Private Ho Chi Minh City Shore Excursion: 8 Stops with Lunch

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Free cancellationTravelers' pick

1/12

Duration8h–12h

GroupPrivate

LanguagesEN

PickupAt your hotel

Eight landmarks, one guide, lunch in between: the day Ho Chi Minh City reveals itself

A private full-day guided tour of Ho Chi Minh City from the cruise port, visiting eight major landmarks including the War Remnants Museum, Reunification Palace, Jade Emperor Pagoda and Ben Thanh Market. Vietnamese traditional lunch and all entrance fees are included, with pickup and dropoff at the port and a private English-speaking guide throughout.

8h–12h

Step-by-step itinerary

Explore Ho Chi Minh City highlights

Visit Saigon Notre Dame Cathedral
Tour Saigon Central Post Office
Explore Independence Palace
Visit War Remnants Museum
See People’s Committee Building
View Saigon Opera House
Discover Cholon Chinatown
Visit Ba Thien Hau Temple
Shop at Ben Thanh Market
Explore Jade Emperor Pagoda
Tour secret weapon bunker

The Experience

The tour runs eight to twelve hours depending on how long you linger at each stop, and the guide picks you up directly from the cruise port. You move through the city's colonial core first—the Saigon Notre Dame Cathedral, built in the late 1880s with red brick imported from Marseille and still standing 60 metres tall, sits next to the Central Post Office, a grand remnant of French Indochina with arched windows and wooden shutters that look unchanged since the 19th century. Both stand in District 1, close enough to visit together and get a sense of what Saigon looked like under colonial rule.

From there the itinerary branches into Vietnam's modern history. The Reunification Palace, once the seat of the South Vietnamese government, still holds the two original tanks that crashed through its gates in 1975, ending the war; the building itself is a time capsule with secret rooms, antique furniture and a command bunker. The War Remnants Museum displays the hardware of that conflict—a helicopter with rocket launchers, a fighter plane, a conventional bomb weighing 6,800 kilograms—alongside photographs that document the war's toll. These two stops anchor the day's heavier moments.

The afternoon shifts to the city's living culture. Ben Thanh Market in District 1 is one of Saigon's oldest landmarks, crowded and difficult to navigate but worth the effort for local handicrafts, Vietnamese art and the eating stalls inside where you can taste hawker-style cuisine. Cholon, the sprawling Chinatown with roots back to 1778, contains the Thien Hau Temple, a Buddhist temple dedicated to the Chinese sea goddess Mazu, and the Binh Tay market at its centre—busy, messy, full of small aisles selling everything. The Jade Emperor Pagoda, a Taoist, Buddhist and Confucian site founded by a Chinese merchant, rounds out the spiritual and cultural stops. Vietnamese traditional lunch is included partway through the day, and the guide handles all entrance fees and the logistics of moving between sites.

What’s included

Private pickup and dropoff at the cruise port.
bottled water throughout the day.
private professional English-speaking guide.
all entrance fees and taxes.
a comfortable vehicle sized to your group.
Vietnamese traditional lunch.

Good to know

Easy physical level

Operated by Maximus Travel Vietnam

Is this one for you?This is a private tour, so you move at your own pace with one guide instead of joining a larger group—ideal if you want to linger at any stop or ask detailed questions without keeping others waiting. The eight-to-twelve-hour window gives you flexibility to spend more time at the War Remnants Museum or Cholon if those interest you most, or move faster through others; the guide adjusts to what you want to see.