Mapping Binh Thanh, Part 1: Vo Duy Ninh

               Far from the touts and tourists of Ben Thanh, a market street exists unlike anything your hotel’s concierge will recommend. Located in the similarly named Binh Thanh District, just outside the city’s center, Vo Duy Ninh is a quarter mile arc of unsullied delight. A non-stop blur of vibrant sights, peculiar sounds, and wonderful aromas running from Ngo Tat To up to the high rises on Nguyen Huu Canh.

                For most of the day, street vendors pack the narrow lane. Mackerel and football sized tuna lie on ice next to dazzling green parrotfish taken from nearby reefs. Snapper splash about in large, circular, half foot deep tin bowls as hoses pump in oxygen. Shrimp occasionally jump to freedom from the scale only to reach their ultimate demise at the wheel of an unsympathetic motorbike.

                Any live fish chosen for that night’s meal is grabbed by the vendor, placed on a cardboard mat, and beaten repeatedly with a foot-long metal rod, aptly named a Priest—as if the vendor administered the fish’s last rites before the walloping began. It’s a gruesome, yet fascinating scene to behold.

                Between the dozen or so women offering fish along Vo Duy Ninh, others sell chicken, cramped on massive plates, chopped or in full, heads and feet and all. Their live counterparts squabble nearby in small domed cages. There is a duck woman, six or seven pig vendors displaying any body part imaginable, and two women selling chopped dog, heads facing out of course.

                Durian, jackfruit, and banana women, all donning different and equally fascinating Ao Ba Ba’s or Vietnamese pajamas, sit just past the last of the vegetable vendors, whose bowls of jades, crimsons and ambers in turn puncture the asphalt with vibrant signs of life.

                Any space that isn’t taken up by a fish, meat, fruit, or vegetable vendor is most likely a store front selling anything from soy sauce to spices to the small plastic chairs that the Vietnamese have at some point in time decided to claim as their own.

                At the southern end of the street, just before it meets Ngo Tat To, along the walls of an incredibly noisy primary school, carts serve Pho, Com Tam Suon, Bun Bo Hue, Bahn Mi, and numerous other Vietnamese dishes. They operate from noon until well past midnight. 

                 Easily reached by cab or Xe Om, Vo Duy Ninh is a mesmerizing alternative to the tourist riddled, overpriced markets of District 1. After you’ve walked the street once or twice, choose an alley and get lost in the maze. The labyrinth of tiny lanes is filled with street foods and curbside bars. Have some fun and be the only westerner in sight.