Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [58]
For some visitors, the war is their primary frame of reference, and such historical hot spots as the Reunification Palace rank highly on their itineraries. Yet the city pre-dates American involvement by several centuries, and not all of its sights revolve around planes, tanks and rusting ordnance. Ostentatious reminders of French rule abound, among them such memorable buildings as Notre Dame Cathedral and the grandiose Hotel de Ville – but even these look spanking-new when compared to gloriously musty edifices like Quan Am Pagoda and the Jade Emperor Pagoda, just a couple of the many captivating places of worship across the city. And if the chaos becomes too much, you can escape to the relative calm of the Botanical Gardens – also home to the city’s History Museum and zoo.
Ho Chi Minh City and around | The City |
Dong Khoi
Slender Dong Khoi, running for just over 1km from Le Duan to the Saigon River, has long mirrored Ho Chi Minh City’s changing fortunes. The French knew the road as Rue Catinat, a tamarind-shaded thoroughfare that constituted the heart of French colonial life. Here the colons would promenade, stopping at chic boutiques and perfumeries, and gathering at noon and dusk at cafés such as the Rotonde and the Taverne Alsacienne for a Vermouth or Dubonnet, before hailing a pousse-pousse (a hand-pulled variation on the cyclo) to run them home. With the departure of the French in 1954, President Diem saw fit to change the street’s name to Tu Do, “Freedom”, and it was under this guise that a generation of young American GIs came to know it, as they toured the glut of bars – Wild West, Uncle Sam’s, Playboy – that sprang up to pander to their more lascivious needs. After Saigon fell in 1975, the more politically correct monicker of Dong Khoi, or “Uprising”, was adopted, but the street quickly went to seed in the dark, pre-doi moi years, and by the seventies had gone, in the words of Le Ly Hayslip, from “bejewelled, jaded dowager to shabby, grasping bag lady”.
Today, however, Dong Khoi is enjoying a renaissance. Its eclectic melange of buildings – from grand colonial facades and slender shophouses to unlovely concrete-slab buildings – is crammed with souvenir shops and designer boutiques catering for the current wave of tourism, with a massive development called “Times Square”, half-way down the street, set to transform the street’s image yet again in the near future.
Ho Chi Minh City and around | The City | Dong Khoi |
Notre Dame Cathedral
Straddling the northern reach of Dong Khoi is the pleasing redbrick bulk of the late nineteenth-century Notre Dame Cathedral. Aside from the few stained-glass windows above and behind its altar, and its marble relief Stations of the Cross, the interior boasts only scanty decoration, but there’s plenty of scope for people-watching, as a steady trickle of Catholics pass through in their best silk tunics and black pants, fingering rosary beads, their whispered prayers merging with the insistent murmur of the traffic outside. A statue of the Virgin Mary provides the centrepiece to the small park fronting the cathedral, where cyclo drivers loiter and kids hawk postcards and maps. Take a close look at her face, as on occasion locals swear they have seen her shed tears.
The cathedral’s twin compass-point spires were, for decades, one of Saigon’s handiest landmarks, but they’re now dwarfed by the glass facade of Diamond Plaza, one of the city’s gleaming shopping malls, and by the telecom tower above the General Post Office, east of the park. A classic colonial edifice unchanged since its completion in the 1880s, the GPO is worth a peek