Travel Writing | Pant Hoot | Online Travel Magazine

I stand at an ATM withdrawing Vietnamese Dong in quantities sufficient to fund a moon landing. Our ride holds up a misspelled sign amongst a waiting throng of touts. We honk our way into a swarm of traffic and the current washes us downtown.His name is Phong and he has a million questions. Where are we from? Where are we heading? We engage in friendly banter and subtly encourage him to watch the road. We hit a curb. It is a near miss. A Honda rider hurls abuse as he scoots by. Phong gives him a blast on the horn.

I stand at an ATM withdrawing Vietnamese Dong in quantities sufficient to fund a moon landing. Our ride holds up a misspelled sign amongst a waiting throng of touts. We honk our way into a swarm of traffic and the current washes us downtown.His name is Phong and he has a million questions. Where are we from? Where are we heading? We engage in friendly banter and subtly encourage him to watch the road. We hit a curb. It is a near miss. A Honda rider hurls abuse as he scoots by. Phong gives him a blast on the horn.

The journey from the airport is a thrill ride. Forget pony tailed geeks rocketing off cliffs on mountain bikes, real extreme adventure is negotiating traffic in Ho Chi Minh City. After several near death experiences we resolve upon our first rule of travel in Vietnam. Never look out the front window! We fear Phong has the same rule.He departs to ice his horn thumb and prepare for later life Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. We take the plunge and eat with the locals. The street food is amazing. We savour a delicious noodle stir fry that may or may not have contained the meat of the bovine creature named in the menu.

Later on foot we make our way to what appears to be a zebra crossing marked near universally ignored traffic lights. We marvel at the courage of local pedestrians as they wade through the motorbike river. We pause, suspecting that the marks on the road are merely used to consolidate pedestrian road kill to areas close to fire hydrants and storm drains. We take the plunge and follow a local. Soon we are experts at Saigon Frogger.

Ho Chi Minh stares from his bust inside the war museum. In a great irony he is now a marketable commodity much in the same way as Che Geuvara before him. His head is on tee shirts, caps and even chess pieces for sale in the markets. It begs the question - How do you retain authoritarian control when you cannot even control your iconography? Marxist heroes become trinkets for the bourgeoisie.

I take in the consumer branding that is everywhere, (admittedly most of it fake), whilst listening to old audio tapes on the museum loudspeakers eulogising winners of the Vietnamese Medal For Killing Americans. This week’s revolution proudly brought to you by Nike, or a reasonable facsimile of it. Is fake capitalism any less subversive than real?

Saigon literally buzzes with life and has an innocence that other places like Thailand lost long ago - Less of the glitzy neon, franchise shops and go-go bars that have diluted places like Pat Pong and Kho San road into parodies of Western fantasy. Here the action is alive outside not upstairs in a noisy club. At the end of the day there is nothing better than sitting in a wicker chair in a roadside café watching the street theatre of Vietnamese life.