Touring Vietnam: Transition Stage: Hoi An to Sai Gon (through Da Nang)

Early morning sun from the bus

The transition day started at 5 AM! I thought I was on holiday! We got back into the bus to head to the airport in Da Nang, about an hour's drive away. We checked in at Da Nang for the flight to Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, after Anastasia had distributed quite a bit of her stuff between others to get under weight limits. She's volunteering in Vietnam for a week after the tour and is carrying a range of dental supplies and tools (she's a dentist, I think I've mentioned; one of two in the group!).

The flight was uneventful and could have been a domestic leg between any two cities.

Another bus from the airport into Saigon. Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon to the locals) is a bustling Westernised Asian city with fabled scooter traffic. It has much more car and truck traffic in the city than what I'd seen in Hanoi, the only other bigger city in Vietnam. The most surprising thing to me was the very tall street trees in the old part of town (District 1). They are very tall, topping five-storey buildings.

Really tall street trees in Saigon


Street scenes of Ho Chi Minh City

On the way to our hotel, we did some city touring. First stop: the War Remnants Museum. This was a very sobering account of the Indochina/Vietnam/American war. Many exhibits of truly horrific scenes in Vietnam and account of the lies and futility of the French and then the Americans over the period since the end of WWII. The ripples of the war are still being felt in Vietnam (4th generation people suffering from Agent Orange/dioxin poisoning). I didn't take many pictures here out of respect. The story told in the museum is (rightly) one of horror and the dismay of the Vietnamese people for the injury perpetrated upon them by colonialists and then by apparently well-intentioned allies when the civil war was raging. The American action in Vietnam can only really be described as an over-reach.


An outline of Australia's involvement	A summary of the cost of the war in humans

Next stop, the Independence Palace. This was the residence of the President of South Vietnam in Saigon and is famously the place where the Vietnam War ended when North Vietnamese tanks breached the gates. The President of South Vietnam was compelled to surrender.


Saigon's equivalent to the White House	The gates that were breached to end the war

The white building is the mid-ground
is the one, apparently

Then we drove around to the (replica) Notre Dame cathedral and the 19th century Post Office building. This sight-seeing stop also afforded a photo opportunity of the building from which the last helicopter left Saigon at the end of the war. Apparently, the building in the famous photo was the CIA building in Saigon, not the American Embassy as reported.

Another bus ride to the Saigon Markets where we had Pho at the restaurant where a Vietnamese President once had some. It was very good! A distinctly different style of Pho from the northern versions.