A Day Sketching, Exploring on My Own in Saigon

Day 78, 2024 Grand World Voyage

Thursday, March 21, 2024; Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, Vietnam.

One of my strongest memories of my first trip to Ho Chi Minh City in 2017 is of the War Remnants Museum. It showed a totally different picture of the war than I learned mainly from news coverage in the United States. I wasn’t quite of the Vietnam War generation – the draft ended just as I graduated from high school. But I already was developing a nose for news, which led me to journalism school and an early career as a reporter and editor.

Today I spent a couple of hours at the rooftop bar of the Rex Hotel – where during the war the U.S. military held daily press briefings. The media dubbed the briefings the Five O’clock Follies, reflecting the contentious relationship between the military and much of the media – and in retrospect, much of the American people. One of my journalism school professors was a part of the “follies” and later wrote about them.

It is hard today to imagine the five-star Rex Hotel and its rooftop bar as the locale of those infamous briefings. In fact, it’s hard today to imagine what Saigon (as many still call it today) was like 50 years ago. Every time I looked up, I saw modern high-rise buildings hovering over streets full of scooters, coffee shops and pedestrians.

Today I stepped a little out of my comfort zone. I packed up my sketchbook, pens and paints and boarded the ship’s 90-minute transfer to the city center, where we would have five hours on our own before meeting for the return trip. Hotel manager Henk and his wife Christel joined us on the brightly decorated bus, with their bikes stowed for riding in the city.

The biggest challenge was crossing the busy streets. The constant parade of scooters and motorcycles never stopped. They key is to step out with confidence and go without pausing, trusting that they will maneuver around you. Scary, but it seemed to work.

A temporary dragon display filled a full block of the center of busy Nguyen Hue Boulevard, with high-end boutiques mixed with coffee shops in seemingly every other storefront.

Armed with my smartphone map app, a printed map and my notes about possible destinations, I set off for the half-mile walk to the Post Office, a popular stop for tourists. The old-style wooden phone booths still sport their clocks with world times, and souvenir booths share space with postal clerks. Again, just like in Huế I saw cards featuring quilling.

Across the street, scaffolding that enrobed the back of the Notre Dame Cathedral in 2017 has been moved to the building’s front.

The area was packed with tour groups, but lacked any shaded seating to offer relief from the heat (90s) and high humidity. As I’ve written before, I’ve been inspired by a fellow cruiser who strikes out on his own to sketch and paint in almost every port. He advises finding shade and – ideally – somewhere that will provide a cold drink and access to a restroom.

The Rex Hotel was just a few blocks away, and its rooftop bar would fit that bill, so I headed there to have lunch and sketch for an hour or two. I took time to work on perspective, which for me means repeatedly sketching and erasing before I get it right and switch to ink. Even though I had a paint palette and a water brush, it seemed too intrusive to take them out. Instead, I moved to sketch a different scene.

My little experiment of exploring on my own and making time to sketch worked well. I’ll definitely repeat it.