Hal Jespersen's Vietnam Tour, March 2025 (Part 3)

This is my (Hal's) report on the trip “Return to Vietnam,” a mostly military history tour hosted by Valor Tours. This is my third tour with the Sausalito-based company. And other than two brief stops in Vietnam on a Southeast Asia cruise in 2001, it is my first time back since the war. I served with the US Army in the Saigon area in 1972–73, right at the end of the US military involvement.

Because this is a lengthy report with a lot of photographs, I have divided it into three parts:

• Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, Khe Sanh, Dong Ha
• Hue, Da Nang, Hoi An, Can Tho
• Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) (this page)

Thursday, March 13 — to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)

Yesterday afternoon, busloads of 215 middle school children piled into the hotel, on some sort of field trip from Saigon. Warned about the effect this would have on the buffet, we rushed to breakfast as soon as it opened this morning at 6 a.m. Leaving at 8, we began the three-hour bus ride back to Saigon. Tam told us that the official name, HCM City, isn’t commonly used, even by some government agencies, like SaigonTourist. The four-lane highway traverses rather uninteresting terrain, flat as a pancake with a lot of rivers to cross. Saigon is now a thoroughly modern city, quite different from what I remember in 1973. It may just be the sunny weather, but everything looks brighter and cleaner than Hanoi.

We checked in at the famous Rex Hotel, notorious during the war for its nightly military briefings to the press corps, which they dubbed the Five O’clock Follies. It is a beautiful five-star hotel right downtown. I wandered down the main boulevard while my room was being prepared and had a very delicious banh mi sandwich at a café. Then we re-boarded the bus and headed out. Our first stop was the presidential palace, aka the Independence Palace or the Reunification Palace. This is a beautiful modern building in a park setting that was the home to the South Vietnamese president, but is now part museum and part time government meeting venue. Out front are two realistic tank replicas, one Russian T-54 (no. 843) and one Chinese T-59 (no. 390), which is a T-54 knock-off. It is unclear to me which of these two was the first to break open the gates and enter the presidential compound on April 30, 1975; sources differ, but they came in at essentially the same time, and it marked the symbolic fall of Saigon. We walked down into the basement to see a command bunker which had large situational maps used by the ARVN. We saw meeting rooms for the national security council, the presidential office, communication rooms, and a couple of formal reception rooms, all painstakingly preserved. We also saw a decent movie about the history of the building and events of the war in Saigon leading up to the fall.

Nearby was the War Remnants Museum. Outside was a large collection of American military hardware that had been captured or abandoned: a CH-47 Chinook, an M48A3 Patton, an M41 Walker Bulldog, an M113 APC, a D7-E armored bulldozer (which I had never seen before), 105 and 155 mm towed howitzers, an M107 175 mm, an F5A Freedom Fighter, an A37 Dragonfly fighter-bomber, and an A1 Skyraider. There were also two large collections of ordnance. Inside was nonstop psychological discomfort. There were exhibits about POW prisons operated by the South, which made bald claims about torture of prisoners (including crucifixion!). There was an entire large room about anti-war protests in the United States, and another one about all of the condemnation of the United States strategy from other countries in the world. There was a large exhibit about American war crimes, including a lot of coverage of the My Lai massacre, and another exhibit about the terrible effects of Agent Orange on the civilian population. One large exhibit, called Requiem, was about war photographers, including a number who were killed, and commentary about their famous photographs. Finally, there were exhibits that showed a large number of American infantry weapons and explanations of the locations of the many American and Allied units. This was all about as anti-American as you can imagine. The place was absolutely packed with tourists and I saw very few Americans among them.

After a sunny day in 96° heat and oppressive humidity, we went back to the hotel. A few of us had drinks at the rooftop bar, and then we walked to Japantown, only a few blocks away, and had a delicious meal in a restaurant that was little more than a hole-in-the-wall. We were accosted by very amorous young women promoting their massage services, but did not fall for their enticements, even though one of them tickled my tummy!

Friday, March 14 — Saigon and Cu Chi

We had some dropouts today, and only four of us rode the 28-passenger bus two hours in heavy city traffic northwest to Cu Chi; others went shopping, one departed early to meet his wife for a vacation. The traffic here is just as frenetic as in Hanoi. Along the way, we stopped briefly at a café and factory/store that did artwork on lacquer with egg shell highlights and inlaid mother of pearl. The Cu Chi Tunnel park is like Pamplin Park (near Petersburg, Virginia) for the Civil War, an expansive area with trails and outdoor exhibits. We started in the recreation of an ARVN base, originally French, with a brief introductory lecture that described the area during the war and the locations of the Viet Cong camps around the village of Cu Chi in relation to the American camps in six villages surrounding it. The major US unit was the 25th Infantry Division, Tropic Lightning. The VC eventually had a network of over 200 km of tunnels and underground rooms.

Next was a movie about the guerrillas of Cu Chi and how they fought the Americans, highlighting briefly a young woman who was known as a decorated American Killer Hero. We walked around the large park with Tam in the lead, commenting on each of the exhibits. He showed us ventilation systems that were disguised as termite nests. We saw the wreckage of an M41 tank that had been destroyed by a landmine. There was an exhibit showing models of various ingenious and deadly personnel traps. And an underground workshop for repurposing unexploded American ordinance for their offensive use. Throughout all of our wandering we heard constant rifle fire and came upon a firing range in which you had the opportunity to fire AK-47s; they charged $2.35 for each bullet, and none of us bothered to do this ourselves.

Another opportunity we bypassed was to crawl through demonstration tunnels, which had been enlarged slightly from the originals, anywhere from 20 to 80 m, depending on your claustrophobic tendencies. I am obviously too big for an extended crawl in a space under 5 feet high, and none of the others were interested either. We took a break and were served tea and cassava melon with peanut and salt, which was a nice respite from the heat. All in all, the two-hour journey to get here was worth it. We were surprised to see the very large number of tourists, but once again very few Americans.

On the way back to Saigon, we were treated to lunch at an open-air restaurant on the Saigon River. It was a seven-course meal served family style, so we did not need to overindulge. In the city, we persuaded Tam to visit the Air Force Museum, which turned out to be not so great. Although it had some aircraft outside, the inside was primarily photographs and dimly lit dioramas, none of which had English translations.

Finally, we visited some sites in Central Saigon, wilting under the 97° humid weather. The Jade Pagoda was something I found on a tourist website, but ended up not being particularly interesting. They wanted me to take off my shoes to enter, and I generally do not like to do so, so I only glimpsed it from the outside. The city post office was actually an interesting architectural building that had an outside decorated with the names of important scientists and inventors, while the inside hosted both a typical government post office function as well as a number of tourist souvenir shops. One of the guys remarked that it was like a miniature Grand Central Station.

Across the street was Notre Dame Cathedral, which is supposed to be beautiful, but it is undergoing renovation, so its front face was entirely covered by scaffolding. I have included a photo I got from the Internet. Nearby the Cathedral is the building whose roof was the scene for the famous photograph of the last helicopter leaving from Saigon in 1975.

We ended the evening with a hosted farewell dinner, cruising on a boat called La Perle de l’Orient. We had a pretty good four-course meal and saw some really stunning Saigon waterfront buildings, including Landmark 81, the tallest in Vietnam. The city uses a lot of electricity displaying interesting neon accents on these buildings. There was also excellent entertainment on board.

Saturday, March 15 — Saigon and Home

Since my flight was not until mid-afternoon, I had the morning free. I booked an hour-long cyclo tour downtown through the Viator app, a bargain $10. This was a lot of fun. The weather at 8 a.m. was very tolerable, and the Saturday morning traffic was not the usual madhouse. We did not see a lot of landmarks, but it was nice to soak up the ambiance. We passed by the Ben Thanh market, Notre Dame, the Ho Chi Minh City Museum (with the obligatory American military equipment out front), the post office, the opera house, and the Saigon River.

It was surprising to me that a large cosmopolitan city such as this has so few tourist attractions. There is the city museum and a fine arts museum that we did not visit, but otherwise we got to see much of what was listed in TripAdvisor in a day and a half.

I walked to the Ben Thanh market for some last-minute shopping and gawking. I believe it is the largest in Vietnam and is over 100 years old, serving 10,000 customers a day. It has about 1,500 stalls of clothing, souvenirs, electronic equipment, suitcases, groceries, and food stands, all packed shoulder to shoulder. I bought some coffee for my wife (including the kind that is eaten by a weasel and pooped out) and one of those little Chinese lucky cats with the waving arm, powered by a solar cell. We’ll see how long it lasts in a household that has two real cats. I endured inside only about 30 minutes in the oppressive mid-morning humidity.

I flew three hours from Saigon to Taipei, laid over for three hours, and then eleven back to San Francisco, departing at 3:45 p.m. Saturday, arriving at 7:50 p.m. Saturday, all due to the magic of the international dateline.

I had a generally good time on the trip. It would have been nice to have more focused military content, but the culture-heavy itinerary was mostly interesting, the hotel, meal, and bus logistics quite good, and the group was friendly with stimulating conversations. Vietnam is quite different than what I remembered, so understanding how it has evolved satisfied an important goal for me. I doubt that I will ever return, but others will find many interesting tourist opportunities for bargain prices.

• Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, Khe Sanh, Dong Ha
• Hue, Da Nang, Hoi An, Can Tho
• Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) (this page)