In the Heart of Ho Chi Minh
Rammed to the hilt with peddlers, vendors, backpackers, bikes, vans, buses, Saigon’s Pham Ngu Lao is a hub of local and foreign activity. The offices of bus companies open their doors onto this busy street, spilling cartloads of passengers out and onto the latest departure with clockwork consistency. The street brims with activity even in the lapses between buses. Carts and vans shunt their backs onto the pavements, hurriedly loaded with some delivery or other. The locals doing the loading are young, but no less adept at smoking their cigarettes while working than the older men – the drivers – who chuff from their front seats. The smell of their cigarettes, made more pungent by the humidity, floats into the air and carries down the road, jostling with the smell of cooking noodles and petrol fumes for attention. The suppliers of these other smells dot themselves along the pavement: local wives offer over-ripe fruit and dishes on demand from their mobile stations and shopfronts; motorcyclists pull up, navigating the hectic pavement surface to find a space to park. Through all this, the backpackers join the mill – one eye on the roadside, the other on the shopfronts – in their attempt to find travel to the next place. Few are intense as Saigon.