Caravelle Hotel
The Caravelle Hotel is located in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The hotel was opened to the public on Christmas Eve 1959, when the city was known as Saigon. Contemporary journalists noted its use of Italian marble, bullet-proof glass and a “state-of-the-art air-conditioning system and a Berliet private generator.”
The hotel’s modern design was the work of a Vietnamese architect, Mr. Nguyen Van Hoa, a graduate of Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts in Hanoi. (Ref: "Caravelle-Saigon, A History" by VHSG, Saigon Culture Publishing House, 2009)
The original ten-story building is now adjoined to a 24-story tower that forms the bulk of the new property. However, the Saigon Saigon Rooftop Bar has changed little since 1959.
Caravelle Hotel is owned by the state-owned Saigon Tourist Co.
History
During the 1960s, the Caravelle was home to the Australian Embassy, the New Zealand Embassy, and the Saigon bureaus of NBC, ABC and CBS. As a hub of communication, it became an noted location in the Vietnam War. See for example the Caravelle Manifesto. It also became part of Vietnam fiction and non-fiction literature, for example Danielle Steele's Message From Nam, Morley Safer's memoir "Flashbacks", &c.
On the morning of August 25, 1964, at around 11:30 am, a bomb exploded in room 514, on a floor occupied mostly by foreign journalists, who were all out on assignment. Nine rooms were damaged, windows were blown out of several cars parked in the street, and a number of people were injured without fatalities.
The Australian Embassy was protected by Australian Army soldiers. As part of the draw-down of Australian forces in the country, these became the independent Australian Embassy Guard Platoon, Saigon which was stationed at the Caravelle Hotel from March 1972 until June 1973.
Following the Fall of Saigon in 1975, the hotel was taken over and operated by the government and renamed the Doc Lap (Independence) Hotel. This name remained until 1998, when the Caravelle name was relaunched.
In 2008, Caravelle Saigon celebrated the 10-year anniversary of its redefining refurbishment. Those ten years have been kind to the Caravelle, as they’ve been kind to Ho Chi Minh City and Vietnam in general.
For nearly two decades after 1975, Vietnam languished beyond the pale of international attention, without access to the World Bank or trade relations with beneficiary countries, or membership in the World Trade Organization. With the end of the U.S. led trade embargo in 1994, the reinvigoration of Vietnam began. The renovation of the Caravelle was a heartening symbol of the country’s reinstatement as a nation worthy of the world’s attention.
Irony of ironies, when director Phillip Noyce in 2002 surveyed Lam Son Square as a movie-set for the dramatic bombing scene in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, he chose the Caravelle as a stand-in for the historic Continental Hotel across the square. It wasn’t that the Caravelle looked anything like the Continental; it doesn’t. But the renovations at the Continental and the cost of shooting scenes at the hotel ruled out the original as an option. As the ground floor of the Caravelle donned stage make up and a new persona for its acting debut, the real stars of the movie moved into the Presidential Suites upstairs. Hotel staff remember the actor Michael Caine, who won an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Thomas Fowler, as an extremely amiable character. Caine would take tea in the bar, chit chat with the restaurant staff, and after discovering that the hotel buffet included roast beef and Yorkshire puddings, became a regular fixture at the restaurant.
The Caravelle no longer ranks as Saigon’s tallest building. But no matter. Its stature today is a function of so much more than its physical attributes. Its place in Saigon’s history is ineradicable. There is not, and there won’t ever be, another hotel like it.
References
Coordinates: 10°46′34″N 106°42′12″E / 10.7761°N 106.7033°E