Off the Beaten Path

The day before we made our last visit to the Orange Apartment, we made our way out that evening to check out the area at night to see if it felt safe. Sure that we knew where the building was on the map, but without an actual street address, we headed out in a cab. When we crossed over the bridge linking District 1 to Benh Thanh, we thought we saw the apartment building in the distance and directed our driver to the right. Nearing the neighborhood, the driver realized that there were no cars allowed, so he dropped us off on the sidewalk.

We walked in the direction of the building for about 10 minutes, only to discover that it was not the correct building. Steven was tired and ready to head back, but I was determined, so he agreed to walk with me passed where we had been dropped off, across a highway, and into another neighborhood, along the river and to yet another mistaken building.

When we realized that we had again gone wrong, we noticed that we had wandered into a Vietnamese neighborhood unlike any we had seen before. The neighborhood consisted of narrow streets barely wide enough for two people to pass without touching, lined with Vietnamese homes, their store front living rooms completely open to the sidewalk, inviting passersby to peer in to their family life as they walked by. Deep in the neighborhood, we came across another bridge, this one across a canal, filled with trash and lined with structures cobbled together with corrugated tin - the inner slums of Ho Chi Minh City.

We decided then that we should give up and head back and flagged a cab down on the main street to our hotel in District One. We were disappointed in not having seen the area around the apartment, but happy to have stumbled upon a slice of life in the city that we would not have seen otherwise.