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| Rooftop Bar - Lief Hotel, Saigon |
We have a photo album of our visit which you might want to visit.
At the end of our river cruise we were dropped at one of the big hotels in the central business district. A posh hotel outside of our price range. We grabbed a cab to the "Lief" Boutique hotel which is just a little outside of CBD. Cabs were reasonable and a good way to get around the busy streets. There's a major construction effort ongoing in the city to build/extend the underground system but we never took any public transit.
The traffic in Saigon was simply shocking -- it made Bangkok, Songkhla, Siem Reap and Phnom Penh all look like a walk in the park. Streets were packed with cars and many small motorbikes which seem to take no heed to any traffic rules. You'd find them zooming down the wrong side of the street driving against the traffic. You'd see them loaded with impossible parcels -- we saw one guy packing a mattress and box spring onto the back of his bike, I wonder if he made it home? Another time we saw a fellow with a rider on back holding onto a full sized door and frame perched between them. I wonder how that went. And when they weren't parked on the busy sidewalks blocking all pedestrian traffic you'd sometimes see them zooming down the sidewalks to pass stalled traffic! Near the cathedral we witnessed a motorbike being bumped by a car as everyone tried to merge through an "anything goes" intersection. He just righted his bike and continued on. It was amazing, I couldn't imagine driving in the city. Fortunately we had hired a guide and driver to help us along.
We booked our hotel through the Agoda web site: it's one of those booking agencies like hotels.com, priceline.com, expedia.ca, etc. However, they seem to have better penetration in that part of the world. We booked the hotel under it's old name "I am Vietnam", it has only recently been rebranded as "The Lief Boutique hotel". We were on the patio one morning as they installed the new signage. It is a newer, modern, stylish, fresh, well equipped, low-rise hotel in a French colonial/Art Deco style with a ground floor restaurant and patio (I enjoyed my breakfasts on the patio every day, we had a late lunch on the patio another day) and a roof-top open air bar. It's down a narrow alley off a side street and a little hard to find -- fortunately the taxi got us there safely but he had to ask for help. We were warmly greeted by the staff on duty and treated to a cold drink (some kind of sweet iced tea) while we awaited our room. Our large front corner room on the third floor had a curved floor to ceiling window overlooking the neighborhood with a small balcony off the side of a small eating area. We had a comfy king sized bed, nice bath, a small kitchen facilty, and air conditioning! We were happy, we really enjoyed our room. The hotel also hosted a roof-top happy hour on the 7th floor (I think that's the floor number -- it's not a great tall building) which had good views of the surrounding neighborhood and the city center off in the distance. We took advantage of the sunsets from the roof top on several occasions. I would not hesitate to recommend this hotel. And, as it was outside the CBD, it was much cheaper than the down town hotels.
Since we were only in the city for a few days, and it's a huge city not so easily managed by folks like ourselves, we had arranged several tours ahead of time. On the Thursday evening when we arrived we were picked up at our hotel by our guide Lin (we had her for Thursday and Friday) and taken by car to the Saigon Opera House to see the "Teh Dar" show. The opera house is a classic French colonial building and a landmark in the city. We were encourage by our friends, Paul and Sandra, back home to see a different, but similar, show -- the AO Show which was on tour at the time. Both are visual spectaculars with lots of very athletic actors performing well choreographed feats of coordination and acrobatics -- something like the Cirque du Soleil troupe in North America. The "Teh Dar" show is a celebration of the culture of the hill people of Vietnam and the performers were dressed accordingly -- none of the fluff and neon of Cirque du Soleil. In fact often times they reminded us of primitive cave men. We enjoyed the show -- it's all spectacle with rhythmic chanting, banging of drums and acrobatics on huge sticks that they formed into moving patterns that they clambered about on. There is no language issue, it's visual and rhythmic.
That night we were shown the Notre Dame Cathedral which is very near the Central Post Office -- both of these and the Opera House are well preserved buildings from the French Colonial period. Lin told us the cathedral is an exact replica of the one in Paris -- I've seen both, it's impressive yes, but no where near as big or impressive as the real Notre Dame! After the show Lin took us to our late night dinner at the "Time Bistro", a second floor restaurant nearby specialising in Vietnamese Cuisine. It was nice enough but not very spicy. The local wines in SE Asia are usually pretty awful, the imported stuff is very expensive. The street nearby was quite busy with lots of neon lights in celebration of the Chinese New Year. A pedestrian mall between the two streets was busy with people enjoying the evening. The sidewalk was a bit of a danger with motor bikes parked and sometimes driving on the pedestrian right of way. Lin was happy to take us for a walk to see more but we decided to head home.
The next day, Friday, Lin (our guide from the night before) picked us up at our hotel in the morning with her driver. Our adventures for the day involved a trip out of the city to see the Chu Chi Tunnels (Viet Cong tunnels from the war) and a return to the city for more sites. On the way out of the city we stopped at another lacquer and handicrafts factory. This factory was special as the workers were all handicapped -- all victims in one way or another of the "War of American Aggression" (land mine victims, birth defects because of Agent Orange). The Chu Chi Tunnels is quite a large complex of huts and hidden tunnels which would have been constructed to hide Viet Cong and North Vietnamese "insurgents" who were trying to unite their country. In some measure it's a pretty sad place, but you'd never know that by the tourists who seemed to be having great fun posing with tableaus of incredible hardship during a nasty war.
We had a spicy lunch on our return to the city (Lin had taken our comments from the night before to heart), then vistited the very old Jade Emperor Pagoda (a Chinese Temple that Obama had visited in 2016), then the War Remnants museum, and finally the Independence/Reunification Palace. For us the whole day was an insight into the Vietnam War. The photo exhibit at the War Remnants museum was particularly moving -- the "Napalm Girl", who now lives in Canada, is instantly recognisable.
On Saturday, our last day in Saigon, we went on "Sophies Art Tour" which is billed as a journey through Vietnam's art history. This was recommended by Paul and Sandra (they also recommended the Opera House show) and it's well worth recommending to the reader. It's a small, no more than a dozen, conducted tour with an "art consultant" (ours was a Brit named Stu) -- "tour guides" must be from Vietnam -- who takes you around to some of the very small private galleries to show you art works and explain their historical context. The tour starts at a downtown restaurant where we met -- we took a cab from our hotel. We're given some of the historical context starting around 1930 when a school of art hosted by the French started -- before that "art" was more "crafts" than art. For example, the lovely works at the lacquer factories are crafts where a fairly static work is repeated by craftsmen. Art for arts sake is apparently a rather recent notion (it might also have something to do with the affluence of the culture -- to be wealthy enough to be idle).
We visited private galleries. There is a City Museum of Fine Arts, which I understand is well worth a visit.
Of the works we saw there were a couple that impressed us. At the "Lotus Gallery" we were taken to an upstairs office and shown some examples from a folio of drawings made by a North Vietnamese soldier during the war of "American Agression". The Viet Cong/Vietnamese documented the war with patriotic sketches of life in wartime much the same way that photographers would. The art works were in pencil, chalk, carbon from burnt sticks, etc. .... from whatever was at hand. Photography wouldn't have worked as well with the heat and humidity, besides, the equipment at hand was pretty primitive. You could carry a pencil and paper pretty easily, a dark room would have been hard. And the artist was a soldier as well who would have been involved in fighting as well as documenting the war. Some of the works are obvious propaganda of the time but others were more thoughtful moments of soldiers at ease captured in a quick sketch. I'm ashamed to admit I can't remember the artists name. I know that I was saddened to see their deterioration into brittle, yellowed, aged paper. I asked why these had not been digitally scanned to preserve them. Apparently, in Vietnam, there are no copyright laws and they are concerned that the artist's ownership will be lost to a digital world.
Another exhibit at the "Hien Minh Company" (antiquarian and gallery) was the art of Nguyen Thi Hien. A woman whose work seems to have been very much inspired by Europe. One was like a Modigliani, another like Picasso. A lovely, but fading, portrait of a young girl was painted on a piece of wood from a dresser drawer. And on the other side a landscape painting. A patriotic painting of a woman soldier on burlap was sadly falling apart. Her work would have been condemned as "decadent" during the early communist regime and we're lucky that this much has survived.
The final galley was "Salon Saigon" located down an alley in what had been a private residence -- formerly the home of Henry Cabot Lodge during his stay as ambassador to South Vietnam. This was a very modern gallery, well lit and cared for with a performance space as well as exhibition halls with very modern works of art. There were some lovely pieces there -- contemporary and sometimes a bit edgy.
Sophie's Art Tour was an informative tour that we thoroughly enjoyed.
The tour dispersed in the early afternoon and we got a ride home in the tour van with Stu -- it turned out he lived down the street a bit from our hotel. We had a late lunch on the patio of "pho soup", enjoyed a final sunset evening at our hotel roof top bar, and a final night time stroll through our neighborhood.
The next day, Sunday, we left Saigon and flew to Darwin via Kuala Lumpur. We enjoyed our visit to Saigon and may return another day. Kate tells me there's things to see in Hanoi and it would be nice to see some of the countryside too.
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