Before we get to Ho Chi Minh, I had a last few hours of wandering around Bangkok, primarily in, around, below and between various malls that glitter the Sukhumvit Road. I started at Siam Paragon, potentially the most renowned mall in Bangkok. It's glitzy, it has a bunch of stores that require reservations and/or limit attendance and hte like. But the real gem of the place is the food hall and food market in its basement. It's expanded from what I remember it to be in 2019, with far more restaurants and stalls selling more general food that got really crowded by the time I left around noon. The food market is the same as usual, a beautiful grocery with so many interesting fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood that all would be so enticiing had I to live in Bangkok.
The fanciest part of the food level was also the emptiest, a large are extending on one side with a man-made river running through it and floating restaurants on each side. It was truly beautiful, but most of the places were either empty or not open when I walked by around 11am. On the sides of the stream in the middle were even more glamorous restuarants. It was interesting as the store level of the mall was packed, so clearly there are a lot of people to buy expensive stuff, but maybe not to eat such stuff.
Finally, in the bowels of the Siam Paragon is an aquarium. Due to rain that was coming around this time, I decided to spring to do this as an indoor activity, and the aquarium was well reviewd. It earned those reviews. It is a winding path from regular fish, to a jungle section, to a large section with sharks, rays and larger fish - with the standard glass tunnel that you walk through. It wasn't the best aquarium I've been to (probably Cape Town), but had maybe the best penguin section, which was a hit with me. They were right up close, swimming aroudna pool so happily. It was beautiful.
From the Siam Paragon, I planned to walk the 20 minutes back towards the Central Embrassy Mall and the Eathai food hall for lunch. This walk goes past many other malls, some are connected directly through either direct elevated tunnels or a walkway that runs above ground of Sukhumvit Road for a decent amount of length. I passed through Central World, which is a less upscale, but still overall fancy, next to Siam Paragon, then past a couple others and finally making it back to Central Embassy and its large Eathai food hall.
Eathai was far more crowded this time, unsurprisingly as it was 1:15pm. I had parts of three meals, all together maybe 1.5 full meals. First was a duck & noodle flavorful soup, then a Tom Yum soup with sliced pork. Both were excellent, neither were too spicy, but the duck & flavorful one was pungent and dark, the Tom Yum tangy and bright. Without prior thought, I picked two opposite, but great soups. The final dish was a pork curry from Northern Thailand (some fo the stands are area specific) which also was excellent. I felt a bit bad leaving so much of each dish but in the end they get paid the full amount either way. This foodhall really had everything; it was clean, it was fairly cheap; it has a super efficient system to order and pay for food. It was a great way to spend my last few moments in Bangkok, surrounded by what still remains my favorite aspect of Thailand - it's food.
The drive to Bangkok's airport was fairly stress free, this time the reserve a Grab app working in overdrive with teh driver showing up early, beating me to the hotel. The only annoyance was since the flight is operated by Thai Smile (despite being booked on Thai Airways.com), I wasn't given my normal star alliance privelages - primarily not being able to go to the lounge. Of course, it just forced me to use my Priority Pass for the first time in at least three years - the Priority Pass lounge was fine, definitely not as good as what the Thai Airways lounge would have been, but at least was clean, had drinks and ok food, and good wifi.
The flight was uneventful and pretty short, and despite the immigration line wait being nearly as long as the flight (60 min v 80 min), soon enough I was in a grab towards the Le Meridien (booked on points, with Marriott for once honoring my suite night upgrade requests). On the drive from the airport to the city, I was again immediately struck by how quickly you are in the city. There's a nominal highway but it has stores and restaurants running alongside the entire way, and maybe 2km away from the airport you are basically in teh city. Ho Chi Minh at night is beautiful, and the surprisingly cool and dry (but humid) weather made it even better.
I was uncommitted for dinner as I didn't know for sure what time I would be through immigration and actually ready to eat, but in the end I made it to the Ngoc Suong seafood restaurant, a five minute walk from the Le Meridien. The Ngoc Suong ambience is great, open air (with a retracable cover). The food was good, not great, but the setting made up for it. I did have a beef wrapped in betel leaf starter (a standard Vietnamese option that is hard to go wrong with) and then a butterflied prawn in a house sauce, which was excellent but not meaty enough. In the end, Ngoc Suong was a decent spot for a last minute, quick dinner.
From there I started what will roughly be a 24 hour period of retracing all the best steps of my prior visit to Ho Cho Min City in 2019, though with some slight differences thrown in. The first was to The Gin House, which was my go to cocktail spot last time, both because it is great, and because it is a 6-minute walk away from The Observatory, where I will end my night. The sad news is the place had to give up half its space due to covid closures. The good news of course is that it is still open, it still has live music on weekends, and it still had excellent gin based cocktails, with great mixologists spinning them up. What I truly love about this place is what I love about Ho Chi Minh City in general - there is no pretension, no glitziness (granted, those places exist, especially on teh club side), but everything is just solid.
From there I went to The Observatory, which I recently ranked as my favorite EDM type club I've been to, and it more than held that ranking. I was a bit dismayed when I arrived at 12:30 that it wasn't so full, but by 1:30 or 2am, it was filled mayble slightly less than it was in 2019. As I'm writing this the next day, I checked my Google Timeline and realized I only got there around 1:15 in 2019 so I didn't really have a great comparison point in terms of its crowdedness for 12:15am.
The place has an airy semi-open rooftop bar and dance space with more light music, with a true EDM undergorund club replete with barely any lights, smoke machines and the rest, behidn it. Both have a bar with decent options, but most crucially balloons. I have no idea how these aren't things in other parts of the world. From what I gather its just basically giving a balloon with Nitrous Oxide and letting you inhale it for a brief high. They are safe, they are effective in teh best way, they are popular, and I'm not going to lie that the feeling I had when I took my first hit of balloon, with the Siagon breeze poking in, was about the best feeling I could have had. That is what I imagined when I decided that I wanted to throw two and a half days in Ho Chi Minh at the end of the trip. And through the first half day it was just about perfect.
