I had been a bit busy and thus found myself in the middle of a work-week with a looming 3 day weekend and absolutely no plans. I decided getting out of Bangkok for 3 days would do me a bit of good to relax and de-stress, so Wednesday evening I booked myself a flight for Friday evening. Friday after work I slung my backpack over my shoulder, hopped on the BTS, and boarded a plane to Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon if you’re old school, or HCMC if you’re hip and current). I then took a cab to Ma Maison Boutique Hotel (booked en route – which turned out to be absolutely charming) and crashed in my adorable little room.
Day 1 in HCMC, Vietnam
I woke up early and went for a jog to explore the surrounding neighborhood. I suppose you could say I “hit the ground running”? I’ll pause and let you look at these photos until you are finished groaning.
It was a short run due to the heat, humidity, and chaos that is the streets of HCMC, but it’s my favorite way to get a feel for new neighborhoods when I travel. I showered and took my Vietnamese Coffee & Breakfast of Pho (of course!) on the patio.
Then I was off to explore the city. My destination was La Rotunde cafe at the advice of a friend of a friend. Along the way, I stopped in to the Ben Thanh Market. Because when in Asia…
I finally arrived at my destination of La Rotunde to find it closed. Womp, womp. So instead, I stopped in at i.d. cafe to enjoy an Iced Vietnamese Coffee and plan the rest of my weekend. Since it had been an impromptu getaway, I still had some small details to iron out, such as…where I was going to sleep tonight.
I walked around a bit more until I couldn’t take the heat and retreated to the luxury of Alagon D’Antique Resort & Spa. Now, I am usually a $10 a night hostel kind of traveler, but since this was a de-stress trip I decided to use one of my Hotels.com Reward nights to treat ma self (and I also got a super-special rate since they were still in soft open).
After I took a nice breather I went down to enjoy the afternoon tea included in my special rate. It looked great. But sadly, in this case, looks were deceiving.
The food was meh at best. From here, I decided to head to the roof to enjoy a poolside glass of wine. With my evening’s accommodations squared away, I needed to decide what else I wanted to do for the weekend.
Top priority was where to find the best Banh Mi sandwich for dinner. I was immediately overwhelmed so decided to narrow the radius to within walking distance of my current location. After a lot of careful deliberation I struck out for Hong Hoa. (I’ll spare you the details of the sophisticated calculations I used to make the final verdict)
Banh Mi in hand, I set out for an evening stroll. Which included a night market of course, because Southeast Asia.
I eventually found myself at Pasteur Street Brewing Company thanks to my insider tip. It had the added bonus of being speakeasy-esque as it was hidden down an alley.
I got the best sampler I’ve ever had of Passionfruit Wheat Ale, Saigon Saison, Jasmine IPA, Toasted Coconut Porter, Ca Phe Porter, & Mexican Chocolate Imperial Stout. I also got an order of Bar Snacks (Potato Chips, Black Eyed Pea Hummus, Crudite, & Bacon Jam) for 120,000 dong. As if I wasn’t already totally overwhelmed with some of my favorite things, for dessert they had a crispy sweet potato bread pudding with coconut milk & pork fat caramel (90,000 dong). Be still my heart. And stomach.
Day 2 in HCMC, Vietnam
Since visiting the Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica of Saigon (officially Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of The Immaculate Conception) was on my to-see list and it happened to be a Sunday morning I decided to brush off the old Catholic shoes and attend Mass. (Note: we don’t actually have special shoes. Well, I guess the Pope does, but that’s different. There is no Mormon special underwear equivalent for Catholics. At least on the laymen level. That I’m aware of.).
After mass I explored the surrounding area and witness no less than 5 wedding photoshoots before heading across the street to the Post Office which is another beautiful building thanks to the French Colonial…errrm, influence.
By this time I was ready for some coffee so decided to head to a coffeeshop, but there were some protests.
Luckily, despite tanks, armed guards, and barbed wire barricades, it all seemed to be fairly peaceful and I didn’t need to get helicopter rescued out of the city. And so I made it to L’Usine unscathed to be able to enjoy my Iced Vietnamese Coffee in peace.
As the mid-day sun hit, I retreated back to my hotel, where I again decided to take full advantage of the package deal to use my spa discount and unwind a bit before heading off to my evening flight to Dalat.
Want to know what I did there? Read about my 24 Hours in Da Lat here. Not to give it too much of the old hard sell, but I spent the day tooling around on a motorcycle with an official member of the Original Easy Riders Club drinking coffee pooped from weasels and rice whisky infused with rats & snakes, so it was like, pretty cool (jump straight to My Day Tour with the Da Lat Easy Riders Club).
