Family Highlights of Southern Vietnam

Your plan will touch down in Tan Son Nhat International Airport and your driver will welcome you to Ho Chi Minh City. From here, you will be transferred to your central hotel and free to relax into the pace of life in Saigon.

In the late afternoon, the guide will arrive at your hotel and introduce themselves before taking you for your first meal of the holiday – a delicious and local dinner in a restaurant.

Notes: Check-in at the hotel is available from any time after 14:00

The tour starts after you enjoy breakfast in your hotel, when the guide and driver arrive and take you to the first stop today – the Independence Palace. This was where the Vietnam War was ended by rolling tanks crashing through the gates, something that we will learn more about at the War Remnants Museum nearby. After visiting these two attractions, we head further backwards through Vietnamese history with a tour of Notre Dame Cathedral and the Saigon Central Post Office, both of which are prime examples of attractive colonial architecture built during the French occupation of Saigon.

Lunch at a restaurant will provide us with a short break before we take the drive to Cholon, the ancient Chinatown that still exists today as the world’s biggest. We start our tour here at Binh Tay market, where we will learn more about the early Chinese immigrants to southern Vietnam, as well as seeing examples of the frantic pace at which people buy their goods here. A visit to the Giac Lam Pagoda, the city’s oldest Buddhist building, follows this before we return to the centre of the city to explore Ben Thanh Market and the whirlwind of activity within.

Relax until the evening time, when your guide will return to your hotel and take you for a highly cultural experience and one of the highlights of Vietnamese tradition – a water puppet show. This will take place at the Golden Dragon Theatre and is always a treat for kids and adults alike.

Enjoy breakfast at the hotel before the guide arrives. This morning, we will be taking the 90km-drive northwest of the city to the eclectic Cao Dai Temple and its bizarre, stand-out architecture. On both the outside and the inside of the temple, we find elements of Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist and Taoist principles, all glued together with tiled roofs and other examples of typically Vietnamese construction. We can visit the intriguing midday mass here before continuing onto a local restaurant for lunch.

We take the return to Ho Chi Minh City after this and stop off at the highly impressive Cu Chi Tunnels. Here, we will learn more about the Viet Cong and their staggering 250km underground network lying below the jungle floor. After an introduction to the tunnels, we can head down inside and take a look around, finding examples of hospitals, weapons storages, meeting rooms and living quarters. We return to the floor of the jungle to try and find some of the camouflaged entrance pits and trap doors used by the Viet Cong to defend the tunnels. Before we head back to Ho Chi Minh City to drop you off at your hotel, we enjoy a traditional guerilla wartime snack of cassava and green tea.

Breakfast starts early today, as we leave in the early morning to ensure that we make it in time for Cai Be floating market. This is a daily market taking place in the glorious Mekong Delta, the tropical land lying just south of Ho Chi Minh City, encompassing some of the best scenery anywhere in south Vietnam.

We arrive at Cai Be and head out onto the vast Mekong River on a local boat. Here, vendors sell their colourful fruits along with tools, clothes and electronics from the floor of their wooden row boats. We can find many great deals on the things on offer here, all before a fantastic background of wild jungle scenery creeping across the embankments of the river.

At a pier, we disembark our boat and head out on foot to see beautiful gardens of bonsai trees and workshops that engage in the selling of local handicrafts. After this, a serene cycle through stretching greenery will take us the house of a local family, who will offer us lunch and relaxation in their gorgeous garden. After a musical performance of beautiful southern Vietnamese music, we return to Ho Chi Minh City. End of the day trip to Mekong Delta boat tour.

Take the final breakfast at your hotel and relish your family’s last few hours in Ho Chi Minh City. The driver will return to your hotel to give you a lift to Tan Son Nhat Airport, where you can catch your onwards flight.

We thank you for joining this family tour of southern Vietnam. It was our pleasure to host you and we hope that you can return with us in the future!