A Long Weekend in Saigon: The Offbeat Plan
Three days adds a proper Cholon Chinatown morning to the palace-and-museum, cafe-tower weekend above, still without a rental car or a day trip out of the city limits. Shorter on time? See the 2 day version of this trip. Chasing the Cu Chi Tunnels or the Mekong Delta instead? See Ho Chi Minh City as a Vietnam base .
| Day | Focus |
|---|---|
| 1 | Reunification Palace, the War Remnants Museum, and a hidden cafe tower |
| 2 | Notre-Dame’s closed cathedral square and Ben Thanh’s night market |
| 3 | Cholon’s Binh Tay Market, Thien Hau Temple, and a com tam alley |
Book these before you go
- Compare District 1 hotel rates for a base near both the palace and Cholon
- Book a Cholon street-food walk , the easier way through unfamiliar stalls
Day 1: The palace, the museum, and a cafe tower
Morning: Reunification Palace (135 Nam Ky Khoi Nghia, District 1, roughly 40,000 VND, ticket window about 8am-3:30pm) still holds the 1975 tank-through-the-gate history without much dressing up, and the War Remnants Museum (28 Vo Van Tan, District 3, 40,000 VND, 7:30am-5:30pm) is the sobering half of the morning nobody should skip. Check the palace’s current visiting hours and the museum’s ticket session times before you go, since both cut off ticket sales ahead of closing.
Afternoon: ride the narrow elevator at 42 Nguyen Hue, an aging 1960s apartment block stacked ten floors deep with independent cafes and small boutiques carved out of former living rooms. Pick a floor at random rather than chasing one specific address.
Evening: skip Bui Vien’s neon bucket-cocktail strip for a proper ca phe sua da at a small District 1 or 3 coffee shop, the city’s actual everyday ritual.
Day 2: Notre-Dame’s square and Ben Thanh after dark
Morning: Notre-Dame Cathedral’s square is worth the walk for the exterior alone. The interior has been closed since 2017 and completion keeps sliding toward roughly 2027, so don’t plan on going inside. The Central Post Office sits directly across the square, its ironwork popularly but wrongly credited to Gustave Eiffel, when the actual architect was Alfred Foulhoux.
Afternoon: Ben Thanh Market (6am-6pm) for the stalls and the crowds. Stay past 6pm and the streets ringing the building turn into a street-food and souvenir night market that runs until roughly 10pm.
Day 3: Cholon, the Chinatown Ben Thanh wishes it still was
Morning: Binh Tay Market in Cho Lon, Vietnam’s largest Chinatown spanning Districts 5, 6, 10 and 11, runs on local wholesale trade rather than the tourist markup Ben Thanh has picked up over the years. Thien Hau Temple next door, a 19th-century Cantonese temple to the sea goddess Mazu, is thick with hanging incense coils and worth twenty quiet minutes. Book a Cholon street-food walk if the market’s back alleys feel like too much to navigate solo.
Lunch: work back toward District 3 for the com tam alley along Vo Van Tan, broken rice with grilled pork and a fried egg for 35,000-65,000 VND, served from early morning until the stalls sell out, usually before the lunch rush even peaks. Locals eat standing or on plastic stools; the picture-menu places nearer the museum are priced for visitors who won’t come back.
Getting between all three days means Grab, fare fixed in the app before you ride, plus plenty of walking within District 1 once you’re there. Vietnam’s official tourism site covers visa rules by nationality in more depth than this itinerary has room for. Three days is enough to leave having eaten in a market built for locals rather than a market built for you.