SAIGON · VIETNAM
Tunnels, sampans, scooters and street food.
The Cu Chi Tunnels and the Mekong Delta, the markets and the river cruises, and the food that pulls people to Ho Chi Minh City in the first place. Every tour, read and ranked, with the price and who to book it through.
Only here
Three days you can only have here.
Plenty of cities have a food tour and a river. Crawling a wartime tunnel network, rowing the coconut canals of the Mekong and standing under the painted dome of a religion born in Tay Ninh belong to this corner of Vietnam alone.
Underground war
The Cu Chi Tunnels
Under the rubber plantations northwest of the city runs a 250-kilometre warren of hand-dug tunnels, three levels deep, where fighters lived, cooked and held out through the war. You drop into a widened stretch and crawl it in the dark. The trapdoors, the smokeless kitchens and the traps left in place are nowhere else.
- 1 HCM City: Cu Chi Tunnels Morning or Afternoon Tour
- 2 Cu Chi Tunnels Tour from HCM City – Morning or Afternoon
- 3 HCM: Cu Chi Tunnels & Mekong Delta with Coconut Village Tour
Life on the water
The Mekong by Sampan
Two hours south, the Mekong splits into nine mouths and a maze of coconut-palm canals. You trade the coach for a rowed sampan, slip under the palms to a fruit orchard or a floating market, and watch a whole province live on the water. This is the rice bowl that feeds the country, and a day in it is nothing like the city.
- 1 From HCM City: Mekong Delta Tour with Sampan Journey
- 2 HCM: Cu Chi Tunnels & Mekong Delta with Coconut Village Tour
- 3 Mekong Delta Guided Tour from Ho Chi Minh City
A faith born here
The Cao Dai Great Temple
Out at Tay Ninh stands the Holy See of Cao Dai, a religion founded in Vietnam in 1926 that folds together Buddhism, Catholicism and Taoism and counts Victor Hugo among its saints. The temple is painted every colour at once under a single divine eye, and at the noon prayer hundreds of robed followers fill the hall. There is nothing else like it.
- 1 Tay Ninh – Cao Dai & Ba Den Mountain + Optional Cu Chi Tunnels
- 2 Small-Group 1-day: Cao Dai Temple & Ba Den Mountain
- 3 Cu Chi Tunnels – Cao Dai Temple & Black Virgin Mountain Full Day
Start with the standout
The one tour more travellers book than any other.
If you do a single thing out of Saigon, the numbers say it is this one. Here is why it tops the list.
The classics
Saigon's Most Booked Tours
Cu Chi, the Mekong, the night food runs and the river. The days most travellers come to Ho Chi Minh City for.
Where to begin
The days a Saigon trip is built around.
The tunnels at Cu Chi, the Mekong Delta, the street food, the motorbike nights, the cooking classes and the river cruises. The handful of days most trips are planned around, and the best way to do each one.
The big day trips
How to do Cu Chi and the Mekong.
They sit on opposite sides of the city, so the how matters as much as the if. Three ways to fit the tunnels and the delta in, depending on the days you have and the early start you can face.
Eat the city
Dinner is a plastic stool on the pavement.
Saigon eats on the street, and the best of it never makes it onto a menu. A bowl of banh canh in an alley, broken rice from a cart, banh mi from the stall with the queue, a beer poured over ice. A guide who eats here daily takes you to the right stools and orders for you.
Read the guide: the best street food tours in Saigon →Ca phe sua da
The city runs on iced coffee.
Vietnam is the second-biggest coffee grower on earth, and Saigon drinks it strong, dark and poured over ice with a slug of condensed milk. Sit on a kerb for a phin to drip, climb to a hidden apartment cafe, or whisk up the egg coffee the north made famous. A workshop walks you through all of it.
See the coffee experiences →The river
The river that gave the city its name.
The Saigon River loops through the heart of town, the old port that built the place and still the best seat in it. Slip out on a wooden boutique boat through the back canals, take a dinner cruise as the towers light up, or watch the skyline slide past at sunset with a cold beer in hand.
River cruises & boat trips →On two wheels
Saigon makes sense from the back of a bike.
There are millions of motorbikes here and the city is built around them. Climb on behind a local rider, usually a student, and the traffic that looks like chaos from the kerb turns into the fastest, best way to eat your way across town. Most run after dark, when the food carts come out.
- 1 Private Street Food Tour by Motorbike/Car with Local Students
- 2 Saigon: Street Food Tasting & Sightseeing Tour by Motorbike
- 3 Private Street Food Motorbike Tour in Ho Chi Minh City
By the clock
A city that never quite shuts.
Saigon keeps different hours through the day, and the best of it shifts with them. The cool of the morning markets, the museums through the heat, and the food and the river once the sun is down.
From 6am
Markets and the morning cool.Beat the heat at Ben Thanh and the wet markets, fruit stalls stacked to the awnings, then a ca phe sua da while the city wakes up.
Midday
The history, out of the sun.The War Remnants Museum, the Reunification Palace and the old post office, or the long run out to the tunnels at Cu Chi.
After dark
When Saigon really gets going.Street food from the back of a scooter, a craft-beer crawl through District 3, a dinner cruise on the river and the night markets.
Ben Thanh and beyond
The whole city passes through a market.
Ben Thanh is the famous one, but the real trade happens in the wet markets, the flower market before dawn and the Chinatown wholesale lanes of Binh Tay. A guide gets you past the tourist stalls to where the cooks shop, names the unfamiliar fruit, and shows you how to haggle without getting it wrong.
See all 25 market tours →By place
Saigon, and the day trips around it.
The city itself for the food and the history. The Mekong for the river life. Cu Chi for the tunnels. Tay Ninh for the Cao Dai temple. Can Gio for the mangroves. Mui Ne for the dunes and the coast.
By activity
Pick how to spend the day.
On foot if you want the street food. On a scooter if you want it faster. On the river if you want it slow. A market run, a cooking class, or a coffee that takes an hour to drip.
Plan it
Three perfect days.
Never been? Here is a long weekend that hits the essentials without a wasted hour.
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