Experience real Saigon: My Saigon 2025

Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) offers bustling streets, amazing walks, too-hip-for-you cafes, rocking music clubs, luxurious salons, explosively delicious restaurants, and indoor cat zoos. Saigon is Vietnam. It's young, practical, crowded, and a little bit brash.

Most visitors to Saigon see the same boring "attractions": boring restaurants, tourist-trap markets, and War propaganda.

Saigon has so much more to experience than tourists see.

My Saigon is the inside track: the most amazing experiences, the cultural backstories, the practical go-to tips, the best coffee, the best food (far beyond pho and banh mi), the best hangouts, the coolest stuff, and hipsters, hipsters everywhere.

New for 2025: Map/navigation links and scannable QR codes for all places mentioned. Scan the QR code in the book when you're on the go and use your phone for navigation.Details about 90-day and multi-entry electronic visas to Vietnam (new as of August, 2023).
Scannable QR codes and map links for all recommended places
History your tour guides aren't allowed to mention.
Good hotels for cheap, without hostels, bedbugs, and weird smells.
Get mobile data up and running without being scammed.
The best pho in Saigon: no, it's not the one in the backpacker district.
Awesome, authentic, cheap restaurants where my friends and I eat -- and Tripadvisor has no clue about.
Coffee. Did someone say coffee? 1930s coffee, street coffee, "specialty" coffee, all kinds of coffee: I'll tell you where.
Hang out with Vietnamese people, munch on dried squid, listen to Viet Pop (if you dare).
Make cool friends, date guys or girls, whatever flag you might fly.
Bust out with Saigonese slang to make your new friends laugh.
Watch out for Saigon's mafia: they run the streets, and they don't announce themselves.
Don't unintentionally offend people by wearing a popular tourist souvenir t-shirt.
You definitely shouldn't give money to beggars and street kids.
Avoiding taxi scams in Saigon is so easy, but most tourists refuse to learn.

My Saigon is a guide, a love confessional, an instruction manual, and an ode to the city.