 Saigon scenes |
 Bac Ho, Uncle Ho, presides over the square facing the gingerbread French town hall and the red flag flies above the dictator’s palace which the Communist tanks gate-crashed in April 1975.
A new consulate-general stands on the site of the old US Embassy, but memories die hard in the elegant city renamed Ho Chi Minh....
Ladies and gentlemen, we will be landing soon at Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhat Airport. The aircraft is laden with native sons and daughters returning to the motherland, their baggage tagged with addresses in unfashionable suburbs. Almond-eyed women, sporting the latest street wear, chatter in a disconcerting Strine.
A hot, white haze hangs over Saigon then bursts of sunshine break through before the wet season gloom descends again. The crumbling runways seem surely little changed since Reunification. Don’t mention the War… but I can’t help it, and neither can the hierarchy.
An energetic street photographer jollies me into posing with Uncle Ho with the gingerbread colonial hotel de ville as our backdrop. Much more remains from the old French Indochina: the Romanesque Notre Dame Cathedral, the GPO and a grand old Municipal Theatre. The Ben Thanh Market, halles centrales complete with an Art Deco mural of stylised geese, houses rack after rack of tee-shirts and plastic shoes, mounds of milk-white squid meat and the fat-cheeked hindquarters of dismembered frogs.
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