How to have an Instagrammable holiday at minimal cost
A holiday to Ho Chi Minh cost guide with some travelling tips to save your dollar. This cost guide is based on a week stay and two sharing accommodation and transport. If you want more information scroll down, to find out, where to stay, what it was like, instagrammable spots and finally some advice. 🙂
Accommodation:
Our hotel was around 20/30 mins drive from the centre, so it was quite cheap to stay here and buses in were incredibly cheap.
Transport:
Our hotel offered to collect us from the airport costs came to under 300,000 VND.
Here we mainly used buses and Ubers- as we found the bus system quite difficult to understand!
Food & Drink:
Food didn’t seem too expensive. We were told to eat in the markets (they had markets in the centre of Ho Chi Minh such as Bến Thành Food Market aimed at tourists). We did mainly go to places which served western food so this probably was more expensive then the typical costs and perhaps wasn’t as good as local food.
Activities:
Opposite some of the markets you can book tours and can barter for a cheaper price. Some tours fluctuated from $20 to 90 for the same tour so be careful.
WHERE TO STAY
We stayed here for a week, this cost around $26 a night and included breakfast. This was one of the cheapest places we found to stay in but this was situated around a 30 minute drive from the city centre. We were won over by the pool. Despite being a nice hotel I wish we did stay slightly more central. I looked before and saw you could get the bus back to the hotel which was incredibly cheap, however the buses stopped running around 6pm to our location, couldn’t believe it! We tried to then get Ubers but most of the drivers didnt speak English and had trouble finding where to drop us. We ended up coming back before 6pm a few times to avoid the drama which did ruin our trip.
WHAT TO DO
Củ Chi tunnels: We went to the tour organiser shop opposite the Street Food Bến Thành Market. We booked for half a day tour, from memory this was around $20 which included transport, which didn’t seem too bad. The Cu Chi Tunnels are almost a 2 hours drive from Ho Chi Minh city. Along the way we stopped at a workshop where victims of Agent Orange create and sell artwork (some have visible deformities from this) the artwork was amazing and you were able to walk in and watch them painting- at the time they were painting on eggshells to create art work of oriental Vietnamese women. Was really amazing!
War Remnants Museum: Really glad we went and were able to learn about the Vietnam War. Not sure exactly what kind of experience we thought it would be but it was incredibly sad. A lot of the photographs displayed in the museum were quite hard hitting and graphic. It is one of Vietnam’s most popular museums, so if you wanted to educate yourself on the War then I would recommend.
Bến Thành Market: In District 1 this market has countless of stalls with many different things to buy from clothes, bags to food.
Bến Thành Street Food Market: Loads of different options here, we were recommended to go here by a number of different people!
An Dong Market (Craft Market): 10 minute drive downtown, Quite a lot of fake goods, Clothes, accessories, bags etc. to bargain down on- so expect to find some deals here!
Cafes: Loft Cafe- To get here is a bit tricky but I had seen quite a few pics online advising to visit here. And remember seeing on instagram a lot of mentions to the big analog clock. Expected it to be more expensive than it was with Vietnamese Coffee being only around £1.50 so just under $2 dollars, which was decent. I’d definitely give Vietnamese coffee a go here, it is as good as they say.
Any Advice
Crossing roads: Take care when crossing the roads (even at pedestrian crossings!). I honestly could of spent hours trying to cross the road, nobody stops for you as you walk onto the road. I learnt if you walk with confidence across the road at a steady pace the mopeds will swerve around you.
Limited English: As I’ve mentioned above, not many people seemed to speak English here, so trying to get on a bus when we had little clue where and when to get off was difficult. The receptionist of our hotel tried to help us and wrote down in Vietnamese directions for our bus driver to tell us when to get off however when we handed this to the bus driver, he asked the passenger behind to read it out loud as he couldn’t read, he also didn’t tell us when our stop was so we guessed and definitely got it wrong!
Plan: I am a planner usually but with the ease of getting around Bali and with a lot of museums/ historical trips planned I thought it would be quite easy to get around the centre and plan spontaneous activities in our free time as and when they arose. I do regret this as we had so much difficulty navigating with transport and not many people speaking English. I think this is partially why we ended up flying out to a different Island to try something new when we still had a week left planned to be in Ho Chi Minh.
I went to Hanoi and had a similar experience. I tried Vietnamese food too and thought I’d gotten it wrong so ended up eating western food for the rest of my stay there.
And them motorbikes are bloody lethal aren’t they?! I couldn’t cross the road unless I was holding on to someone.
It was a great read and very relatable
Edwina xxx