Part of my gallery
"Vietnam"

During the American war the hotel bar was again haunted by diplomats, journalists, soldiers,and spies. Time and Newsweek kept their bureaus upstairs. After the new regime took over in 1975, the hotel shut down, leaving the façade to rot like the bourgeois relic it was. In the late 80’s, however, as the government turned to tourism as a source of revenue, several musty “heritage” hotels, including the Continental, were trotted back into service. The hotel is now managed by Saigontourist, Vietnam’s state tourism authority, which has run it about as effectively as you’d expect an underfunded socialist bureaucracy to operate a luxury hotel.

Peter Jon Lindberg
(Nostalgia at Saigon’s Hotel Continental)