Ho Chi Minh City Travel Guide | Saigon, Tunnels and the Delta

The other end of a long thin country

Vietnam is a country shaped like a question mark and its two ends barely resemble each other. Our Hanoi guide describes a thousand-year-old city that is cold in February and does everything slowly. This is the opposite.

Saigon is fast, hot, loud and commercial. It was the capital of the south, it was French, then American-adjacent, then reunified, and it has spent the decades since becoming the country's engine. The traffic is worse than Hanoi's. The coffee is better. Nobody here is nostalgic about anything.

Most Vietnam trips should include both, and the smart way to do it is an open jaw, in at one end and out at the other, so you never backtrack. Which end you start at is a matter of taste; we usually suggest finishing in Saigon, because it is the easier city to fly home from and the better place to spend the last of your money. Ask us to build a Vietnam open jaw.

The districts, decoded

The addressing here is numbered rather than named, which sounds bureaucratic and turns out to be the clearest system in the region once you have it.

District 1 is the centre. The old French civic buildings, the big hotels, the tourist mass, the walking street, most of the sights, and where the overwhelming majority of visitors stay. It is convenient and it is the least interesting food in the city.

District 3 is next door and it is where a growing number of people who know what they are doing stay: quieter streets, older apartment buildings, better restaurants, and a five-minute ride to everything in District 1.

District 5, Cholon, is the old Chinese quarter and it is a genuinely different city: temples thick with hanging incense coils, herbalists, a wholesale market, and a rhythm that has nothing to do with the tourist centre. It is the best half-day in Saigon and almost nobody bothers.

District 2 and District 7 are where a lot of expatriates live and they are pleasant and largely pointless for a visitor.

Stay in District 1 if it is your first trip. Stay in District 3 if it is your second.

The war, and what an Australian should expect

This is the part that makes this city different for us specifically.

Australia fought in Vietnam. Almost sixty thousand Australians served, and a great many Australians alive today have a direct family connection to it. Then you arrive here and the war is presented, entirely reasonably, from the winning side's perspective, in a country that regards it as a war of independence and has moved on far more completely than we have.

The War Remnants Museum is the confrontation. It is one-sided and it says so with its exhibits rather than its labels. It is also genuinely important, and the photography on the upper floors, particularly the material on chemical defoliants, is deeply distressing. Two hours. Not for children. Go anyway.

The Cu Chi tunnels are a couple of hours out and worth the day. The network was enormous, the ingenuity was extraordinary, and the sections open to visitors have been widened for larger bodies, which tells you something about the originals. There is a firing range at the end where you can pay to shoot a rifle, which strikes many visitors as a strange note to finish on, and you are entirely free to walk past it. If you are claustrophobic, do not go into the tunnel section; nobody will mind and the site is still worth the trip.

The Reunification Palace is the building the tanks crashed through on the day the war ended, preserved exactly as it was, right down to the maps on the walls in the war room downstairs. It is quieter than the other two and it is the one that sits with you.

None of this is a cheerful morning. It is one of the more valuable things an Australian can do in South East Asia, and it is worth deliberately not scheduling anything demanding for the rest of that day.

The rest of the city, honestly

Ben Thanh Market is famous and is a tourist market. Go for twenty minutes to see it, buy nothing at the first price, and understand that the food stalls around the outside are better than the ones inside.

The Central Post Office and Notre-Dame Cathedral are a French colonial pair in the middle of District 1 and take fifteen minutes between them. The post office is genuinely lovely and still works as a post office, which is the charm.

The rooftop bars are the thing Saigon does better than anywhere else in Vietnam, and unlike most rooftop bars they are not a tourist tax. The city from above at dusk, motorbike rivers moving in the streets below, is a legitimate experience.

Cholon as described above. Half a day, mostly on foot, mostly getting lost.

A motorbike food tour is the single best paid experience in this city, and yes, you ride pillion. Someone who knows the place takes you to five stops in two hours across districts you would never find, and it solves the language, the ordering and the navigation in one purchase. If you do one guided thing in Saigon, do this.

The Mekong Delta trap

Here is the honest version, because the day trip is the most-sold and least-good thing in southern Vietnam.

The standard Delta day trip is three hours in a bus each way, a boat with a hundred people on it, a coconut-candy workshop, a bee farm, a man playing a guitar, and back. It is not offensive. It is just not anything, and it costs you a full day of your holiday.

The Delta itself is wonderful. It is a genuinely different Vietnam: water instead of roads, floating markets that start before dawn and are finished by eight, houses on stilts, a pace that belongs to a river. But it is wonderful over two days with a night in it, ideally a homestay, and it is wonderful because you are there at five in the morning when the market happens, which is the exact hour a day trip cannot deliver.

So the recommendation is binary. Two days and a night, or skip it entirely and spend the time in the city or on the coast. The middle option, which is the one every booking desk will sell you, is the one to refuse.

Eating, which is the actual reason

Bánh mì is the best thing colonialism ever accidentally produced: a French baguette rebuilt with Vietnamese lungs. Pâté, cold cuts, pickled carrot and daikon, coriander, chilli, a smear of mayonnaise. Buy it from a cart, not a shop.

Phở here is sweeter, herbier and comes with a plate of things to add, which northerners consider vandalism. Both sides are wrong and both bowls are good.

Cơm tấm is broken rice with grilled pork chop and a fried egg, and it is the lunch of this city.

Cà phê sữa đá is iced coffee with condensed milk, made with robusta rather than arabica, and it is strong enough that a second one is a genuine decision. Vietnam's coffee culture is one of the world's great ones and Saigon is its capital.

The street stools are the point. The plastic furniture is the size of a doll's house, the kitchen is a cart, and the food is better than the restaurant with the English menu forty metres away.

Weather, visas and getting here

The south is warm all year and never cold, which is the opposite of the north. December to March is the dry season and the pleasant one. May to October is the wet season, which in practice means a serious downpour in the afternoon most days and sunshine either side of it. It is entirely liveable if you plan the middle of the day indoors, and the fares are considerably better.

The visa is not optional. Australians generally need one arranged before travel, and the e-visa applied for online is the usual route. Vietnam does not do visa-on-arrival for us the way much of the region does, and this catches people out constantly. Apply early, match the passport details exactly, and check the current rules on an official source.

Getting here from Australia is a stop or a non-stop depending on your city and your dates, and our flights to Vietnam page covers the corridor. The construction worth asking about is the open jaw: into Hanoi, out of Saigon, with the middle by train, bus or a short domestic hop. In a country this shape, flying in and out of the same airport costs you a day you did not have to lose. Get a free Vietnam quote.