Saigon is the crucible of born-again capitalism. Officially named Ho Chin Minh City, for many-including its seven million-plus inhabitants-Vietnam’s most raffish and cosmopolitan metropolis will forever be Saigon.

It’s a frenetic city on the make, but there’s far more to it than wheeling and dealing. Once you get over the traffic anarchy and air pollution, it makes a pulsating start to any Vietnam adventure.

Particularly around downtown District One, Saigon is transforming itself into a modern Asian metropolis. Leafy Le Loi Boulevard seethes with cars and mopeds; cell-phone addiction convulses out of control; dance clubs are packed with newly affluent youngsters. Although not yet matching the mercantile gleam of Bangkok or Shanghai, malls such as Zen Plaza are a sign of things to come.

Casinos and luxury hotels in the People’s Socialist Republic? Yes, indeed. Like the glass-and-steel commercial high-rises, they’re a result of the Communist Party’s doi moi or "renovation" policy.

This hot, sprawling city stitches together multiple layers of history, culture, and lifestyles. Beyond the "bright lights, big city" glitz, hems (alleyways) lead into dim warrens, where small home enterprises thrive: outdoor barbers, noodle makers, and tailors busily whirring treadle sewing machines.

Expense-account restaurants trade aromas with pho bo beef-and-noodle kitchens and no-nonsense eateries. Think of it as crisp table-linen and filet mignon on one side of the street; plastic chairs and ca cha fish balls on the other. French indulgences are everywhere, but international flavors also include Chinese, Tex-Mex, Indian, Italian, and Japanese.

Well-heeled foreign shoppers make for Dong Khoi Street’s fine art galleries and array of silken seductions. Cheapskates in need of $5 guidebooks go to De Tham. Here, hawkers parade stacked-high piles of pirated travel guides covering every Asian country. De Tham is a main backpacker drag, but you don’t have to be young or grungy to use its cyber cafés or sign up for an $8-day-tour to the Mekong Delta.

More than 1,500 stalls…and around 15,000 daily visitors. On Le Loi Boulevard, Ben Thanh central market is jammed with dodgy lacquer ware, pirated CDs, cheap clothing, and knockoff copies of every designer purse imaginable. Be prepared to haggle.

It’s a must if you’re hunting for mass-produced junk-if you’re not, its milling madness is best avoided. Food stalls at the back yield some great sights and smells, but Binh Tay Market in ramshackle Cholon makes for a less tourist-infested photo mission. Home to the Chinese community since the early 1900s, its incense-laden temples blaze scarlet and gold. The jade sellers, traditional medicine doctors, and butcher stalls piled with chicken feet all seem to belong to backstreet Beijing, not Saigon. But although the slums have mostly gone, food markets like Binh Tay aren’t for the squeamish.

For decades, Saigon was a synonym for vice and dissipation: a running sore of brothels, fumeries (opium dens), and backroom gamblers oozing from the armpit of colonial France.

Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American, paints a mesmerizing portrait of its decline during the early 1950s. That louche world of old Indochine now casts only a faint shadow. Saigon’s neon-lit renaissance meant some scenes in the 2002 movie version of the novel were shot in the more traditional settings of Hanoi and Hoi An.

One of Greene’s favorite bolt holes was the Hotel Majestic in District One. Built to a French blueprint, it continues to flaunt its marble credentials at the river-front corner of Dong Khoi. Under a "pewter evening sky," the Majestic’s rooftop bar is a great place to look out over the Saigon River, sip a vermouth cassis, and read a chapter or two of Greene’s memoirs, Ways of Escape.

In Greene’s day, Dong Khoi was called rue Catinat. During the early 1950s, it remained Saigon’s most fashionable thoroughfare, but its fin-de-siècle shine was tarnishing badly. By the time American GIs arrived, rue Catinat had become Tu Do (Freedom Street), and just another booze-sodden stretch of iniquity. No horse-drawn carriages and certainly no splendid boutiques stocked with lorgnette opera glasses, Edith Piaf records, and French perfumes.

Renamed yet again as Dong Khoi (People’s Uprising Street), the old rue Catinat of the French colons has now returned to its role as an elite shopping street. Overall, prices seem cheaper in Hanoi, but Dong Khoi stores have a fabulous extravaganza of crafts and silk if you’ve no time to go north.

A People’s Committee administers the city from within the old Hôtel de Ville, the French for City Hall. Painted in lemon-meringue colors and topped by a russet roof, this lavish building looks almost bereft without a tricolor. It hardly suggests communist functionality. Nor does the Municipal Theater, formerly the Opera House.

Watching an advertising shoot for bridal wear on the theater’s steps, I wondered how Ho Chi Minh would view Vietnam’s free-market whirligig. The revolutionary leader is honored with a statue in a garden square below the former Hôtel de Ville. He’s reading to a child in his kindly-looking Uncle Ho pose.

At Dong Khoi’s upper end, Notre Dame Cathedral is another reminder of French times. So, too, are the restored colonial villas: a number reborn as garden restaurants. For locals, though, the lasting French legacy is the baguette. Here it’s as much a food staple as in Paris.

Sunsets mean sundowners. So don’t miss the chance for a thirst-quencher in the Rex Hotel’s rooftop garden bar. The Rex’s history makes it a must-visit landmark for many Americans.

An old stomping ground of U.S. military high command and international war correspondents, the Rex served as the venue for the "Five O’Clock Follies." Journalists gave this unflattering nickname to the highly-spun briefings from military spokesmen on the supposed progress of the Vietnam War-known here as "the American War."

In Vietnam, it is easy to feel as if the war had become some kind of grisly tourist attraction, even if most Vietnamese are exceptionally friendly and bear no overt grudges toward Americans.

Around 40 miles from Saigon, the Cu Chi Tunnels are a 125-mile web of subterranean passageways that provided Vietcong guerrillas an underground stronghold that American soldiers rarely penetrated.

Visitors are first subjected to an old black-and-white propaganda documentary before a tour of nasty-looking booby traps of the bamboo-spike variety. Then come the tunnels…one has been specially enlarged for Westerners. Still extremely narrow, it’s also pitch-black and chokingly humid. Don’t go down if you’re claustrophobic.

Also be warned that the sound of gunfire may induce a few heart-stopping moments. Above ground, the National Defense Shooting Range offers a $6 chance to fire off five bullets from an M-16 or an AK-47.

Everywhere in Vietnam it’s impossible to ignore these Apocalypse Now echoes. Grubbing around Saigon’s markets, you may wonder who buys U.S. military camouflage gear, bullet-strung necklaces, fake dog-tags, and Zippo lighters (I presume they’re fake). Even for rampant capitalists, profiting from what they insist are dead soldiers’ effects seems a peculiarly obnoxious practice.

Saigon slips into communist-correct HMC City mode at the War Remnants Museum. Attracting around 400,000 annual visitors, it bills itself as "one of Ho Chi Minh City’s most enticing cultural and tourist sites." Until a few years ago, it was titled the American War Crimes Museum.

On District Three’s Vo Van Tan Street, its grounds are thronged with giggly Vietnamese teenagers enjoying Kodak moments beside captured American tanks, Huey helicopters, and defused bombs. But the exhibition halls hold no laughs for anybody.

Photo galleries chronicle endless horrors. Kiddies deformed by Agent Orange. Corpses and atrocities. Bombed neighborhoods. Massacred peasant villagers. Colonial rule isn’t ignored either. There’s also a prison-like building with an authentic guillotine and "tiger cages." Topped by grilles, these minuscule cells contain emaciated wax models of prisoners tortured by the French.

One-sided propaganda? Maybe. But for those who have never truly grasped the reality of war, it should not be missed.
NEED TO KNOW
Where to stay:
The Caravelle Hotel

What to see:

CU CHI CAVES
Sinh Café Tours run half-day coach trips to Cu-Chi for $4. Entrance to the site is an additional $5-see www.sinhcafevn.com. For $6, a full-day-tour combines the tunnels with the mesmerizing kitsch of the Cao Dai Temple-that includes Victor Hugo, Lenin, and Winston Churchill among its saints and spirit guides.

Best bars:
The Rex Hotel
The Majestic Hotel

Where to eat:
Foie gras, goat’s cheese salad, squid-stuffed ravioli drizzled with saffron sauce. For French-Italian posh-nosh fusion, try Camargue at 16 Cao Bao Quat, District One. In a restored villa, its upstairs terrace is perfect for balmy Saigon nights. But it’s outrageously expensive for Vietnam-and you’ll be dining with expats and tourists, not locals. Including a bottle of the cheapest wine, a bill for two leaves little change from $60. Reserve at tel. 08-824-3148.

If you’re more of a fluorescent lights, plastic table, TV-in-the-corner type, Pho Quen ( 65 Nguyen Thai Hoc Street, District 1) is far more dollar-friendly. Don’t sit too near the door-the outdoor cook tends to have some problems controlling the barbecue.

For just under $13, we got this feast: four Bia Saigon beers-$2.58; Clam soup-$2.26; six small seafood spring rolls-$1.29; morning glory (a crunchy green vegetable) with garlic-97 cents; a large snapper fish grilled in salt and wrapped in a banana leaf-$4.85; rice (for two) -65 cents.

Nightlife:
Don’t let Saigon’s neon lights fool you. Not everybody is benefiting from "the socialist market economy." Vietnam remains a poor country, where people will sell almost anything to get by. Male Westerners without a female bodyguard can expect to be accosted by xe om motorcycle taxi riders offering a ride to a girlie bar.

Bui Vien, a downtown street intersecting De Tham, bristles with down-at-heel hostels and the dark crack-way openings of hems. Instinct already warned these weren’t alleyways down which to search for photos.

Further along, a dealer came sidling up with an extensive menu of non-prescription drugs. No temptation to me, but such open availability indicates how some Western kids get into trouble on their overseas adventures. IL

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Steenie Harvey

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