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.