I’d planned a full day in HCMC, yesterday. I was going to get up early and take myself on a walking tour, looking at various sites, picking up the Reunification Palace and the Fine Art Museum, the Jade Emperor Pagoda and Cholon (the Chinese district). It was a full day, and having heard horror stories about people getting lice from Grab helmets, I was going to walk it all.

I started by buying water from a kiosk in the park opposite my hotel. For some reason, I sat on a bench to organise myself. A Vietnamese woman appeared out of nowhere and sat next to me. In almost flawless English, she asked about my sleeve tattoo. Before I knew it, we were engaged in a full on gossip. She lives in the Philippines with her son and daughter, who are 22 and 24 respectively. She’s a single parent, divorced when her son was 3. She’s in HCMC visiting her uncle, who is sick. She comes back two or three times a year. Her daughter is about to go to Kingston to work in a hospital, so she can send money home. Would I be happy to talk to her daughter about life in the UK? Why don’t I come and have lunch at her Uncle’s house? Something feels a bit off about this, to me. I’m not sure why, and I genuinely can’t work out whether I’m passing up on a fantastic local experience, or dodging a bullet, but I tell her that I’ve arranged to meet some friends already, so I can’t do lunch. I say if she gives me her phone number, I’ll call her when she’s done for the day and meet her and her daughter in a bar. She doesn’t have a mobile phone. My instinct that something isn’t quite right intensifies. Everyone I’ve met here is on WhatsApp! Even the streetfood stall owners have mobile phones… I tell her I’ve enjoyed our chat (which I have) and head off.

First stop Ben Thanh market. I’m a bit wary of this, after my Hue experience, but the two are chalk and cheese. Here, there’s a series of government regulated fixed price stalls line the outer perimeter. This is handy for giving you a baseline sense of prices (and for building confidence!). Once inside this perimeter, all prices are up for grabs. There are stalls selling copies of designer handbags, copies of scent, t shirts, fabric – all kinds of things. I was briefly tempted by a Hermes handbag, but the guy wanted to start the bidding at VND 3m (about £100) and I didn’t want to pay much more than about VND 1m, so I walked away. They find this quite hard to deal with, but I just didn’t want it enough to spend that kind of money!

Coming out of the other side of the market, I crossed a roundabout heading up to the Fine Art Museum. There was a western couple standing consulting a phone, and she had a watercolour sleeve tattoo, kind of similar to mine. So I admired it, and we chatted a while. They’re from Vancouver – Langley, in fact, where I have friends (*wave to Tanya*!) and had been in HCMC for three days. She’s Chris and he (I think) is Greg. Let’s call him Greg. Anyway, Greg wondered if I knew whether there was a bar close by and I said I thought there was one in Pasteur Street. Did I want to join them for a beer? So I did, and we found a bar and the rest of the morning was spent chatting and laughing and generally not doing very much, but having a lovely time!

Eventually, we set off on our separate journeys. It was damn hot, and after two beers I was in need of water. I set back off for the Fine Art Museum, and picked up a can of Sprite with my ticket. I wandered around some galleries of modern art post 1975 which mostly followed western schools – I saw none of the glorious lacquer work or naive oils I’d enjoyed in Hanoi. Moving between galleries, I came to a point where I could choose to move upstairs or downstairs. Just beyond the stairwell was another gallery with some lovely colourful work in it, and a French window opening into a small Juliette balcony overlooking the courtyard. The colours caught my eye and I meandered in. There was a woman, sitting at a table, painting. I had stumbled upon Bich Ngoc, the artist in residence. Her work was lovely – Chinese style brushwork nudes; expressive portraits; naive representations of children; and scenes of Vietnamese life that were definitely a cut above the quality I’ve seen for sale. Leading through her work, I found a portrait that looked very like her and asked if it was a self-portrait. No, she said, it’s my friend. But I could make a portrait of you? For 900,000? (About £24). I ummed and aahed a little, but secretly I’ve always wanted to try a street portraitist, and this would definitely be a cut above that!! So I said yes. Then she wanted to do two; one with my glasses and one without. I said I would only want to buy one and she said no worries; she could sell the other. So again I said yes. She selected paper and set to work. They were amazing!! The whole process took maybe two hours, and was hugely entertaining. We chatted about this and that, and various other people wandered in and out. It was fun! And I really loved the pictures (although they are very flattering, also…!)

I was hungry by now, and the sun was fierce, so I went and found some lunch in a Vietnamese fast food joint called Mon Hue. And then I booked a Grab (car) to take me to the Jade Emperor Pagoda. The Grab app works by pinpointing your location, calculating the fare to your destination, and then putting the job out to drivers who are at liberty to accept it or not. My order was accepted immediately, and so I left the cafe and scanned the street for my car (the app tells you the model and registration number). There were no Grab cars on the street. The driver texted me to say he was there and we then had the most hilarious exchange, which demonstrates beautifully why you should never rely on Google Translate. Sadly, I didn’t screenshot it at the time, and the history is lost when the booking cancelled. At one point, when I thought we were discussing where he was vs where I was, I laughed out loud when his response came back translated as “How much loan do you want to borrow?”…. ummmm… I just want a taxi, mate! “I am skinned”…. ok. No clue. Although I did work out that “My friend you need to Kenso ven the bank” was a request to cancel the job…In the end, I flagged a MaiLinh taxi through the rush hour to Jade Emperor. Lots of people had told me that this Taoist temple was one of HCMC’s unmissable sights. It’s relatively modern, having been built in 1909, and has impressive statues of Taoist and Buddhist divinities made from reinforced papier-mâché. The roof has some lovely tiling that I’m afraid my photos don’t really do justice to. I didn’t break out my guide book, which was probably a mistake since I didn’t really understand what I was looking at… but nonetheless the shrines were impressive! It’s an active temple and many people had stopped to pray on their way home, which made me feel a little as though I was intruding, so I didn’t stay long.

I decided to walk back to the hotel. By now the sun was setting and there was a breeze beginning to push out the stifling heat of earlier in the day, so a walk felt like a pleasant idea. It took about an hour, past a children’s hospital and through the financial district and past the Catholic cathedral.

It was interesting, in the way that a new city is always interesting, but not beautiful or atmospheric in the way that other places here have been. I took a slight detour, to avoid the park where I’d met the woman who’d left me wondering, earlier in the day, which meant I came back to the hotel via Duong Bui Vien, the seedy street I was talking about in my last post. Still seedy. So although the day was not remotely as I’d planned it, I’m kind of glad; I remain largely unimpressed by HCMC, but unexpected human connections meant I spent a really pleasant day there, in a way I couldn’t possibly have planned.

Back at the hotel, I picked up my laundry (yay!!! Clean clothes!!) and set about packing and getting ready for my trip to the Mekong Delta in the morning. So I’m typing this from the bus to Cai Be – which apparently is Cambodian for floating house. It seems the Mekong Delta has only been Vietnamese for about 200 years and many of the names (including Saigon, which means jungle) are Cambodian in origin. Cai Be is so named because the area was dense jungle populated by tigers and elephants – too dangerous for land-based houses so people built houses on boats for safety purposes.