saigon boat

Saigon Dinner Cruise: The Oriental Pearl | HCMC, Vietnam

I was really excited to try a dinner cruise down the Saigon river. It seemed like an old-fashioned luxury. I saw the Elisa from the balcony of the Ho Chi Minh Port Museum and thought, what an interesting old wooden junk, I’ll try that one! I later found out that the Elisa is too large to sail, so it’s just permanently docked as a restaurant boat. There are many dinner cruises, but I wanted one of the old wooden boats, and the Oriental Pearl was the nicest one running.

It’s not expensive; it seems like locals can get tickets for $16 but any non-Vietnamese gets charged about $10 more. For the money, the food is sufficient, but not good. There’s a Western menu and an Asian menu; I chose the Asian menu, which ended up being two oysters, two fried chicken drums, bland fried rice in a pineapple, a fried crab roll and glass noodles with a couple shrimp. Drinks, including water, are extra. The cocktails are weak, and the boat is extremely hot, even with the fans on, even in December. The views are, frankly, ugly, with mostly 2000s and 2010s poorly lit office buildings all along the shore at first; further out, there’s just no lights, nothing.

If those were all my gripes, it would just be a neutral experience I wouldn’t choose again. However, I couldn’t wait to get off the boat for two other reasons I hate Vietnam for in general: chainsmokers and noise pollution. Everyone is allowed to smoke everywhere on the boat, and they do. I’m allergic to cigarette smoke and people in Vietnam act like it’s 1990 and it’s all in my head, maintaining a disgusting attitude as well as a disgusting vice. Wake up, it’s 2023 and you’re in a public health crisis! The Western world banned this 20 years ago.

As for noise, they have different musical entertainment on each section of the ship- the rear dining room, center dining room, lower dining room, and upper deck. There are no walls between the spaces. So 4 different live bands or sound systems playing at the same time, all night, and you can hear all of them, loud and clear. The level of noise pollution in Vietnam in general is also a serious problem; even local karaoke places think it’s cool to jack the volume up to decibel levels literally considered torture by the CIA, and the strategy on this boat was no different. They actually had a charming traditional music troupe rotating through the spaces, and it makes me genuinely sad to know their talents are wasted here night after night.

Lastly, the crowd was fine in the center dining room, mostly couples on dates and tourists, but a bit trashy elsewhere. The rear dining room was taken up by some sort of corporate party where they were drinking to the point of bad behavior, and the lower dining room was dedicated to the occupants of two giant Chinese tour buses also getting really wild. Fun for them, not so much for the smaller parties onboard.

Well, yolo. It was on my list, I tried it. Traveling isn’t perfect!