Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City, still called Saigon by most of the people who live in it, is the country's commercial capital and the arrival airport for southern Vietnam. It is louder, hotter and more spread out than Hanoi or Da Nang, and it rewards travellers who pick one district and work it properly rather than trying to see all of it. District 1 holds the landmarks and most of the hotels. District 5, the old Chinese quarter of Cho Lon, holds the wholesale trade. District 10 and District 4 are where a lot of the eating happens after dark. Our Ho Chi Minh City guides are built from what residents write, not from what tour operators publish. For each place we pull the newest Google Maps reviews in Vietnamese, quote them in the original and translate them, and we say how many we read. That is how a market that no English-language list ranks highly turns out to be the one where traders do not inflate the opening price, and how a road closure that every guidebook misses ends up in a paragraph about which gate to use. Reviews written by visitors tell you a place is cheap. Reviews written by residents tell you whether it is fair, which is the more useful signal. Every recommendation names its honest catch before its charm: the beggars in the walkways, the food floor that costs triple the clothing floor, the market with no air conditioning and a lot of insects. Prices are quoted as samples on a stated date, in dollars with dong in brackets, at the published bank rate we checked that day. Entry, health, safety, transport and money claims link to the official source they come from, with the date. We do not have a contributor living in Ho Chi Minh City yet, so these pages rest on resident reviews and official sources rather than a visit of our own, and they say so.