cycling sài gòn

On a Tuesday afternoon with skies overcast grey, I opted out of attending the society class to embark on a six hour bicycle ride around the city with my roommate, Hải. I figured that witnessing firsthand the income disparities within the city’s poorest districts would be a more worthwhile experience than sitting in an air-conditioned room arguing about, or being lectured on rather, which socioeconomic viewpoint holds more moral and substantive value.

Cycling down Phạm Ngọc Thach past Nhà Thơ Đức Bà onto Tôn Đức Thang, the remaining traces of sunlight began to fade when we realized that we had forgotten our rain ponchos back at the guesthouse. No matter, an old woman with a red colored kiosk on wheels, in an alley next to businesses and hotels for the economically affluent, stood selling colorful rain ponchos resembling colorful garbage bags of the thin variety.

“Hai áo đi mưa bao nhiều tiền vầy, bác?” Hải asked.

“Ba ngàn một cái con,” the old woman replied as she gathered an empty coffee cup from a customer dressed in the standard local manner of long sleeved collared shirt and dark slacks. After paying the old woman six thousand đồng, she tossed two rain ponchos into the front basket of my bicycle, yellow and green.

At that very moment, torrents of water fell from the skies above just as we were about to get back onto the streets in order to bike against the one-way traffic on the nearest bridge crossing the river into Quận 4. Our first stop was at a local open-air market within the district; however, the vendors had cleared out for the day due to the sudden downpour of rain. This vacant marketplace did not especially hold the traits of the economically downtrodden even when juxtaposed to the nearby multistoried building in the process of being constructed; this is perhaps because no one was about except for the usual crowd of men on motorbikes. However, directly across the street was a row of local businesses, in varying states of structural decay, which sold mechanical repair services and various odds and ends. Leaving the area, we passed by the Saigon Port stretching some city blocks full of colorful shipping containers. On the streets opposite this domain of global product exchange, local businesses and individuals sold various street-side food products, consumer goods, and lottery tickets. It would be unwise to generalize the socioeconomic conditions of these individuals as having one distinctive class label since each person within the scene subsisted at differential levels of prosperity.

Directly beyond the shipping yard was the bridge crossing yet another portion of the Mekong into Quận 7. The strenuous uphill cycling was well worth the downhill descent, where gravity did its work, as well as the scene of small colorful boats docked near the river’s banks, which seemed to serve as mobile homes on water, and small barges drifting by. The rain momentarily ceased, and the people passing on motorbikes begun to remove their rain ponchos. Pointing out the boats docked at the littered river bank, Hải described how many of these boats also functioned as floating markets during the morning hours.

Once over the bridge and possibly another one into KCX Tân Thuận, a piercing rain befell—the thin rain ponchos purchased earlier had begun to tear; as such, we sought shelter under the canopy of a bus stop along the street. Waiting there for the same purpose, or possibly for a bus, was a girl in her early twenties dressed in a red colored shirt and blue jeans. Our eyes met a few times, but alas, she was in her own world underneath her face mask blocking the city’s polluted air. After the rain had slowed its pace, we regained our steady pace through flooding streets past mounds of trash, half-burned in grassy plots, until we were just outside the gates of the Tan Thuan Export Processing Zone. It is here that the government processes products created strictly for export purposes to foreign trading partners.

Over a few more bridges where colorful boats anchored on the muddy brown waters, we found ourselves bicycling along another segment of the river bank in Quận 7 where the waters had turned into a shade of murky black. The stench of raw sewage permeated this scene where floating boats housed whole families and rusting metal shingle homes stood on wooden stilts at odd angles. These housing structures barely continued to withstand time in a state of urban decay as new housing and business complexes sprung up directly behind them. To make matters worse, it was probably the case that these homes did not have running water. Speaking further of sewage and sanitation, litter once again lined the banks of the river here. On the bridge overlooking the water, a woman in a conical hat walked by with her bicycle loaded down with recyclables she had collected.

Some time later after a midday snack of súp cua and bánh flan, we cycled past a row of buildings in the architectural style of the colonial French. It was here that a look inside these buildings, converted into mechanized factories, did I get a glimpse of the squalid working conditions—not only did there seem to be inadequate lighting where heavy machinery operated, but also there seemed to be a strong disregard for what could be considered modern safety precautions as workers worked barehanded and shirtless. Across the street stood a shirtless elderly man urinating in public view against the trunk of a tree. Public restrooms and proper sanitation seem to be lacking in the poorer districts of this country’s urban centers. While in Hà Nội a few months back, I have seen people defecating and urinating on the streets in public view. Further down the street stretching across the black waters reeking of raw sewage was a bridge constructed by the French in the shape of the letter U—Cầu Chữ U.

As it was in close proximity to the U-shaped bridge, we stopped by my roommate’s university for a quick visit—Đại Học Hồng Bàng, a former student dormitory converted into a small university wherein students were preparing for their final exams in classrooms without air conditioning. From there, we made our way over to Chợ Lớn in Quận 5 to visit a Buddhist temple where an injured kitten followed us around and then a Catholic church where Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother Ngô Đình Nhu last sat before they were seemingly executed. Towards the day’s end as dusk befell the city skies, we had bành bột chiên and bò bía at a street-side eatery in Quận 11 before returning to the guesthouse.