Looking Back: Saigon

Saigon traffic infused with beer and night...

Saigon (June 22, 2002) — Delightful and disconcerting, Saigon is Vietnam on amphetamine. The ante’s always up in this city: where Hanoi slows down and shutters its windows, Saigon is just getting warmed up. Take, for instance, Notre Dame Cathedral: lit up at night in neon, it looks more like it holds a nightclub in its bowels than a nave. Saigon sprawls—not lazily, mind you—in all directions. And here, like elsewhere in Vietnam, yet more fiercely and savagely, cyclos and motorbikes dart through the streets, like swarms of two-stroke bumblebees spitting exhaust. They move en-masse, as if they possess—like insects or birds in flight—the preternatural ability to sense in which direction the congregation will move. And like this they continue, and occasionally one or two will fall off to drone down back alleys or splash through puddles and disappear.

We’ve started a new category on our blog called ‘Looking Back’ that will include an occasional entry from our journals that date back to 2001 when we first began writing about living and travelling abroad. We’ll present these paired with a photo in the form of a verbal postcard. Together, these postcards provide an (in)formal and often (in)coherent narrative of the trips we’ve taken!

1. Looking Back: Notre Dame, Saigon
2. Looking Back: Night Train To Varanasi
3. Looking Back: Bonavista Iceberg
4. Down and Out: Scammed in Ho Chi Minh City
5. Looking Back: The Agony and Beauty of Calcutta