantities of food on display. We were trying to find some postcards for sale and having a lot of difficulty, before someone finally offered us some postcards... which would have cost something like 25 dollars after doing the currency conversion. No thanks! I can't say I was surprised that the vendors here were trying to scam foreign tourists who might not know the conversion rate. We were starting to feel overwhelmed and a bit sick from the whole experience and didn't stay for long at the market. I was glad that we had taken the time to visit though as it was certainly memorable.
We walked back to the hotel to take a break for about an hour after visiting the marketplace. After having a chance to catch our breath and drink some more water, Liz went with two of her work colleagues to get a massage at the little studio pictured above. I came along for the ride and brought a book to read while they were getting those massages for lack of anything else to do. The rest of these pictures are street scenes that we captured while walking to the massage studio and they give me an opportunity to talk about the traffic experience in Ho Chi Minh City. To put it bluntly, the traffic in this city was completely insane, with motorbikes outnumbering cars something like 10 to 1 and traffic laws more of a suggestion than something actually enforced. The motorbikes routinely would hop up onto the sidewalk when traffic was running slow on the streets, and they would not stop for pedestrians in crosswalks; you had to walk out into oncoming traffic and rely on them steering around you to cross the road. Very nerve-wracking stuff for someone used to Western countries even if this is the norm throughout much of Asia. It was something that I'd read about and seen on television but hadn't directly experienced myself before this trip - even the chaotic conditions in Bangkok had been tamer than this.
Finally, Liz and I went out that evening to get dinner at a restaurant over near the cathedral. This place was called Miyen and advertised Japanese fusion cuisine which we thought would make for a good change of pace. (Somewhat ironically, Liz never had the chance to get Vietnamese food during her five days in Vietnam!) The food here was indeed pretty good, except that they forgot about my order and didn't deliver it for something like 45 minutes after Liz received her food until we finally realized what had happened and prompted them about the mistake. Aside from that, it was a nice way to close out our brief time in Ho Chi Minh City. These other pictures captured some of the omnipresent street vendors who were serving up tasty meals in makeshift restaurants along the sides of the street, along with this huge bar with the sign advertising "Yo Beer" which was located just across from our hotel. That place was loud enough that we knew we didn't want to eat dinner there.
This was the only free day that we had to explore Ho Chi Minh City and I think that we were able to see a reasonable cross-section of its best tourist attractions in the limited time available. We were able to walk past the surviving historic buildings from the French colonial period while also experiencing some of the new structures going up that reflect the modern day Vietnam. I was happy that I had the opportunity to see the War Remnants Museum and Independence Palace that symbolized the war-torn past of this city even as it moves forward and embraces the future. Next up we would be traveling to Seoul as part of our return flights home, and the contrast between Vietnam and South Korea couldn't have been much more different. Vietnam in 2023 was where South Korea had been about 40 years earlier, and we would be traveling to a city which was further along in its development path. Our experiences there will be covered on the next page of this travel section.
