Ho Chi Minhstad audiotours

The city is officially Ho Chi Minh City, but almost everyone who lives here still calls it Saigon, and that small act of topographic loyalty tells you something about the place. The French built their colonial capital here in the 19th century, and the wide boulevards of District 1 still carry that ambition: Notre-Dame Cathedral, finished in 1880 using bricks shipped from Marseille; the Central Post Office, opened in 1891 with a cavernous interior attributed to the firm of Gustave Eiffel. The Reunification Palace, where tanks from the North drove through the gates on April 30, 1975, remains exactly as it was on that morning, preserved as a working monument to the fact that everything changed.

Modern Saigon runs on motorcycles and forward momentum.

Ben Thanh Market draws tourists to its circular covered hall, but the real commerce happens in the alleys behind it and in Cho Lon, the city's sprawling Chinatown district, where wholesale trading fills warehouses that have been operating for a century. The War Remnants Museum presents its subject without diplomatic softening and is essential context for understanding this city's recent history. At night, street-food vendors set out plastic stools on sidewalks and serve bun bo Hue and banh mi that substantially outperform every version you have had elsewhere. The Cu Chi Tunnels, where Viet Cong fighters maintained 250 kilometers of underground living space during the war, are 70 kilometers northwest and change the way you see everything that comes after.