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 takes you on the insider 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.

Details about 90-day and multi-entry electronic visas to Vietnam (new as of August, 2023).

New for 2025: map links and QR codes for all recommended places. Scan the physical or electronic book's QR codes with your smartphone to get navigation and walking directions.

• Big-picture navigation.
• 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.