Not everyone touring Vietnam can give Ho Chi Minh City five days. If you’re combining it with Hanoi, Hoi An or Ha Long Bay, a long weekend here might be all your itinerary allows — and that’s genuinely fine. This guide is built around triage: what to prioritise, what to happily skip, and what to save for a longer return trip, so you leave with the real...
The Cu Chi Tunnels sit roughly 40–70 km northwest of Ho Chi Minh City, depending on which of the two visitor sites you choose — and getting there is less straightforward than it looks on a map. Traffic on Highway 22 can turn a “quick” trip into a three-hour ordeal, and the tunnels themselves are split across two very different sites. This guide covers...
Most visitors to Ho Chi Minh City do the Mekong Delta as a day trip. They board a minibus at 7 am, travel two hours south, spend three hours on a boat, see a floating market and a coconut candy stall, and return to the city by late afternoon. It is a perfectly good day out. What it is not — and cannot be — is the Mekong Delta. We spent four days on the delta with...
Ho Chi Minh City, still known to most locals and travellers as Saigon, is one of those cities that genuinely surprises you. We arrived, having spent time in Hanoi and expecting something similar — we couldn’t have been more wrong. Where Hanoi feels ancient and atmospheric, HCMC pulses with an energy that is entirely its own. The streets are wider, the pace is...