Ho Chi Minh... or Saigon as the romantic in me prefers was indeed unexpected. In the most wonderful of ways. I came to that city, with no concept of what it was and left with a yearning to come back.
The air is thick with an old school charm, a kind of exciting uncertainty and the scent of romance of the long forgotten colonial type. It's indescribable but oh so palpable, your heart races, your dreams seem electrifyingly tangible and just within reach, if you stretched just that little bit more.
It has the air of something that time forgot, or almost forgot, and you expect to see the old school english tourist who considers himself a traveller (for a tourist and a traveller are very different things you see) in his khaki's "discovering Asia" and "finding himself", walking at you from around the next corner. It's a little like the feeling one gets when you walk into Temple Gardens in London, only there you get magically whisked away to the era of Dickens and Great Expectations instead.
Travel at night, by motor bike, I beseech you, it's the only way to see it. Be an armchair (or any chair for that matter) anthropologist at one of the many intimate, tucked away little cafe's. Cry for the lost humanity at the War Memorial Museum for it gives you an understanding of the people of this wonderful city.
Then leave and yearn to return, for at the end of all this you will have left your heart in Saigon. The distant strains of the Saxaphone solo from "Last Night of the World" bidding you a bittersweet farewell at the very edges of your consciousness.
Image courtesy of Image37 on Flickr.
