Water Dispenser Outside Church, Le Van Sy St.

One of the most touching sights in Ho Chi Minh City is the humble water dispenser many Catholic churches leave on the footpath outside. In a city where clean, drinkable water is hard to get, this is a small act of charity that is immensely useful, and, to my mind at least, quite admirable.
These dispensers are filled up with clean water throughout the day, and the thousands of people who work, travel or live on the streets of this enormous city know they can walk by and grap a cupful whenever they want it. The sign on the side says "No Charge."
This particular photograph was taken on Le Van Sy St. in Phu Nhuan, outside the beautiful Ba Chuong church.

Monastery Gardens - Ho Chi Minh City - Vanh Hanh Buddhist University

Van Hanh Buddhist University was once a dusty collection of ramshackle shacks and 60s-era concrete buildings. A few years ago a wealthy Taiwanese Buddhist group came to the rescue and developed it into one of the most beautiful small universities I have seen.
It is also home to a resident monastic community (it is the residence of Vietnam's Buddhist Patriarch), and operates a neighbourhood temple.

Monastery Gardens - Ho Chi Minh City - Chua Giac Lam

One of the suburban temples in Ho Chi Minh City that is well and truly on the tourist beat is Chua Giac Lam.
It is said to be one of the area's earliest extant Mahayana temples (there are, naturally, some much older Theravada temples in the vicinity, including Wat Bodhiwong, a Khmer temple), and there are graves in the temple cemetery dating back 300 years. Despite the occasional crowd of tourists, I quite like Giac Lam. It is spread out, and in the afternoons it is a hangout for students from the neighbourhood who come here to study in the quiet - and do quite a bit of flirting with each other. When I spent a lot of time in Vietnam in 1999 I used to come here quite often to conduct an informal English class with a young monk I knew, and we were allowed special access to a closed-off garden at the side of the temple which grows special medicinal herbs for the monks' use. Unfortunately I have no pics from that time.
The front courtyard boasts a very big and very healthy Bodhi tree.
As it is situated on quite a large parcel of land, the temple has, over the years, established a number of different outdoor shrines on a grand scale.



This shrine to Kwan Yin is a great favourite of elderly Chinese men, who sit in front of it all morning shouting to each other in Teo Chew dialect, smoking and scratching their bare bellies.

Monastery Gardens - Ho Chi Minh City - Chua Vien Giac

Right near my house in Ho Chi Minh City is a small suburban temple that was once dusty, decrepit and nondescript.




About ten years ago the new Abbott began to rebuild it, and these days it is one of the most beautiful temples in the City.




It is one of the few temples to have a dedicated full-time gardener (who also happens to be a monk), and the grounds are kept in pristine condition.




Chua Vien Giac is well worth a visit, not just for its lovely garden, but for its unique architecture, based on traditional Hue styles.

Details: Chua Vien Giac, 193 Bùi Thị Xuân – Phường 1 – Quận Tân Bình – TP. Hồ Chí Minh

Temple Bells

Big cast-iron bells are a necessary feature of all temples in Vietnam, and I am kind of interested in them. They are obviously an expensive item, but I have no idea where they come from - I've seen factories and workshops making all kinds of Buddhist ritual objects, but I've never come across a bell-making business.
Unlike in the West, the bells aren't necessarily very carefully pitched - normally just a dull, heavy metallic sound that can carry over the whole temple complex.
Often in the afternoon the bells are sounded for extended periods.
Bells are frequently covered with sheets of paper carrying prayers, especially for the sick.
This is a new-ish bell at a big temple in Thu Duc district, just outside Ho Chi Minh City.

Ho Chi Minh City

I love big cities.
Most people despise places like Bangkok or Taipei, but I adore them. The more unwieldy and congested the better, in my estimation. I think this is a reaction to growing up in the bush. I spent most of my life dreaming of the city, and when I travel that's mostly what I'm interested in.
Now, most foreign visitors to Vietnam come away adoring quaint little places like Ho An or Phu Quoc or Hue. All nice places. Or they rhapsodies about the faded post-colonial charm of Hanoi. Agreed, great city. But for me, the truly wonderful part of Vietnam is Ho Chi Minh City - that vast, heaving, polluted metropolis, a Gotham gone mad.
Yes, I know that it's filthy, hot and dangerous. I know that it's almost impossible to get around in - and increasingly so. But it's so charming!
For starters, the people are beautiful. Boisterous and outgoing, Saigonese love going out and being out, and their frank curiosity and love of the new make them irresistable.
And they are crazy about religion. Ho Chi Minh City is jam packed with temples, churches and shrines. This alone is enough to render it endlessly fascinating for me. Every single suburb can boast of dozens of hidden-away and quite beautiful houses-of-worship, and after 15 years of exploring I'm still nowhere near having discovered them all.
The crazy architecture and the tall, cool cement block houses are constantly diverting, and you never know what will be created when a construction begins.
Every third home is a restaurant or cafe, and dining-out options are endless.
Anyone who fancies him or herself a good cook can simply chuck a couple of plastic chairs out onto the footpath and voila, a restaurant is born. These places are frequently delicious.
Food, religion, noise and beauty - all these things combine to make Ho Chi Minh City the perfect metropolis in my eyes.

Vietnam Traffic

One of the things that is most legendary about Ho Chi Minh City is its abominable, dangerous traffic.
Vietnam is not really a place designed for the pedestrian, and any thoughts of leisurely strolls through quaint city streets should be jettisoned as early as possible. Any avid walker soon learns that strolling the streets of any city of size in Vietnam is an act of insanity.
Road rules do exist, but in Saigon they are, for the most part, ignored. You need to look left, then right, then left again before you cross a street. And then you need to close your eyes and step out into the chaos, calling on the protection of your chosen supernatural being.
In side streets and alleys the going gets even tougher, because there are no footpaths, and the flaneur is forced to simply try for a place on the street, along with all the motorised traffic.
Should there be the remnants of a footpath, it is mostly used as motorcycle parking or extended display space for shops and restaurants.
Any spare space is taken up by small, illegal carts selling sugar cane juice, cigarettes or bread rolls.
In Ho Chi Minh City these days one sees more and more cars, but I really wonder if they will ever take off. It is already difficult enough getting around on the infinitely more maneuverable motorcycle.

St. Andrew Dung Lac

It is always my contention that the Vietnamese (particularly in the Central and Southern regions) are a particularly religious people, and take their religion very seriously.
I also think it's interesting that Catholicism is, in fact, quite an antique spiritual tradition in Vietnam. Many assume that it arrived with the French in the 19th Century, but in fact there have been Catholics in Vietnam since the beginning of the 16th Century.
In the section of Ho Chi Minh City that I call home, vast numbers of Catholics reside, most of them descendants of Northern Catholics who fled the great persecutions of the mid 50s. There is a network of churches in the district, some of them, like the beautiful Ba Chuong church on Le Van Sy, quite enormous.
It is inside the Ba Chuong church that you can see a shrine to St. Andrew Dung Lac and his martyred companions. At various times throughout Vietnamese history the people in charge have been less than enthusiastic about Catholicism, and there are large numbers of martyrs. St. Andrew Dung-Lac is kind of the granddaddy of them all, and his feast day serves as the memorial date for 117 of the 19th century Catholic martyrs in Vietnam.
Though a shrine to these martyrs is a standard part of most church interiors, in terms of popular devotion they can't compete with Truong Buu Diep, St. Martin de Porres and, naturally, the Blessed Virgin. Shrines to these figures are ubiquitous, and more spontaneously attended.

Quan Am Temple, Cholon

I have been an enthusiast for Quan Am Temple in Cholon for many years now.
In fact, one of my abiding fantasies is to go and work there as a temple attendant for a few months and write a book about it - a la Gontran de Poncins' wonderful From a Chinese City.
I love District 5 and its crazy energy - especially at night. I love how the one place residents of Saigon consistently warn me against visiting is District 5 - allegedly many bad things happen there. Perhaps it's just lingering prejudice against the Chinese, or perhaps it's true? Cong An News, the trashy police tabloid that is read religiously by many in Ho Chi Minh City, delights in a good murder or violent robbery in District 5. In fact, it normally warrants a front page.
But by day my favourite place to hang is the colourful and crazily busy Quan Am Temple in Lao Tu street. The fact that this place is well and truly on the Lonely Planet beat doesn't bother me, because I have been hanging out there for many years. The foreigners drift in and out after taking a few snaps, but I have contacts among the incense sellers and fortune tellers and old ladies who clean the toilets, and am allowed to put my feet up in secret rooms and watch the non-stop activity at what must be one of Vietnam's busiest temples.
A few years ago this place was much more interesting, from a religious/anthropological view. It was a lot more run-down, and there were lots more shrines hidden about the place (which is amazing when you witness the sheer number of shrines that still exist within the temple complex!). Also, there used to be any number of lady shamans, clairvoyants and spiritual healers on the premises, ready to prescribe a religious ritual or two to advance the petitioner's good luck. An inflow of money from overseas Chinese communities has meant that the temple has cleaned up its act considerably, and the lady shamans and prophetesses were among the first things to go. It's kinda sad, but was probably necessary - the local authorities tend to take a dim view of When I spend a morning or afternoon at the temple I am treated as a special guest and ushered into one of the side rooms and fed royally with buns and fruit left on the shrines by devotees. It really is a wonderful way to while away some spare time while you are in Ho Chi Minh City, and I can't recommend it enough. Just pull up a chair somewhere near the main shrine room and brave the carcinogenic clouds of incense smoke.

Kwan Yin

Kwan Yin is much loved in Vietnam, where she is known as Quan The Am. Temples always feature a little shrine to her somewhere on the premises, and some temples outdo themselves to create elaborate shrines to the Gentle Mother. Such statues often attract a cult following, and particular statues are thought to possess particular lucky energies. One could create a map of Ho Chi Minh City based on the various shrines to the Goddess of Mercy and what they are meant to bestow upon the sincere worshipper.

The River

Water runs through many of Saigon's suburbs. Indeed, Ho Chi Minh City is really little more than a glorified swamp, hence the constant flooding throughout the rainy season. This is the reason for the traffic chaos, the perpetual filth and endless inconvenience of the current roadworks going on all over the city - the government is installing a new street drainage system which will (hopefully) make flooding a thing of the past.
Now the section of river that runs through my part of town was once a stinking cesspit issuing a stench so foul that it was actually difficult to walk near it. A whole miniature city of illegal pole houses covered most of the water's surface, and it was generally an extremely undesirable place to be. At some point the government knocked down all the houses (I think it was in the late 90s) and beautified the riverbanks, installing a series of one-way bridges that helped traffic flow and eased congestion. restaurants and cafes blosomed in buildings facing the river, making the most of the clean, grassy banks and cool river breezes.
That was then.
For some reason the authorities decided to tear the whole thing up again and do something else. What that something else is is not exactly clear, as the whole process has taken years and years, and the riverside areas are once more stinking cesspits good for nothing but impromptu toilet breaks and spontaneous illegal cockfights.
How fondly I remember those green grassy banks and the gentle sound of laughter drifting on a cool breeze from an elegant riverfront cafe......

Giac Lam Pagoda

Giac Lam Pagoda is well and truly on the tourist beat, but I still find it an amazing place.
It is gradually being gentrified, but just a few years ago it was an abandoned and rustic corner in a dodgy area of Ho Chi Minh City where you were likely to be abused by passers-by. It has lost that frisson of danger, but it is still a wonderfully real slice of Saigonese life, an ancient suburban temple that caters to its local community.
Though tourists flock to it for its ancient statuary and well-preserved temple architecture, Vietnamese come for the Kwan Yin Pagoda at the front of the temple, which is said to be especially lucky, and anyone fit or energetic enough to climb to its top to pray and make offerings can expect some especial boons.
The temple is also a destination spot for local students, who use its shady courtyards, patios and gardens as study spots to escape from overcrowded conditions at home. Inevitably this lends the temple a slightly romantic air as young people use the guise of study to explain away their illicit meetings.
When I was here studying Vietnamese back in 1999 I used to meet a young monk here and we'd have perplexing afternoons holding hands and talking about the Buddhist scriptures. We'd take a spot by the abbott's garden, famous throughout Saigon for its collection of medicinal herbs and plants indigenous to Southern Vietnam.

Building a new temple

There is something of a temple building boom going on around Ho Chi Minh City at the moment.

Buddhism is slowly accepting its status as the religion of the wealthy middle-classes in Vietnam, and a combination of financial forces means that City temples have, for the first time in a generation, the funds to renovate and re-invent. These forces include the increasing financial clout of the Saigonese professional classes, the injection of funds from overseas Vietnamese communities, and the diminishing size of monastic communities. In a very short space of time Buddhist monastic communities in Vietnam have begun to experience the same shrinking pool of vocations for the celibate life that the West has experienced for 40 years. While this is worrying for the future, it does have a positive short-term effect - the temples are no longer leaking money by being a halfway house for orphans, the marginally insane and the otherwise unemployable. There is money now to be made in Ho Chi Minh City, and being a monk seems far less attractive a meal ticket than it might have just a few years ago.

I was at Dai Giac temple yesterday, and observed the on-going re-construction of what was once a very humble little suburban temple (with a blind monk striking the bell in the afternoons, and a cage of irritable monkeys waiting to attack the unsuspecting passer-by). It is being transformed into something very new and very glamorous.

This process is happening all over town, at faster or slower speeds depending on the available cash. The crumbling old cement temples built for the most part during the American war years will soon be a thing of the past.