Huge fun on a Vespa Saigon After Dark street food tour.
Flying into Saigon from Hanoi we were met by our guide and driver and taken swiftly to the city, though not so swiftly through the rather dense traffic once we'd got there! Saigon is infamous for the masses of motorcycles on its roads.
We were staying at the Liberty Central Riverside Hotel, a beautiful hotel right on the Saigon River. We had had a very busy time since we'd arrived in Vietnam and decided not to rush around trying to see things in the city - there wasn't anything we were desperate to see and we had an evening street food tour booked which we knew would be taking us through the city to many different areas.
Many people visit the tunnels used by the Viet Cong in the American/Vietnamese war which continued from 1960 until 1975. We had read that the tunnels tend to be rather unatmospheric and crowded with tourists, and we didn't feel we could get much from a hurried visit.
Instead we elected to have a leisurely lunch in the hotel rooftop bar overlooking the river.
Our street food tour was by Vespa and the pick-up was at 6pm at our hotel. We were kitted out with helmets and then off we went to the rendezvous point in a lively bar in the city. To say the ride was exhilarating is the understatement of the century! We were only passengers, of course, and our drivers were real experts at negotiated the totally mad traffic of Saigon - most of it on two wheels!
There were six of us in our group: we two, two English girls and an Australian couple.
After cocktails and introductions we were back on the Vespas to our first food stop, a seafood restaurant where we were shown, among other things, all the different varieties of snails available!
We had snails, frogs, clams, mussels, all in various sauces, some with chopped peanuts. Most of the shellfish, apart from gorgeous soft shell crab claws, didn't actually taste of much. There was also a plate of beef and fries for those who couldn't eat shellfish!
A couple of beers each then back on the bikes.
We travelled along Ho Chi Minh Square in the centre of the city, passing the People's Committee Building, once the Hotel de Ville. The long French occupation of Vietnam can be seen in the many remnants of colonial architecture, especially in the cities.
Saigon was captured by the French in 1859 and French colonial rule was gradually extended over the rest of the country until the end of the Second World War when the struggles began with the Viet Minh. These continued until 1954 with the effective defeat of the French and the splitting of Vietnam into South and communist North. Only 6 years later the Vietnam/American War began.
At our next stop we had slices of fresh watermelon and light, crispy prawn and pork pancakes and a weird jelly-rice topped with chopped spring onion, peanut, chilli and ginger - I really didn't like the jelly stuff but the rest was good. More beers!
At this stage the Australian couple called it a night but the rest of us went on to a cabaret bar which was decorated for Christmas and had a very good female jazz singer, then on to a club with a heavy metal band. I had excellent ginger tea in the cabaret bar but back to cocktails in the club!
It was a long and extremely fun evening. The Vespa rides through the city were fantastic and the food was great. And we'd seen many sides of the city we might otherwise not have experienced - highly recommended!
Our car came promptly at 8 a.m. to the hotel for the drive to the Mekong Delta where we were to spend a night on a boat. On the way we travelled through agricultural land and noticed many shrines and graves in the middle of the fields. These are ancestor graves in the places where the deceased used to live and work.
On the way we stopped at an extremely colourful Cao Dai Temple. The monotheistic religion, only formulated in the early twentieth century, takes elements from several others including Buddhism, Taoism and Roman Catholicism. Adherents believe that mediums can communicate with the dead who will guide them through life.
Cao Dai promotes the concept of a "good" person who aims to escape the reincarnation cycle by living a good life abiding by many tenets recognisable from the other religions such as not killing or stealing.
