Time Capsule Hotel

The Continental Hotel Saigon in central Ho Chi Minh City opened in 1880.

The Passengers just returned from a weekend in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.  We had a great time discovering a vibrant and changing city, and we will be sure to write future posts about our trip.  First, I wanted to provide a few images of our hotel, a relic of both French colonialism and the wars of the 1960's and 1970's.

The saucers and place settings at breakfast are like a breezy French cafe, but the coffee mugs are very American.  

The Hotel Continental Saigon was opened in 1880 by Pierre Cazeau on what was then called Rue Catinat, now Dong Khoi Street. The operation was later run by the mobster Mathier Francini until Saigon became part of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1975.  It looks like a huge colonial pile, and it featured as a central location for conspiratorial politicking during the country's troubles in the twentieth century.  Journalists and media reporters often stayed here.  Undoubtedly many swapped stories that never made the record.  Look for the hotel in Graham Greene's The Quiet American (both book and movie) or the film Indochine.

The courtyard cafe during breakfast.

The hotel stands beside the central plaza next to the old opera house.  Our balcony faced onto the plaza.  The whole affair was built with open-air corridors and double-height ceilings to help guests manage the tropical climate.  However, the anachronism that struck me most was the application of the hotel's mid-century logo everywhere.  The hotel's arms appear on the coffee cups, the ash trays, the towels, and even the tags of the bedding.  It's a piece of branding from a bygone era.

A corridor in the Continental Hotel Saigon.

Overall, we had a fantastic stay at the Continental and found all the amenities and services up to a very high standard.  The remnants from previous eras of traveling made our experience in 2010 an adventure in time as well as place.  For more images of the hotel, click the link below left.

One of the ash trays stationed along the corridors.  Notice the hotel arms stamped into the sand on top.

The bedside table in our room had (non-functioning) dials for five channels of music in addition to the tiny digital clock in the center.

Potted plants growing on the terrace opposite the hotel corridors.

A new shopping mall looms over the Hotel Continental Saigon and the historic municipal theater.  The motor-scooters in the foreground are the preferred mode of transit for city residents.