Day 3 - Saigon Death March Part I

We checked out of the Le Le after a breakfast of omelletes, bread and coffee that was part of the cost. For the two of us the deluxe room and breakfast came to $30USD. We probably could have gotten much cheaper places but the service was special and can heartily recommend them to anyone going to stay in HCMC.

We left our packs at the hotel and walked through the park to the Ben Thanh markets. The place was huge, crowded and selling everything from pork intestines to dinosaurs made of motorcycle parts (I wanted one!).



Even though it was only 9-10 am the heat and humidity was oppressive and I had to have a sit down and a chilled coconut centre drink ($5000 VND). I bought my daughter a goth looking bracelet (bet she hates it) for 70,000 and 2 cheesecloth tops for 100,000 the pair.



Then it was off to the HCMC Fine Arts Museum. I was more impressed with the architecture, tiles and leadlighting than the art inside for the most part. Vietnamese modern art has a strong French influence and includes lots of simple stylised form. The war was represented in quite a few pieces and so were the people you can see on the streets like beggars and vendors.




The ground floor of the museum was taken up with a free exhibition of photographs celebrating the designs of Pierre Cardin. Dawn and I had a good laugh over some of the stuff from the 60's. A Vietnamese man was most interested though and was taking digital pictures of all of the pictures. Entry to the upstairs rooms was 10,000VND and it was worth it just to turn on the floor fans in each room and stand in front of them.



We were hungry, hot and tired and stopped at the first airconditioned restaurant we came to. The Luna. We ate pork and prawn rice paper rolls, beef pho and sour prawn and vege soup. We also drank life saving beer. I had a tiger 22,000VND and Dawn had a Bia 333 18,000VND. Lunch all up was 179,000VND