Rivers Of Life

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Sunlight glances off a speedboat’s wake as it roars away from Thao Dien district with its embassies, Western expat residences, pilates studios, cafes and sprawling millionaires’ follies. I’ve been watching the river since sunrise from a bay window in my room at the Villa Song, a French colonial-inspired boutique hotel, and the prettiest place to stay in Ho Chi Minh City.

By the far bank, a family of four gathers under a plastic canopy to eat breakfast on the deck of a cobalt blue fishing boat. An island of reeds and grasses and plastic refuse drifts downstream towards the Mekong Delta. Around the next bend, an immense steel bridge carries peak-hour scooters in their thousands towards the cluster of skyscrapers and French colonial terraces of Saigon (as locals still call the centre of the southern capital).

Ho Chi Minh City is a buzzing old-new mass of contradictions. Down-at-heel French and communist government monuments (the almost destitute and deserted Fine Arts Museum, for example) sit just a stone’s throw from some of the shiniest, most opulent five-star hotels on earth (the Reverie, on Nguyen Hue Boulevard, is a fantasyland of Italianate gold leaf, mosaic and Carrara marble). The phenomenally hip Propaganda Bistro (decorated with revolutionary murals) serves Vietnamese home cooking to the young, upwardly mobile Saigon crowd, while outside, street vendors dish up bowls of steaming soup, crispy banh xeo (rice crepes) and banh mi (filled baguettes) just as they have for centuries.