A Day in Ho Chi Minh City 

Text by: Jason Rolan

Photos by: Phoonsab Thevongsa 

Ho Chi Minh City has over 9 million motorcycles, and I think I was nearly run over by most of them. Crossing the street is a game of chicken, not for the faint-hearted. The trick, I was told, is to walk at a slow, steady pace and never stop, never run, and never make any sudden moves. The motorbikes will flow around you like water around a rock, as long as you don’t panic and give them a reason to reconsider. The city, formerly called Saigon, is steeped in as much history as it is in coffee, and today I wanted to take in as much of both as I could.

Stepping out into the historic downtown district, my senses were ambushed: traffic roaring past in a blur of horns, and the smell of food stalls lining the sidewalks where locals hunched over steaming bowls on stools barely big enough for a toddler. I dodged, weaved, and eventually made it to my first stop of the day, the Museum of Ho Chi Minh City, once Gia Long Palace, and before that, the residence of the Governor of Cochinchina back when France still called the shots here.

I like to start exploring a place at its museum. It’s cheating, really. An hour inside, and suddenly the streets outside make sense. This one walked me from ancient history all the way up to the American War, and out front sat a delightfully random lineup of vehicles: a dapper 1930s roadster parked shoulder to shoulder with war-era helicopters, as if history itself couldn’t decide what to display next.

Just north of there is the famous Central Post Office, which, remarkably, still has a pulse in the digital age, with locals mailing parcels and tourists gawking at the vaulted ceilings as if they’d wandered into a cathedral by mistake. It used to employ multilingual letter writers, hired to pen correspondence for the illiterate or for anyone sending word abroad. The last of them didn’t retire until 2021, at the very respectable age of 91. This man spent a lifetime writing other people’s love letters, and I think about him more than I probably should.

Naturally, I needed coffee. Vietnamese coffee comes in small, turbo-charged doses of a bitter black shot cut only by a stubborn centimeter of condensed milk pooled at the bottom of a handle-less glass. Stir once, then do as the locals do: park yourself on a tiny plastic stool and sip slowly while gossiping with whoever’s nearby. It usually arrives with a glass of hot green tea on the side, presumably so your taste buds have a chance to recover between rounds.

Caffeinated and slightly more reckless than before, I summoned the courage to cross a few lanes of oncoming traffic toward Notre Dame Cathedral. Its 58-meter gothic spires have been wrapped in scaffolding for renovation, but even hidden, the French grandeur leaks through. Every brick, tile, and pane of stained glass was shipped over from France, which feels like either great devotion to craftsmanship or a serious lack of trust in local suppliers.

A short stroll south, I found myself standing under the clock tower of Ben Thanh Market, one of the oldest buildings still standing in the city. Inside, over a thousand vendors hawk everything from cookware to keychains, and the food stalls are a battlefield of decisions, including pho noodles and banh mi sandwiches. I chose bun bo, a beef vermicelli bowl, and washed it down with yet another glass of rocket-fuel coffee.

From there, and roughly 6,000 racing motorbikes later, I reached the elegant Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts, once the mansion of a wealthy merchant family and now home to three floors of Vietnamese art spanning sculpture, oil painting, ceramics, and woodcut prints. Old guard and new artists share the walls. Somewhere among the bronze pieces, I found a sculpture of a Lao woman, and its beauty stopped me in my tracks.

By the end of the day, I’d earned a small education in Ho Chi Minh City’s culture, people, and history — and, most importantly, its coffee.

Getting there:

Lao Airlines flies from Vientiane to Ho Chi Minh City three times per week.