News: City sets up team to assist foreign backpackers
A/ Overview and Map
B/ Famous tour/bus operators
1/ TheSinhTourist (Sinhcafe)
2/ Phuong Trang bus operator
3/ TNK Travel
4/ Kim Travel
5/ Air Asia
C/ Saigon backpacker area on Tuoi Tre newspaper
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…
News: City sets up team to
assist foreign backpackers
(TuoiTreNews Updated :
06/09/2013 13:55 GMT + 7)
The Communist Youth
Union of Ho Chi Minh City’s District 1 on Saturday launched a team of young
volunteers to assist tourists in the Pham Ngu Lao quarters, a well-known
backpacker area for foreigners.
The team includes 78
youths with good foreign language skills and they will work on two shifts: from
8am to 11am and 2pm to 5pm on weekdays.
From June 8 to
December 29, the volunteers will be available to provide tourism information
and help prevent scams targeting tourists at three hot spots in the area: the T-junction
of Pham Ngu Lao - De Tham, the crossroads of De Tham - Bui Vien, and 262 De
Tham.
Local authorities hope
that this team will help promote the city as a safe tourism destination and
attract more international travelers.
A/ Overview
Bui Vien, Pham Ngu Lao and De Tham streets along with a spider-like
network of intersecting alleys constitute the Saigon's backpacker area.
There are many reasons that a lot of tourists choose to stay here:
1/ From Saigon's Tan Son Nhat airport, there are many daily public buses with air-condition to this area. You can get off at De Tham street's station. (See how to get here at
"Transport").
2/ Great location: center of Saigon city. Just a some-minute walk to Ben Thanh market
3/ Plenty of dorms, basic guesthouses, standard hotels and some deluxe ones. Room rate starts at 5USD up (See "Where to stay")
3/ Plenty of dorms, basic guesthouses, standard hotels and some deluxe ones. Room rate starts at 5USD up (See "Where to stay")
4/ Many restaurants and bar which open till late.
5/ A lot of mini marts which open 24 hours
6/ Banks and ATMs, Currency exchange counter
7/ Cheap/ reasonable price. (a Vietnamese loaf of bread is just 15,000VND or 75cents)
8/ There are many tour/bus operators which offer the most competitive prices (of course you get what you pay)
9/ English speaking people
All the best?
Its really safe in this crowded area but there were some reports of robbery.
Be careful when you arrive here in early morning from Nha Trang by sleeping bus. When something happened, its good to contact your consulate.
Local policemen speak almost no English.
If you come with family and kids, consider to stay in Ben Thanh market area. Otherwise, stay with the loudly music bars and some scenes not good for children.
Map
8/ There are many tour/bus operators which offer the most competitive prices (of course you get what you pay)
9/ English speaking people
All the best?
Its really safe in this crowded area but there were some reports of robbery.
Be careful when you arrive here in early morning from Nha Trang by sleeping bus. When something happened, its good to contact your consulate.
Local policemen speak almost no English.
If you come with family and kids, consider to stay in Ben Thanh market area. Otherwise, stay with the loudly music bars and some scenes not good for children.
Map
Below 23/9 park with bold green colour is Pham Ngu Lao street. Under 1
line is Bui Vien street. De Tham street links Pham Ngu Lao and Bui Vien
streets. Ben Thanh market is on the right (See how to get to Ben Thanh
market by public bus from Tan Son Nhat international airport at
"Transport")
De Tham street
15,000VND/ loaf of bread
Bui Vien street at night
Drink Saigon beer (10,000VND/beer) and enjoy "Kho muc" (fried cuttlefish)
Two of the most crowded bars on De Tham and Bui Vien: CO2 and Crazy Buffalo
B/ Famous tour/bus operators
1/ TheSinhTourist (formerly well known as Sinhcafe. www.thesinhtourist.vn)
Contact
Head
quarter in Saigon and has representative offices at all main tourist
destinations. All the offices are in backackper area of destinations.
So it is just a little bit walk to have everything.
Address: 246 De Tham street, district 1, Ho Chi Minh city
Tel: +84.8.38389597Fax: +84.8.38369322
Email: info@thesinhtourist.vn
www.thesinhtourist.vn
Overview Has been in service since 1993. Very popular with packackers, Asian tourists, especially Korean, Singaporean, Malaysian, Chinese and overseas Vietnamese.
Offer open bus: Saigon – Da Lat – Mui Ne - Nha Trang – Hoi An – Hue – Ha Noi (Please see "Transport" for detail). Daily 6:30AM bus to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap of Cambodia
Offer daily tours around Sai Gon, Cu Chi tunnel and Mekong delta
Note: Its 2-day Mekong delta with just about 45USD/pax and stay in a 3-star + hotel with three meals, bus, guide
Its 3-day Mekong delta visits Tra Su cajuput forest which is not on tour of almost other tour operators.
Price is a liitle bit higher than TNK and Kim Travel but offer better food and stay
Attention: During traditional new year and holidays, the service is maybe getting worse and price increases very much, sometimes doubles price in comparison with normal day.
Overview Has been in service since 1993. Very popular with packackers, Asian tourists, especially Korean, Singaporean, Malaysian, Chinese and overseas Vietnamese.
Offer open bus: Saigon – Da Lat – Mui Ne - Nha Trang – Hoi An – Hue – Ha Noi (Please see "Transport" for detail). Daily 6:30AM bus to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap of Cambodia
Offer daily tours around Sai Gon, Cu Chi tunnel and Mekong delta
Note: Its 2-day Mekong delta with just about 45USD/pax and stay in a 3-star + hotel with three meals, bus, guide
Its 3-day Mekong delta visits Tra Su cajuput forest which is not on tour of almost other tour operators.
Price is a liitle bit higher than TNK and Kim Travel but offer better food and stay
Attention: During traditional new year and holidays, the service is maybe getting worse and price increases very much, sometimes doubles price in comparison with normal day.
2/ Phuong Trang bus operator
Contact
272 De Tham Street, district 1 (next to TheSinhTourist bus operator).
Tel: (08) 38 309 309 (open 24 hours)
Website: http://futatrans.com.vn - Email: lienhe@futa.vn
Overview: Offer modern buses for the route Saigon - Dalat- Mui Ne- Nha Trang - Da Nang and Mekong delta.
This company has many offices. The De Tham office is only for booking ticket and getting on bus for Da Lat, Vung Tau, Phan Thiet (Mui Ne), Nha Trang.
Very popular with local people
(Please see "Transport" for detail)
Tel: (08) 38 309 309 (open 24 hours)
Website: http://futatrans.com.vn - Email: lienhe@futa.vn
Overview: Offer modern buses for the route Saigon - Dalat- Mui Ne- Nha Trang - Da Nang and Mekong delta.
This company has many offices. The De Tham office is only for booking ticket and getting on bus for Da Lat, Vung Tau, Phan Thiet (Mui Ne), Nha Trang.
Very popular with local people
(Please see "Transport" for detail)
Pictures
Pics: Phuong Trang
3/ TNK Travel
| |||||||||||||||
2nd office is for Japanese tourists with Japanese staffs
Cheap price
Main office
TNK bus
Office for Japanese tourists
4/ Kim Travel
| Add: | Add: 189 De Tham St., Dist.1, HCMC, Vietnam |
| Phone: | (848) 39205552 / 39205553 |
| Fax: | (848) 38369859 |
| Website: | www.kimtravel.com |
| Email: | info@kimtravel.com |
5/ Air Asia
Location: De Tham street (opposite TheSinhTourist)
Saigon backpacker area on Tuoi Tre newspaper
Ho Chi Minh City backpackers’ town
Tuoi Tre
Updated : 09/10/2013 11:38 GMT + 7
There is no time for sleep in a small area of several square
kilometers in central District 1 in Ho Chi Minh City, which is occupied
by foreign ‘backpackers’.
Locals call it "Khu phố Tây ba lô" or Saigon Backpackers’ – a hot spot for foreign tourists to stay in Vietnam.
It is becoming more and more popular around the world as the ‘town’ of
guesthouses, restaurants and an abundance of other services for low
priced tourism.
The area is bounded by the streets of Pham Ngu Lao, De Tham, Bui Vien,
and Do Quang Dau. It is criss-crossed by dozens of small alleys
connecting the ends of the area to form a ‘labyrinth’. Given its small
size, it takes a backpacker less than an hour to walk around the
‘labyrinth’.
The streets and alleys are home to over 90 travel offices, 247 hotels
and guestrooms, 72 registered restaurants and numerous eating tables set
up along pavements, and 25 fashion and gift shops.
Knocking on the door at midnight
Foreign backpackers are seen strolling round, eating, or drinking any time, day and night, in the ‘town’.
One of the ‘specialties’ of visiting the area is the languages –
English, French, Spanish, and Japanese. But the most attractive language
of the ‘town’, which does not really have a name, is the mixture of
body language, Vietnamese and a given foreign language during a chat.
Different from alleys in other areas, alleys in the backpackers’ town
are busy from the midnight until early in morning, because this is the
part of the day when cheaper international flights arrive in Saigon.
Alley 104 on Bui Vien Street, which is less than 1.5m wide and 200m
long, has more than 20 mini hotels standing next to one another. The
colorful neon signs of the hotels and other services light up the alley
all night.
“This is the first time I’ve come to Vietnam, and I didn’t think this
street would be so narrow,” said US backpacker Anmada Taylor, who booked
a room in the alley in early June via the website Agoda.com. “But it
seems OK as I see people drinking and chatting over there at night. No
worries.”
In the sitting room of another hotel in the alley, a Scottish tourist
named Edward Davis is playing guitar and singing while eating dried
peanuts with iced beer.
“I’m here for a month, I like it here. It’s friendly, I think it’s easy to live in Vietnam,” he told Tuoi Tre.
At another table, some backpackers were surfing the internet and
checking Facebook at 3:00am – four hours before the start of a working
day.
Not only hotel rooms are available, as tourists can choose cheaper dorm
rooms – a nine square meter room for a maximum of six people. It has
triple bunk beds.
De Tham and Pham Ngu Lao Streets are the ‘domain’ of travel and car
booking offices, while Bui Vien Street is mainly for hotels and
restaurants, and Do Quang Dau is the street of bars, coffee shops and
street food.
At the bars, visitors can not only listen to international music but
also watch football matches from the English Premier League, La Liga,
Bundesliga, and Champions League.
Visitors can also take advantage of other services such as tattoo and
massage parlors, as well as spas at the intersection of Bui Vien and Do
Quang Dau. The corner is full of cigarette smoke and women staying up
late.
Most foreign tourists staying in the Saigon Backpackers’ town dress
like locals do while walking along the streets – a T-shirt, shorts, and
slippers. They greet one another as friends.
Some struggle to use chopsticks to eat. They drink Vietnamese coffee,
which is different from elsewhere in the world, as it is mixed in
boiling water to produce a thick black liquid after going through a
filter.
Most tourists stay in the backpackers’ town for several days, and it
serves as a transit location for foreign tourists before departing for
other areas such as the Mekong Delta, Nha Trang, Da Lat, or flying to
neighboring nations like Cambodia and Laos.
On average, hotels in the area cost US$12 -22 a day, but may be lowered
to $7 sometimes. The peak season for Westerners is from August to
January, while Asian visitors often come in February – April
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…
Sunday, April 06, 2014 13:44
Why change Bui Vien if it’s one of Saigon’s most popular haunts for both locals and foreigners?
While tourism is still growing in excess of 10 percent per year,
with the economic slow-down Vietnam wants to bring in more tourists.
From the (some say failed) attempt to entice visitors to Phu Quoc Island
with the promise of a free 30-day visa, to the proposed “US$1 a day
tourist tax,” Vietnam simultaneously manages to give with one hand and
take away with the other in a confusing show of mixed messages.
And no message is more mixed than the government’s recent push to
“clean up” the Old Quarter in Hanoi and the Tourist Quarter in Saigon,
contentiously removing all the chairs and tables from Pham Ngu Lao Ward,
the bustling but tiny hub of inner Saigon, home to over 420 hotels and
responsible for over $1 million every day in income.
If you happened to hear the police vehicles driving around Pham Ngu
Lao Ward and you speak fluent Vietnamese you might have noticed
something strange about the message they gave. They were telling people
that “the foreigners” want Pham Ngu Lao “cleaned up”. We have to clean
it up “for the foreigners”. But has anyone asked the foreigners what
they want?
Let’s call this what it really is; an effort to change Vietnam’s
image. The government thinks that a cleaner, more modern, metropolitan
city will attract more tourists, and possibly a better class of tourist.
But they fail to see the point of view that the rest of the world has.
Yes, I know all too well that people who have not been to Vietnam
have some crazy ideas. “Isn’t it a war-ravaged place full of poverty and
prostitutes and infant mortality?” “Can I even get Internet there?” We
all as residents know how far that is from the truth. Vietnam is a
modern country with some of the highest standards in the world of
literacy, Internet access, healthcare and political stability. But I can
understand how the rest of the world might not know.
How many of us came to Saigon for Gucci handbags and luxury
apartments and glitzy malls? I didn’t. I think most of us, and I have to
pause to ask the professional expats of Vietnam to get off their high
horse and not be judgmental about the “tourist scum” for a moment and
just admit that we came here for a simple life.
A life without pretentious airs and grandiose lifestyle. We came for the ca phe sua da and the banh mi thit and the hot rock massages… and for the mot hai ba yo.
Even if we “grew up” and moved out of Bui Vien to live in Phu My Hung
or An Phu or even Go Vap or Cho Lon, a lot of us still recognize that
those things are part of Saigon’s culture. It’s in Saigon’s blood.
Do you really want to ban street vendors in the “tourist area” of
Saigon? Because when you ask anyone who’s visited or lived in Vietnam
but now lives abroad what they miss about Saigon, they will be quick to
tell you how much they’d absolutely kill for a glass of ice cold Trung
Nguyen coffee and a banh mi thit or a bia hoi.
But where will we get any of those things if we eliminate street
vendors in Pham Ngu Lao? Will we have to buy them from a shop? “Come to
Saigon Subway and pay VND50,000 for banh mi thit or Highlands Coffee to pay VND80,000d for a ca phe sua da.” No no no. That simply will not do.
While the battle raged in the Facebook communities such as Another
Side of Vietnam last week between the down to earth expats versus the
stiff upper lip “I live in the REAL Saigon” stalwarts, arguing back and
forth about whether Pham Ngu Lao was either a disgrace to Saigon or the
very heart and lifeblood of the city, I saw one Vietnamese girl chime in
at the very end of the lengthy discussion, after reading what must have
been pages and pages of people calling both the foreigners and the
locals disgusting for eating and drinking on the sidewalk. She said:
“Eating and drinking on the street is part of our culture. We like it
that way”.
And there you have it in a nutshell. We all know if we’ve visited
Bui Vien at night that it is NOT just full of backpackers. In fact at 11
p.m. on a Sunday night you’ll be hard pressed to find one at all
amongst the massive throngs of young Vietnamese drinking and eating
heartily and toasting each other to good health and good luck.
So who are we cleaning up Saigon for? It can’t be for the locals
because they love it. It can’t be for the foreign residents because they
(for the most part) love it. Who is it for? Some theoretical foreign
tourists with lots of money but who don’t want to visit Vietnam because
they mistakenly think that Thailand or Malaysia are cleaner and safer?
I had a good discussion about it with some friends the other night.
A Thai friend from my area who works and drinks at a local bar has been
saying repeatedly lately “This is unique. People come here because this
is unique. We don’t have this in Thailand or Malaysia or other places.
This here… Saigon... it is unique. You cannot take this away or you will
lose something precious.”
A Belgian who had joined our party weighed in on the discussion and
asked me “Do you want this to be Khao San Road?” And I looked between
him and my Thai friend and with a smile I said “If I wanted to live on
Khao San Road, I would live on Khao San Road. Right?” My Thai friend
said “Of course. There’s nothing wrong with Khao San Road, but it’s not
Bui Vien.”
If we want to see France or Holland, we will go there. If we want
to see Hong Kong, Tokyo or Singapore, we will go there for what that
offers. I’m typing this on a plane to Singapore right now, but you know
how long I’m spending there? No longer than it will take me to hop a
train to Kuala Lumpur. Because I have no desire to spend SG$15 for some
basic takeaway food or to queue for entry to museums and events. I’m
headed straight for the heart of KL… Jalan Petaling where I know I will
see happy smiles and street vendors and a smorgasbord of food served on
the roadside. But when I had to say goodbye for a month to my precious
Duong Bui Vien apartment this morning, I did it with a tear in my eye.
Do whatever you want to the Old Quarter in Hanoi. Take down all the
English signs (as I understand is happening right now) and return it to
its French Colonial glory if you wish and make it the sort of
no-nonsense, tidy and respectful snapshot of history that you desire it
to be.
But we don’t want Bui Vien to be Khao San Road. We want it to be
Bui Vien. So if I can politely and respectfully give my opinion to the
Vietnamese government, as a travel journalist and Saigon resident (with
the Vietnamese wife and Saigon Dep Lam tattoo to prove it)… keep your
hands off Pham Ngu Lao please and let’s let Saigons be Saigons.
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