Bui Vien Walking Street has a bustling nightlife.Credit:iStock
And where younger travellers might have headed for Bali’s Kuta Beach or Pattaya in Thailand,the city’s trendy cocktail bars,Bui Vien “walking street” and huge drinking barns,complete with DJs pumping out beats from elevated stages,are relatively new magnets.
Of course,solemn snakes of middle-aged tourists are still being hustled from one historic venue to the next,but the food and drink scene seems to include as many young locals as there are cashed-up visitors.
Saigon,rarely called Ho Chi Minh City by locals,has a whole new look. Gone is the shuttering that forced pedestrians to share footpaths with scooters while engineers dug mega-trenches for the new Metro rail system.
Now a broad boulevard stretches along Le Loi,from Ben Thanh market to the Opera House,giving the latter a grand entrance worthy of any diva,illuminated at night by a gauntlet of giant electric flowers. When (or if) the oft-delayed Metro launches with a planned “soft opening” and temporarily free travel in July,the city will really take off.
Saigon - seldom referred to as Ho Chi Minh City - is fun and inexpensive.Credit:iStock
Meanwhile,the mad swirl of the massive Ben Thanh roundabout that once made crossing the road a daredevil dance through swarms of scooters,has been tamed by lights and a large traffic-free plaza containing the impressive terminus of the new rail line.
But the contrasts that made the city unique – high-end designer stores sharing corners with street food sellers – are still there. The Saigon Centre on Le Loi is a sprawling multi-storey mall that makes our Westfields seem cramped and parsimonious.
But a block away you are back to laneways,hawkers and crumbling paving where there have at least been some efforts to stop scooter parking taking over the entire footpath.