A Different Kind of Vietnam

From the top of the Rex Hotel, one cannot see across Saigon (officially, Ho Chih Mihn City or HCMC). Not to the river, not even to the downtown core. The hotel is not high enough and there are too many buildings in the way. A shopping centre spreads out across the street; skyscrapers poke up all around.

One can see, however, a thing that makes Saigon unique in Vietnam: an intersection that is gratuitous in its length and width. Le Loi has eight lanes of traffic that run northeast away from Ben Thanh Bus Station. Nguyen Hue, running northwest to southeast in the direction of the river, has four. Both roads are divided by large, long islands of greenery and palm trees.

This isn't what I've been used to over the past three weeks. Streets in Hanoi's Old Quarter were roughly four meters of actual road, with maybe an extra meter or so of sidewalk on either side - just enough room for motorcycles to park there. My bus from Hoi An to Nha Trang couldn't pick me up at the hotel because the street was too narrow. All throughout Vietnam, there hasn't been enough room for all the cars and bikes and people all at once.

Except here. Back at the same intersection, the sidewalks in front of the department store across the way are at least four meters wide. Motorcycle drivers - "you need bike?" - can lounge, parked, until they find a suck, er, customer and still allow for other people to walk by, four or five across.

Even the storefronts are broader. The vendors and silk merchants of Hoi An could have probably won the prize for commercial density - greatest amount of capitalism per square centimeter. But the retail shops and restaurants on this corner would not look out of place in Europe or North America. They are spacious.

I do not suggest that Saigon is the City of Excessive and Eternal Space; there are still tiny places. My hotel is on a little alley about three meters wide and I've noticed shops in other areas of town where the owner's home is tucked in the back or up a narrow set of stairs. I have had to step out onto the street to get around bikes and noodle stalls.

Some places, though, like the intersection at Le Loi and Nguyen Hue and the positively imperial roundabout at Ben Thanh, are exceptions that are unique to Saigon.

Saigon's website notes that, during the late nineteenth century, the French administered the south of Vietnam differently from the rest of the country and poured a lot of money into city. They made Saigon "the Pearl of the Far East". So history seems to account for the difference.

But whatever the reasons, Saigon has come a long way from its beginnings as a small Khmer fishing village to become a cosmopolitan city. It's just different from the rest of Vietnam.