Day 12 – Ho Chi Minh City

January 5th 2009

Our last full day in HCMC, up at 9am for breakfast then back to the room to check our plans and pack the bag for our wander round.

Out the door on to Nguyen Hue and the first thing that hits us is that it's a hot one today, going to be a real test of the acclimatisation we've thought has been going well. Not only is it sunny, which makes a world of difference, but it seems to be quite humid compared to what we've got used. So the pace of today will be necessarily slow.

All the museums and public attraction buildings have lengthy closing times for lunch – a throw back to the French now doubt! - so timings are also going to be difficult to manage as it's unlikely given the heat we'll actually fancy any lunch today to fill that gap.

Turning down Le Loi (Lay Loy – Vietnamese not French which was my first thought), one of the main boulevards, we take our time walking down to the main market in HCMC, Ben Thanh. This is a part locals part tourist market, which is good as we don't feel isolated from the everyday goings on, and is within a market building as opposed to being outside. All the guidebooks warn to be aware of pickpockets here, happy to report nothing missing, I can see why, the walkways between stalls are incredibly narrow with each tiny stall seemingly having at least 3 late teenage girls working on it. They're quite tactile in trying to get you to stop, so in all those hands it wouldn't be too surprising for the odd wallet to go missing. Clothes are the main selling point, and while I've no doubt whatsoever they're all fake, seeing Ralph Lauren shirts for £3 brings a smile. Walking past the stalls eventually brings some desperate “what are you looking for” from the stallholders, suspect anything you said they'd rush off elsewhere and get it. I eventually buy an iconic Vietnamese flag t-shirt and have fun with the bartering, not done it for years but the old techniques come flooding back. You actually have to remember not to be too harsh, the sums aren't actually much to us, so I'm happy that my T-shirt comes down from 55,000 to 40,000 – less than £2 in the end...

While there's the odd fan in the market it's pretty stifling so we escape outside and after a hundred yards dive into a bar/coffee house for air con and some drinks, I become weirdly enthralled by a TV programme on the life of the, not particularly good, Argentinian tennis player Juan Ignacio Chela – well, I haven't actually watched TV this holiday so it's just novelty value I suppose!

Next stop is the Reunification Palace, which we know will be closed at this time but are hopeful we can get into the grounds for a walk round. This is the place the Communists headed straight for when they entered Saigon and scene of the iconic photo of the tank passing through iron gates. While we don't get in we can clearly see the building from the fence and it's a strangely modern affair considering it used to be the old palace of the president. Then you realise that it was bombed twice by disgruntled South Vietnamese air force officers so it's actually a 1970s building. The tanks and a jet fighter in the grounds all add to the effect.

Bit more walking and we're into the afternoon, the heat is really getting to us now so we find another cafe, Arnolds, for another 7Up and air conditioning while we wait for the War Remnants museum to open.

The War Remnants museum is one of those places where you don't really want to go but you sort of have to. Put together almost instantaneously by the Communists when they entered Saigon, it's been open for visitors since September 1975 (the same year they took over the south). At least they've changed the name, used to be called something like The Museum of War Crimes against Vietnam, but I don't suppose that really drew in the French and American tourists, and while the French get away with it a bit, it's the Americans who obviously bear the brunt of the propaganda. I think propaganda is just about the right word here, it's very obvious that the wording and “quotes” used are all trying to portray a strong message of pure US atrocities in the area and without being intimate with the history of the conflict there's a large number of photos which could easily be construed in a number of ways. I have to shy away from one section of the exhibition, seeing the pictures of the child victims of the chemical warfare is too much for me. Ultimately it's the plainly obvious message that war is terrible and the stats behind it are just incomprehensible. Sarah observes in a children's art competition showing pictures of peace etc that there is a clearly indoctrinated message being put across – this isn't free thinking art of children we're looking at, so perhaps there is an undertone to Vietnam in general that has simply passed me by.

We take a stroll back to the hotel via the City Hall to shower and have a rest before another, more gentile, evening in HCMC. The heat has taken its toll so we certainly need the break.

A guidebook recommendation is to go for cocktails at the 10th floor bar of the 5* Caravelle Hotel, as it's just round the corner would be rude not too so we duly oblige. Get a good balcony seat with good views around. Strangely our own 3* hotel – which we can see clearly from our perch – has a much better view from its 11th floor restaurant but sitting outside on the balcony is very pleasant indeed.

A couple of cocktails later, a whopping bill – the guidebook said Happy Hour, it was wrong – and we head to Lemongrass, the restaurant we were unable to get into last night. This time we're successful and have a very good set meal, the cheapest one it turns out at only $12 a head, but genuinely the one we wanted.

Back to the hotel for the last time and packing up again, our pickup is at 9am tomorrow morning to take us back to the airport for our flight to Da Nang and hopefully some R&R in Hoi An.