Our son turned 12 this year, and overnight went from a sweet child to a terrible tween. It was a shocking transformation, and my husband and I hoped that treating him to a four-day break in Vietnam would result in less eye-rolling and decreased sarcasm.
Our plane descends into Ho Chi Minh City at night, into what looks like a blanket of eye-popping neon. Calvin, like he’s done on planes since he was eight months old, presses his nose against the window and forgets to be churlish, but only for a short while: our hotel turns out to be set up in what looks like a dilapidated doll’s house.
“Why couldn’t we have visited Tokyo instead?” Calvin asks, as we judder up in the tiny lift. Then we turn the key to our room and step into a shoebox that has windows at one end, a bathroom at the other, and three single beds jammed in between – the “triple” that we’d asked for.
But emerging the next morning after breakfast (spicy shrimp on toast, mango chutney, thick black coffee), things get better. We discover that Ben Thành Market, a hodgepodge of shops and food stalls, is five minutes away, and Calvin soon declares his favourite dishes – fragrant beef pho and sweet sago dumplings. We wander around, parting with fistfuls of dong each time that we buy something (the people of Saigon seem to prefer their own currency – one of the least valued in the world – to the American dollar). Calvin is fascinated by the thick wads of bills trading hands everywhere, and never tires of pointing at various items just to hear the price, which often runs into millions.
We also book a couple of tours, one of them a cycle-rickshaw ride through the city at night. This is more alarming than fun, because the rickshaw men, all on the wrong side of 80 years old, set off at a brisk pace through the traffic, constantly taking their eyes off the road to point out landmarks.
Calvin enjoys the tour immensely, but not as much as the water-puppet show that we catch on the last day. The theatre is ancient, comprising a sunken stage filled with murky water and creaky wooden bleachers. The performance is enthralling – brightly coloured dragons and phoenixes sloshed about in the water while six musicians wail songs about harvest and rain. At one point, Calvin moves up to the front for a better view and sits chin in hands, utterly rapt.
Ho Chi Minh City has made it onto Calvin’s list of favourite cities. It’s on mine, too, because it seems to have cured our boy of the terrible tween syndrome. He hits 13 next year, but that’s a different story. And a different city. Probably Tokyo.
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