Concrete Beauty
“All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.”
Christopher Morley
I peer through the window as we begin our descent; my first glimpses of Ho Chi Minh City. Even with my elevated vantage point, I can’t even begin to comprehend the scale of it. It is like New York City on steroids, street after street lined up into the distance, a tightly packed grid of intricately woven intersections and crossroads. It makes Hanoi look quaint. Its population is far smaller than that of Delhi, but the aerial view is entirely different – Delhi sprawls where Ho Chi Minh City is structured; compact in its magnitude.
(For clarity, I’ll refer to the city here on out with its acronym, HCMC, to avoid entanglement in its many monikers. The locals seem to maintain that it is Saigon unless official documents are involved, although even that has been made more the confusing with the official renaming of a certain district of HCMC as Saigon in the past six months.)
For all of its imposing size and shape, I find that I like HCMC almost instantly. This comes as a surprise to myself most of all. I’d been primed to dislike it by everyone I’d spoken to and all that I’d read: that what I’d find would just be another city too big and too busy to really enjoy, and lacking in the character that places like Hanoi and Hoi An were so known for.
I resent that rhetoric on arrival. While I agree that I’d left the charm of Hanoi’s Old Quarter in the north, that the many streets here are more so lined with modern, minimalist coffee shops than they are hole-in-the-wall restaurants lit up by a line of dancing lanterns. But character, HCMC has in abundance, both in the quasi-Parisian remnants of the French colonial times to the staggering glass buildings that identify it as one of Asia’s fast-rising metropolises.
But this is still Vietnam, so inevitably, the only appropriate way to see the city is on the back of a scooter. My guide takes me from historical landmarks to deep into the inner workings of the city, where everyday life continues on. A lady with a warm smile serves us up Vietnamese “pizza”, a crispy corn pancake topped concoction that I’m not quite sure about, although the tangy sweet sugarcane juice that goes alongside it washes away the taste.
And, of course, it rains: the first drops quickly turning to a torrential downpour encasing the peaceful temple we’re standing in. We wait a little while, until it shows signs of stopping before heading back out. But my guide doesn’t trust it, handing me an oversized poncho raincoat to don before getting back on the scooter.
She was right to, although the poncho only does so much good when the second onslaught begins. I hold on tight to the grip bar at the back of the scooter as my guide expertly navigates the rapidly gathering puddles and slick-wet streets. I don’t know how she does it; I can barely so much as keep my eyes open against the torrent of water rushing down.
Raincoat or no, I am soaked through by the time I return to my hotel, shivering slightly as the contrasting cool air conditioning sends goosebumps down my skin. Even still, it has been one of my favourite afternoons of sightseeing that I can remember. It feels fitting, somehow, to have seen the city both under brilliant sunshine and impressive rainfall, as two distinctive sides to this urban jungle.
I carry a raincoat with me for the rest of the night, so of course it stays dry, despite the lingering humidity from the day. I have dinner nearby, crossing through an intersection lit up like Times Square, enclosed by its glowing billboards. I stop by a jazz bar hidden in the dark entrance to what, at first glance, might appear to be a parking garage, but the band starts in on Auld Lang Syne, of all things. I don’t stay long.
I only have these few days in HCMC but I make the best of it, in a way that suits me. I spend a sweaty hour in the old post office, writing long overdue postcards to friends and family across the globe. By the time I’m done, I have become a tourist attraction in my own right, as an entire German tourist group stops to photograph me tucked up at one of the writing desks, a portrait of Ho Chi Minh himself hanging above, overlooking the entire building.
I stop by an art gallery, a confusingly organised building with a few other tourists and several concurrent engagement photoshoots. I take a sunset river cruise although the sun’s final moments are lost to the hazy, overcast skies, and the skyline does not quite lend itself to a tour like this, at least not in its present iteration.
I get rained on, again, furiously. I had my trusty raincoat, but my poor beaten-up sandals had only just dried from the day before. Everything I have with me seems to be slightly soggy, even as I pack up my freshly washed laundry ahead of the following day’s travel. That’ll persist, through Cambodia, through Thailand, the next two countries that lie ahead of me.
I’ll get used to it.
