Ho Chi Minh City - Day 5

Panic, Packing and gỏi cuốn

My last day in Ho Chi Minh City. I was more than ready to move on and head toward my new coastal home in Quy Nhơn. The next step.

The morning, of course, started with stress. Long story short, the phone situation was finally sorted, but not without pushing me right to the edge first. It was one of those moments that will almost certainly happen again, where everything feels disproportionately difficult and all your usual support systems are asleep on the other side of the world. The people I would normally call in moments like that were all in the UK, and I had to figure it out on my own.

It was the point where I really questioned everything. Especially knowing that in just a few days I would be starting a new life in a city I had never even visited before. But I recovered, because what was the alternative? Going home over something that had already been resolved, even if it had been stressful? That didn’t make sense either.

I went for a long walk to clear my head, aiming to find a book café I had researched on Google Maps. I crossed the bridge over the river, only to discover there was no book café at all. That seemed about right for the day. By that point, though, my resilience mechanism had kicked in. In this city, even if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you usually find something else instead. Sometimes something better. So I turned back and headed once again toward Book Street.

From there, I decided to wander through the shopping malls, just for fun, with absolutely no intention of buying anything. The contrast still amazes me. The heat outside, the constant charcoal smell drifting from street stalls, and then suddenly stepping into vast, air-conditioned malls filled with expensive goods and polished surfaces. It feels like switching worlds every time you walk through the door. I also managed to find more than one bookshop and felt a small, unexpected thrill at recognising things from home. A book on Pink Floyd, my favourite band. A children’s story that reminded me of something from my childhood. Familiar anchors, even though, as usual, I bought nothing.

Lunch was an unexpected triumph. I found a quiet, beautiful restaurant and briefly confused the staff by asking if I could have bún chả, but swap the pork for gỏi cuốn spring rolls. They were understandably baffled. As I’ve learned, dishes are served a certain way for a reason. They make sense. Alterations from a silly Westerner don’t improve them. So I settled on the dish I would normally avoid, convinced it would be too much salad and not enough substance.

In the UK, we’d call them summer rolls. In Vietnam, they’re called gỏi cuốn. Rice paper wrapped around prawns, rice noodles, salad, and my arch-nemesis: a slice of pork belly. They were served with an incredible nước chấm. I was sure it wouldn’t fill me, but it was fresh, balanced, delicious, and most importantly, surprisingly satisfying. I’m still not fully sold on pork belly, but it was actually not bad at all, perhaps carried by how good the other eighty percent of the dish was.

It felt like the right meal to end on. A quiet win. I was ready for the next chapter.

I spent the rest of the evening organising, packing, and briefly panicking again when I realised I’d already accumulated enough things to make closing my suitcase a challenge. Somehow, it all fit in the end. And when I finally shut it, I realised for the first time that I might miss this city a little. It wasn’t perfect. Nothing ever is. But even amid the chaos and the cocktail of smells, there were so many things to fall in love with. The diversity of the food, the scale of it all, and all the small things I probably didn’t even get close to discovering in my short time there.