Ho Chi Minh City — Taipei Vietnam Airlines VN570 Flight Report
Previous:
- Doha — Ho Chi Minh city Qatar Airways QR974 Flight Report / Vietnam arrival
- Ho Chi Minh City D1 — downtown Saigon
- Ho Chi Minh City D2 — Cu Chi Tunnel
- Ho Chi Minh City D3 — Cho Lon
After coming back from Cho Lon, Wiew went to meet with a friend while I briefly walked around downtown Ho Chi Minh City again.
I went to see the Saigon Central Mosque, built in the early 20th century mainly for Muslims from South Asia. When it comes to Islam in Vietnam, though, first thing came to my mind is the Cham people. The Cham people are Austronesians who used to have their own country in today’s central-southern Vietnam, until Vietnam’s southward expansion in recent centuries. They were predominantly Hindus before converting to Islam in a large scale after their country fell. There were still Cham towers today in central and southern Vietnam, some of which were nicknamed “the little Angkor” due to its structural similarity to Angkor Wat. In fact, there is still a Cham community in Ho Chi Minh City today (in a district no tourists would go) which I initially wanted to visit, but the logistics would be too much to deal with.
So when I saw the lady selling these Malay-looking dessert in front of the mosque, I tried to ask her via Google translate whether she is of Cham origin. She was not.
Since there’s still some time before Wiew came back, I walked to this fancy looking cafe nearby to have a cup of coconut coffee (the coffee and coconut ice were even separated), concluding our trip to Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon, or Gia Dinh, or Prey Nokor…… The city had witnessed rise and fall of various regimes, which all gave a different name to the city.
We were choosing between Vietnam Airlines and Eva Airlines booking the flight back, and finally decided to try experiencing something new. In the security we already saw and heard many fellow Taiwanese travelers.
Tan Son Nhat Airport was quite small, with just a handful of souvenir stores airside. It took us a while to locate the Apricot lounge — turned out it could only be accessed by an elevator. The escalator nearby led to a staff area (not sure whether the escalator down to the lounge was still under construction.)
Because I usually had bad luck when it comes to lounges, Wiew swiped his priority pass in to bring me in as a guest. The lounge wasn’t very crowded during our visit; it had good food but not a lot of variety — rice, meat, pho with separate soup etc.
We learned that our flight was delayed after arriving at the gate. Shortly it started to rain in torrents. Now that I think about it, this is the only time I visited Southeast Asia without getting soaked in pouring rain, thanks of Wiew’s good luck.
Our aircraft was parked far away in the tarmac, so several buses came to pick us from the gate. Most of the passengers seemed to be Taiwanese. When a Vietnamese guy ran onto the bus holding a pile of documents, I overheard a Taiwanese traveler joke about him in Mandarin, “he must be a foreign labor who went abroad for the first time,” with a tone of condescension, which made me a bit uncomfortable. I wish to live in a world without borders, a world where all sovereign countries are abolished, or at at least a world where people don’t judge each other by their nations’ GDP or passport indices. In a racially homogeneous society East Asian society, many are unfortunately ignorant about expats and the difficulties they are faced with.
We initially planned to book Vietjet Airline’s, Vietnam’s cheapest low cost carrier, red-eye flight back. But the airline changed its seasonal flight schedule and cancel the flight on this day; otherwise we would have had an extra half day in Ho Chi Minh City. But to be honest, 2.5 days here were quite enough to see most places we wanted to see. With even more days, we may have added day excursions to Nha Trang, Pan Thiet or other nearby towns to visit the Cham towers.
Departing Tan Son Nhat, departing Ho Chi Minh, departing Saigon. The footage I saw in “Last days in Vietnam” came to my mind, the flights retreating US citizens and local collaborates during the Operation Frequent Wind 3 days before Saigon’s fall in April 1975.
Vietnam Airline’s A321 doesn’t provide a screen. Wiew was watching the Neflix show episodes he downloaded from his iPad. I, on the other hand, basically slept through the entire flight due to exhaustion and jet leg accumulated for an entire week. I even skipped the meal, and just had the boba tea we pre-ordered for dessert.
Arriving in TPE. Leaving home for nearly a decade, I’ve lost count of how many times I have come home.
