In which Layla and Roz revel in the hipster coffeeshop haven of Ho Chi Minh City

By Layla

Ho Chi Minh City. Aka Saigon. Aka our final stop before our holiday is over, I go home, and Roz flies to the UK for work. We sped through the nighttime streets from the airport to our hotel, climbed many flights of stairs, gasped at the increased heat and humidity, set the aircon to its lowest setting, and spent the rest of the night with teeth chattering in Arctic conditions. 

The next day a rare treat: no alarm clock! (Though Roz will note that I woke her at 8am with an accidental exclamation of "Gosh!" - I was just expressing surprise that it was the latest we had slept all holiday!) The morning at leisure, we strolled around, getting the feel of the city. I'd compare Hanoi and Saigon to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Hanoi is beautiful and charming, but Saigon feels more dynamic and exciting. If you want to go places in life, it feels like Saigon is a destination for that. There's a special energy there. The city is particularly teeming with motorbikes and hipster coffeeshops. So many hipster coffeeshops. I've never seen anything like it. So in order to soak up the local atmosphere, we felt it wise to spent the morning coffeeshop-hopping. The Workshop was my favourite. 

After a hipstery lunch in one of said coffeeshops, we met up with a Saigon Free Walking Tours guide and spent the next couple of hours walking around town in the blazing heat admiring fab French architecture: government buildings, the cathedral, the opera house, and an impressive post office. We passed the building famous for the photos of evacuation by helicopter at the end of the Vietnam war and went round the fancy Reunification Palace, admiring its stately rooms and emergency bunker... and dreaming of ice cream. 

Our dreams soon came true in a little cafe in a park, where people had gathered to hang out, sing together, and play badminton. There was a collection of contemporary sculpture. It was all lovely, if a bit hot... so we went back to the hotel for some of that Arctic aircon. 

That night we headed out, via a cocktail, to a cool indie-feeling cinema where we had excitingly bought tickets to a random Vietnamese film with English subtitles. It was both scary and rubbish so we took our leave and strolled instead down a pedestrianised, bustling street lit with neon flowers to a fancy and nice vegetarian restaurant called Hum for dinner and cocktails before bed. 

We are always sad on our last day of holiday, so to distract ourselves, we've taken to booking a tour. Today we hopped in a minibus to the Mekong Delta, the point where the huge river, having traversed Tibet, China, Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia finally meets the sea in Vietnam. It's the quintessential daytrip from Saigon. We started by visiting a temple with some fab Buddha statues. Then proceeded by motorboat across the river to various islands where we got to taste the local produce: honey, various weird and wonderful tropical fruits, and coconut candy. We then got into little canoe-type boats and were rowed along narrow watery passages with an arched ceiling of palm leaves. It was all rather cool. 

We had an extravagant, beautifully vegetarian lunch on one of the islands, then headed back to the hotel. We spent the rest of the afternoon playing Scrabble (I won) in Tractor Coffee, then again in L'Ursine (I won again) before a final dinner and the local craft beer from Pasteur Street Brewery. Reluctantly we ordered some banana cake for the road and tore ourselves away. It was time to go home. 

So, Vietnam is a fabulous holiday destination. It is delightfully cheap, interesting, beautiful, diverse, brimming with great food, and for an Asian country, gosh, it's so easy. People speak English, there's a great tourist infrastructure, and there are masses of sights to see and activities to do. I know everyone else already knew that... but after 10 years in the planning, it was great to have my suspicions confirmed!

Books read on this holiday (sorry we have different rating systems!)

Layla - All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (5/5), When the Floods Came by Clare Morrall (4/5), Hagseed by Margaret Atwood (5/5), a little way through The War of the Worlds. Y HG Wells, and three quarters of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. 

Roz - The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt (9/10), When the Floods Came by Clare Morrall (8/10), We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (8/10), The Marvellous Adventures of Ingrid Winter by JS Drangsholt (8/10) and The War of the Worlds by HG Wells (9/10).