Saigon: The Adventure Begins

Ho Chi Minh City, better known by its older name "Saigon", isn't my favorite place in Vietnam. As a city it's fine enough; bustling, busy, and chaotic, but I'm far fonder of Hanoi in the north. My adventure in Vietnam was going to begin here; in a city I've been to a handful of times but never really "clicked" with me.

Nevertheless, it does have a certain charm, and I spent the early afternoon walking around downtown near the old Saigon Opera House waiting for my old college roommate Dominik to arrive.

Back in college, we used to love watching reruns of the BBC auto show Top Gear. It was our favorite show to watch, and one of our favorite episodes was the 2008 Vietnam Special, in which Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond attempted to cross Vietnam from south to north on motorbikes.

Dominik had some time off before starting a new job and wanted to go on an international adventure, and almost as a joke, we talked about trying to recreate the Top Gear special. The joke turned into reality, and without very much advanced planning, we had agreed to meet up in Saigon to begin our two-week cross-country journey. As neither one of us has a motorbike license, however, we opted to hire a driver with a car to make the journey safer and more comfortable.

While waiting for his flight to arrive via Taipei, I wandered around taking in the sights. To my disappointment, the iconic Romanesque revival Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica was covered in scaffolding.

This was especially disappointing as it was also undergoing construction the last time I visited Saigon in 2022! I know that architectural preservation and restoration takes work, I just hope that I'm able to someday go inside the beautiful old French cathedral.

Crossing the road, I came to the Saigon Central Post Office, built in 1886 and beautifully preserved.

Today, you can still send a letter from the post office, but it's also now home to a number of souvenir shops and cafes. Officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, this is one of the world's few remaining Communist countries, but (like China) that doesn't mean that Capitalism and commercialism isn't very much alive and well. The government may be officially a one-party system, but the economy has been opened since 1986. In fact, no matter where you go in Vietnam, you never seem to be far at all from one souvenir shop or other.

Dominik arrived in late afternoon, and after dropping our luggage off at the hotel, we immediately headed out to see a bit of Saigon in the few hours we had in the city. First, we stopped in at the War Remnants Museum, the spot in which the Top Gear special officially started. We would be trying, as best as we could, to visit every place they did on their adventure nearly 20 years ago.

The museum holds a small but very well-preserved collection of machinery and artifacts from the Second Indochinese War, known locally as the "American War" (after all, it doesn't really make sense for the Vietnamese people to refer to it as the "Vietnam War").

After a short coffee break, we headed on to the Presidential Palace, the one-time residence and headquarters of the President of the Republic of Vietnam.

The massive presidential residence is an imposing example of Vietnamese modernism, its blocky exterior giving way to an interior filled with elegant Asian-inflected mid-century décor.

Built between 1962 and 1966 on the site of the former French colonial Norodom Palace, it served as the official residence and workplace of the presidents of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) during the final years of the Vietnam War. It was here, on April 30, 1975, that North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the palace gates and demanded the unconditional surrender of the South Vietnamese government, marking the symbolic end of the war and the reunification of Vietnam.

Walking through the Independence Palace today feels like stepping into a perfectly preserved time capsule of the 1960s. Reception halls, cabinet rooms, the presidential office, and even the underground command bunker remain largely unchanged since the fall of South Vietnam, complete with original maps, rotary telephones, vintage televisions, and period furnishings.

The palace itself is as much a political symbol as an architectural landmark. While much of the country endured conflict, instability, and economic hardship, the palace projected an image of order, prosperity, and elite privilege, with its lavish reception rooms, private apartments, rooftop helipad and dance hall, and sophisticated command center.

After the war, rather than erasing this history, the reunified Vietnamese government preserved the building almost exactly as it stood, transforming the former seat of a defeated regime into a museum where visitors can experience both its striking mid-century architecture and the setting in which one of the Cold War's defining conflicts came to an end.

Dominik was exhausted after his long flight from the US, so we returned to the hotel for an early night.

He had booked a room for us at the Sheraton Saigon Grand Opera Hotel, the very same five-star hotel where the Top Gear guys stayed at the beginning of their journey.

Each day, we decided to watch part of the special before bed, catching up to where we had traveled each day. I know it's super nerdy, but it was really exciting to look out the window of our hotel room to see the very same view that the BBC film crew captured of Saigon at night, and to see how much the city has developed in the past two decades. Vietnam has changed a lot since then. It's far more developed and modern, with towering skyscrapers, better infrastructure, and far fewer motorbikes. However, it hasn't entirely lost the chaos that gives the country so much of its charm.

We turned in early, ready for the next morning when our adventure would begin in earnest.