Footloose on the Busy Streets of Saigon

This was going to be fun! Up and down Le Duan Street, where the U.S. Embassy once stood, laughing teenagers in denim and silk were racing their motorbikes, eating ice cream and smiling and waving at the American strolling toward Notre Dame Cathedral.

Then I met my Dien Bien Phu. I could not cross the street. There was no traffic signal, no policeman and no order whatever. The sea of motorbikes never parted.

“Ride, sir?” asked a cyclo, or pedicab, driver named Thien. “Yes,” I said.

I was in Ho Chi Minh City, by myself, after my wife and I had a disagreement about where to travel after the events of Sept. 11. She had said no way, nowhere--go by yourself. So I thought I would come to a land with which I had long been fascinated, a land of pagodas, Buddhist monks, prayer wheels and rice paddies. Thus, in January, I ended up in Vietnam.

The scene of the 20th century’s longest war is today an oasis of peace. Over eight days I found everything I was seeking: serene temples, jasmine and incense, straw conical hats, hushed children sitting cross-legged in the streets and painting in oils. I also found incredibly low prices.

With amazing ease, Thien pedaled me down Dong Khoi Street past art galleries and young women in orchid-and-white tunics selling roses. I knew Dong Khoi well--from novels and newsreels--though I was new here. It had been Tu Do Street during the Vietnam War and Rue Catinat under the French, who ruled here from 1859 until their rout by Gen. Ho Chi Minh at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

Thien dropped me off at a French cafe called Brodard, charging me about $3.30. I asked an Englishman at the next table how he dealt with the traffic.

“Just step off the curb and walk right into it,” Nick said. “Don’t stop or slow down or speed up or make a run for it. You’ll get the rhythm of it. Just remind yourself: They’re only these bloody little bikes.”

Brodard resembled an ice cream parlor in a small Provencal town, with ceiling fans and sepia paintings on caramel-colored walls. It was comforting and soothing, and it gave me the strength to grapple with Ho Chi Minh City again.

I came to Nguyen Hue Boulevard, a broad thoroughfare designed by the French, and froze. There were motorbikes as far as my eyes could see. I remembered what Nick had told me, but I just could not get off the curb. Then a girl, maybe 6 years old, stepped out smartly beside me, and I walked in her shadow to the other side.

I ducked into the marble-floored lobby of the Rex Hotel. Here, during the Vietnam War, the U.S. military briefed correspondents on the battles of the day.

Rooms at the upscale Rex were going for $49. At Ho Chi Minh City’s six five-star hotels, prices started at $80. Although I was traveling on a package in which individual costs were not broken down, I figured I was paying about $95 for a huge, bright room at the luxurious Sofitel Plaza, including a buffet breakfast with Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese and American food.

The Rex’s lobby was filled with Americans. While American visitors see Vietnam as a historic battleground, half of Vietnam’s 78.5 million people are under 20 years old, and for them the war is not even a memory. Over my five days here, older Vietnamese rarely made eye contact with me, but younger people smiled and often initiated conversations.

Americans have been visiting Vietnam in growing numbers since 1994, when the U.S. lifted the trade embargo that had been in place since 1975. Vietnam’s Communist government still forbids opposition parties but now allows much private enterprise and encourages foreign investment. I myself was staying in a French hotel and traveling on a Chinese tour package.

My Cathay Pacific holiday included a city tour with a guide. Pham Anh Ngoc was of college age, bubbly and giddy, and her tour on my second day in the city began this way: “Would you believe it? Long ago there were two Vietnams, a north and a south.”

Ngoc--her first name--told me I didn’t have to keep saying “Ho Chi Minh City” because everyone else still calls it Saigon. She took me to the War Remnants Museum, which is four galleries of photos and exhibits on what the Vietnamese call the “American War.” The photos were graphic and gruesome, showing massacres, beheadings, tortures and deformed babies. The museum was packed, and nearly all the visitors were American.

When I was finished, I found Ngoc under a tree. “So how did you feel about it?” she asked.

“It was a little unbalanced,” I said. “There was nothing about what the North Vietnamese did to the South Vietnamese. And some of the captions were false. But how do you feel about it?”

“Oh, I’ve never gone inside,” Ngoc said. “It’s just for tourists.”

After the tour, I got up the nerve to walk the four blocks from the Sofitel Plaza to Notre Dame Cathedral. The last street was the hardest, but I followed Nick’s advice and made it across.

Outside the cathedral, a woman carrying a basket filled with postcards and guidebooks pushed a thick book of Vietnamese postage stamps on me. For $7 it was a good deal, and I bought it. In seconds, every vendor on the plaza was on me, so I ran into a guarded orange brick building. It was the Central Post Office, designed in the late 1880s by French engineer Gustav Eiffel, a cavernous vault with 11 interior arches and, at the back, a painting of Ho Chi Minh. Ho was president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from 1946 to 1954, and then, after the partition into two Vietnams, of North Vietnam until his death in 1969.

Twelve long lacquered wood benches near the entrance were filled with people writing letters in longhand. Some used fountain pens. When they finished, they went to one of 37 windows, each labeled in Vietnamese and English. Although there were easily 200 customers in the post office, there were no lines.

Outside, the driver of a motorbike taxi, or honda om, offered to take me to Pham Ngu Lao, the budget hotel district where many backpacking visitors stay, for $2. Chung told me to sit on the back of his bike, holding onto his waist, and I began the most hair-raising ride of my life. We were inches away from the thousands of other motorbikes, weaving around trucks and buses and leaning over a bit too far whenever Chung took a curve. But after a while I started to like it.

For most of the 20th century, Saigonese traveled on bicycles. But in 1986, Vietnam’s Communist rulers evolved a plan called doi moi, “renovation,” to raise living standards and improve the economy. Under the plan, motorbikes became affordable. While $500 is more than a year’s pay in much of Vietnam, it’s only five months’ earnings in thriving Saigon, a city of about 7 million.

He dropped me off in front of the 333 Cafe, a long, narrow restaurant open to the street, across the road from an Internet cafe and next to a restaurant called Good Morning, Vietnam. In front, signs in English advertised pizza, hamburgers, Vietnamese food, vegetarian food, pastas and sandwiches. All the tables were taken but the front one, the one I wanted, and I ordered a bottle of water for 50 cents.

I soon learned why no one had taken the front table. Street hustlers offered me calculators that shot flames and dozens of other fine collectors’ items. Boys tried to shine my running shoes.

But the view of sidewalk life was worth the annoyance. A woman wearing fuchsia silk pajamas buffed the toenails of another whose teeth and lips had turned dark red from chewing betel nuts. A bicycle repairman found leaks in tires. Two high school girls in white silk ao dai--the national costume of tunic and matching pants--lifted their trouser legs as they walked through a puddle. A scribe battered out letters on a vintage typewriter. A pretty young woman wrapped mounds of sticky rice in banana leaves and handed them to a mother and a girl in a dirty dress. Two wrinkled women wearing conical straw hats carried a baby to a doorway and rubbed ointment on his red bottom. Coconut sellers balanced trays on bamboo rods.

I left to check out the dinner clubs on Dong Khoi, the Fun Zone, which runs from Notre Dame to the Saigon River. Maybe I could even find something authentically Vietnamese in this cosmopolitan city. Through the windows I saw an all-Vietnamese crowd at Paloma Cafe, so I took a seat at the dark walnut bar.

Paloma was decorated like a Spanish grotto, dark with strings of gold doubloons hanging from the walls. At one end of the room, an alto in a green ao dai sang sweet-sounding Vietnamese songs, and at the other, Elmer Fudd cartoons were showing on a big-screen TV.

From a menu that included beef stroganoff and tournedos in bearnaise sauce, I ordered grilled sea bass en croute with lemon butter sauce for $3. It turned out to be stunning, one of four great meals I had in the city.

Enjoying the show, I listened as a violinist played “Roll Out the Barrel.” I loved the sweet and dated innocence of Paloma, the boys bouncing on their father’s knees, skinny teenagers in bobby socks.

The following afternoon I took an air-conditioned taxi to the Saigon River. Taxis cost 65 cents for the first kilometer and were super-clean. Drivers always used their meters and never claimed to be out of change.

I was now down to five main streets that I couldn’t cross, and the highway along the river, called Ton Duc Thang, was one of them. I took one look at the traffic on Ton Duc Thang and ducked into the Lobby Lounge at the Renaissance Riverside, another of Saigon’s top hotels. A waitress wearing a light green ao dai brought me a Georges Duboeuf Chardonnay for $3, and bowls of cashews and crisp dried peas. I relaxed in a wicker chair, looking past the table of gleeful American men smoking Cuban cigars, and out the huge windows overlooking my dreaded Ton Duc Thang.

When I got up the courage to cross the street, I left. But the traffic defeated me again. A cyclo driver offered to take me across Ton Duc Thang to the river for 50 cents. He edged into traffic, made a U-turn after a few blocks, tried to sell me a massage, a watch and a radio, then deposited me on the riverbank.

That evening I added Le Loi, site of the Municipal Theater, to the list of streets I could cross without the aid of a child, as I walked to Augustin, a French restaurant. Its 11 tables were brightly spotlighted. On the wall were posters from the Cezanne museum in Aix-en-Provence, France, along with faux Renoirs whose Parisian picnickers looked Vietnamese. The sweet smells of olive oil and freshly baked bread filled the air. From a long list of classic French main dishes, I picked the canard a l’orange, since duck is a Vietnamese specialty. It was served with carrots and cauliflower, all wonderful. In time I got a bill for $14.

When I arrived at the nightclub Apocalypse Now, four blocks east, the Rolling Stones were singing “Brown Sugar” and Manchester United was playing Liverpool on one giant screen, and Britney Spears was on another. Ngoc, my guide, had told me her parents did not allow her to go to Apocalypse Now because it was no place for nice girls. A bad girl wearing a crimson top and a short black skirt told me the dancing would begin in two hours, at midnight.

I walked two blocks toward the Saigon River and crossed Ton Duc Thang--twice.

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Guidebook: Navigating in Vietnam

Getting there: From Los Angeles to Ho Chi Minh City, there is connecting service (with a change of planes) on JAL, Cathay Pacific, China Airlines, Philippine, EVA, Singapore, China Southern, Asiana, ANA, Thai Airways and Korean. Restricted round-trip fares start at $709.

Telephones: To call the Vietnam numbers below from the U.S., dial 011 (the international dialing code), 848 (country code for Vietnam) and the local number.

Packages: On the Web I booked a Cathay Pacific Holidays air, hotel, transfer and tour package from Hong Kong (Cathay’s U.S. offices do not offer these packages), including five days in Ho Chi Minh City and three in Hanoi with buffet breakfasts and lodging at each city’s best hotels, for $1,700, including a $300 single supplement. This was $350 less than the price of the individual components. 1111 King’s Road, Taikoo Shing, Hong Kong; 011-852-

2747-4388, www.cathaypacific.com/chl/eng.

Thai Airways has a six-night package to Vietnam from Los Angeles for $1,608, double, including air fare and a night in Bangkok, through its Royal Orchid Holidays division, (877) 484-2811, www.thaiairways.com.

Where to stay: Hotel Sofitel Plaza Saigon, 17 Le Duan St.; (800) 763-4835, fax 824-1666, www.sofitel.com; $106 double. Of the city’s six top hotels, this is the only one in a quiet neighborhood.

Rex Hotel, 141 Nguyen Hue Blvd.; 829-2185, fax 829-

6536, www.rexhotelvietnam.com; $59 double, $49 single. This upscale hotel is in the heart of the action.

Where to eat: Augustin, 10 Nguyen Thiep St.; 829-2941. French dinner for one with two glasses of wine, $14.

Paloma Cafe, 26 Dong Khoi St., 829-5813. Seafood dinner for one, with entertainment and two drinks, $7.

333 Cafe, 201 De Tham St.; 836-0205. Pizza is $2.

For more information: Embassy of Vietnam, 1233 20th St. N.W., Suite 400, Washington, DC 20036; (202) 861-0737, fax (202) 861-0917, www.vietnamembassy-usa.org/travel. (U.S. citizens require a visa.)

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Barry Zwick is a Times news editor.