Exploring our surroundings in Ho Chi Minh City – Day 124 – Jan 4, 2026

I have a horrible night’s sleep. I keep feeling my tooth and in my sleepy state I worry that my troubles are not over yet. I also got a bug bite yesterday. Or rather, I got three, but two have completely disappeared. The third one has taken over my left calf. I thought about taking allergy medicine yesterday, but forgot. Now, I have to deal with this:

Enough complaining, time to enjoy our first full day in Ho Chi Minh City! I always ask Joe to book hotels with breakfast included, if it makes sense location and price wise. So our hotel had a breakfast buffet on the 11th floor, complete with rooftop balcony, where lots of the Vietnamese hotel guests are smoking. Yes, smoking in restaurants are a thing here, but most restaurants also have at least one wall completely open to the outside, so there’s air, somewhat.

The breakfast buffet has a bread, baguette, garlic bread and sugar toast section, a hot food section, a noodle soup section, and a cold platter section. There are also yogurts and jellos and fruits. Here’s what I ate on day one:

Joe has decided he does not want to live with bugs in our hotel room any longer, so he asks the front desk staff if we can move rooms today. They show him a room on the 3rd floor, and one on the 8th floor. We agree to move to the one on the 8th floor, and we can keep our current room until we move at 12pm. That means, we can explore for a couple of hours, and then come back to move our stuff. It saves us packing up everything neatly into locked bags to put them into storage.

We set off to explore. It’s hot and it’s humid. We walk and walk and walk and walk, when we suddenly see a café that might just have the snack we need right now. We place our order, and head upstairs to the very trendy seating area.

By now, it was maybe 11am, and we decided to go walk some more, heading towards the hotel to move rooms.

Just like my first impression yesterday, I find the city so green! Bangkok was completely different, as was Osaka. Neither of those two focused on greenery in the way Ho Chi Minh City does. I think it’s beautiful! (And bonus: it provides some much needed shade here and there!)

Vendors in Vietnam are much more aggressive than in Thailand. Lots of vendors walking around carrying their goods, like the coconut sales woman who finds us and decides to act friendly. She pushes a coconut with a straw into Maylin’s hands, and then starts opening three more, as there are four of us, and says over and over “here, I’m going home, it’s the end of my day”. Joe gladly accepts, but then she asks for 50.000 Vietnamese Dong per coconut. Joe manages to give two back, so at least we’re only out 100.000 Dong (approximately $5CA), but I prod him and grin “you just got hustled”!

We’re getting closer to our hotel, and it is so hot. We’re walking on the shady side of the street at least, but I have to stop and take a picture of these tall trees! Look at how tall they are? Please confirm below, they really are tall, right? Like taller than the tree you see outside your own window while reading this?

Two blocks away from our hotel now, but suddenly I nudge Maylin. I have seen a sign she’ll be thrilled to see, and we call out to Joe and Téa up ahead – we are stopping at 7Eleven. They have a smoothie machine!

Back at the hotel, moving from the 2nd to the 8th floor is a quick procedure, and our new room is visibly cleaner than the 2nd floor. I think the 8th floor room has been renovated more recently than the 2nd floor room, so it feels fresher. As for size, it’s the same, but we have one less window, and it’s therefor a darker room.

Finally, we can head out and grab a proper lunch! We ask the hotel staff for recommendations, and the guy tells us to turn right at the corner and look for a restaurant called “Loi”. We walk and walk and walk and are obviously beyond where he said it would be, so we hop into a place that looks pleasant. We’re whisked upstairs to a bright and beautiful dining room, lots of windows, all wide open, brick walls and dark brown leather benches all along the one wall. The girls decide to share a pan fried beef noodle dish, while Joe and I opt for shrimp summer rolls and a Vietnamese pancake with chicken.

After the delicious lunch, we head out into the heat again. It’s too hot, and the girls are impatient in the heat. Around a corner we find a shopping mall, so we duck inside for AC and washrooms.

I have a goal of walking down to the river, and so force my family to keep walking. We’re still in the shade, so as cool as we can be, but we also have water bottles. The only thing that’s dwindling, is our energy levels… Suddenly, to our left, we see the famous Café Apartments!

We risk our lives by crossing the street (apparently, this is just how traffic and pedestrians work in this country?), and get to the riverbank. We walk along the river and get as far as the riverbus station, where Joe calls us a taxi and we head back to the hotel.

The taxi whisks us off back to the hotel, and we cool down for a bit in our hotel room. When we get hungry and decide it’s time for dinner, we walk around the corner and past yesterday’s Pho Viet Nam restaurants. The one we’re looking for today is just another couple of doors down, and we get seated inside, far away from smokers.

Joe orders a “like pho, but not pho” noodle soup in a hot stone bowl. The noodles, veggies and raw meet come on the side, and he adds them all to his bowl.

I order a square crab spring roll, with rice noodles and “vegetables” on the side. My spring roll arrives, then the noodles arrive, but the vegetables are missing. When they finally give me my plate of veggies, we realize it’s lettuce with herbs! So then I could make lettuce wraps with what was left of my crab spring roll, which was the best idea ever!

We’ve had a long and hot day, so head back to our new 8th floor room to relax for the rest of the night. We watch a movie in the room, and polish off whatever we had left of snacks from our Bangkok to Ho Chi Minh City travels.