Ho Chi Minh City's Best Attraction Tours
Most first-time visitors try to cover Ho Chi Minh City’s District 1 and District 3 landmarks in one exhausting afternoon. A better plan groups them by proximity and treats the Cu Chi Tunnels as a separate half-day, not an afterthought bolted onto the same trip.
The central circuit: District 1 and District 3
Four sites anchor a standard half-day or full-day tour. Independence Palace, at 135 Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa, keeps its 1960s presidential staterooms, an underground war bunker, and the spot where Tank 843 crashed through the gates on 30 April 1975; allow 1.5 hours and expect 40,000 VND for the palace alone or 80,000 VND for the combined ticket with the historical exhibition. The War Remnants Museum on Võ Văn Tần is 40,000 VND, open 07:30 to 17:30 with a midday break roughly 12:00-13:30, and presents the Vietnamese account of the war; it is genuinely distressing for some visitors, runs about two hours, and is worth knowing about before buying tickets for children. Ben Thanh Market rounds out the loop for browsing and street food.
Two long-standing pieces of misinformation are worth correcting before you go. The Saigon Central Post Office was designed by French architect Alfred Foulhoux, not Gustave Eiffel, despite how often that claim gets repeated. And Notre-Dame Cathedral of Saigon has been wrapped in exterior scaffolding since 2017, with structural restoration running through 2027; the interior is closed to sightseers and open only for Sunday parish services, so treat it as an exterior photo stop rather than a walk-through.
Full-day tours pairing the city highlights with Cu Chi Tunnels are the most heavily booked combination in southern Vietnam for a reason: it saves a second full day of driving.
Cu Chi Tunnels: know which site you are booking
Almost every budget shared bus tour goes to Bến Đình, about 60 km from the city, which has been deliberately widened and reinforced with concrete to fit larger groups and Western frames, plus a noisy AK-47 live-fire range. Bến Dược, roughly 75 km out, keeps original, unexpanded tunnel sections that require real crawling on hands and knees, alongside the solemn Bến Dược Memorial Temple commemorating over 44,000 fallen soldiers; it draws far fewer groups and suits a quieter, more contemplative visit. Do not treat the two as interchangeable entrances to the same tunnel; they are different sites with different atmospheres. Independent visitors outside a packaged tour should expect a genuinely disputed standalone entrance fee, roughly 90,000 to 135,000 VND depending on the source and whether a service or guide fee is bundled in, with hours 07:00 to 17:00 and last entry at 16:00.
For a different way in, Les Rives runs a Cu Chi Tunnels trip by speedboat up the Saigon River, arriving ahead of the road-bound bus groups.
Skylines: Landmark 81 versus Bitexco
For a modern counterpoint to the war-history sites, Landmark 81’s SkyView occupies floors 79 to 81 at over 380 meters, with floor-to-ceiling glass and a sky bridge, open 10:00 to 22:00. Pricing is disputed across sources: roughly 300,000 VND for a standard adult ticket, rising to about 810,000 VND for some combo packages, so check the venue’s own booking channel rather than trusting one figure. Bitexco’s Saigon Skydeck on floor 49 sits lower at 262 meters for about 240,000 VND, though plenty of visitors skip the standalone ticket and buy a cocktail at the 50th or 52nd-floor lounge instead for a similar view at a similar price.
The Independence Palace’s own site and the War Remnants Museum’s official site both carry current hours if either changes before your trip. For a slower way to link these same sites on foot, see the walking tours guide , and for the day this circuit fits into, the 3-day itinerary has room for both the city loop and Cu Chi on separate days.
The verdict: book the Cu Chi combo for logistics, but choose Bến Dược over Bến Đình if a quieter, more original tunnel section matters more to you than proximity and a shooting range, since the drive difference is only about fifteen extra kilometers.