The Roads Out of Saigon, and How Long Each One Really Takes

Most travellers give Saigon three days and then fly north to Hoi An. It is a defensible plan, and it leaves the most useful thing about the city unused. Ho Chi Minh City is a road hub before it is anything else: mangrove forest begins inside the municipal boundary to the south-east, the sea is about two hours away, sand dunes about three, the Central Highlands rise into genuine cold air six or seven hours north, and the Cambodian border is a morning's bus ride. The Mekong Delta's administrative edge is under an hour west, but that is a technicality — the delta landscape worth driving for starts a great deal further out, and that distinction does more work in this piece than any other.

So the question is not whether there is anything within reach. It is which directions repay a day, which demand two nights, and which you should refuse to attempt as a day trip however many operators sell it to you on Pham Ngu Lao. Every distance below is approximate and every time assumes decent conditions. In Vietnamese traffic the two are not interchangeable, and getting out of the city is the part that eats the hours.

Start with the roads, not the sights

Saigon does not have one departure point; it has a scatter of them, and they face different ways.

Mien Tay Bus Station, out west in Binh Tan, is the gateway to the delta. An Suong, on the north-western edge, is the ordinary public departure point for Cu Chi and Tay Ninh — worth knowing, because visitors are routinely sent to the wrong terminal for precisely that trip. Mien Dong covers the north and the coast, and here the picture is genuinely messy: most long-distance routes have shifted to the new terminal in the Thu Duc area, roughly twenty kilometres from the centre, but the transfer has been phased and repeatedly incomplete, the old site in Binh Thanh has kept running services, and a large share of operators board passengers at their own downtown offices rather than at either terminal. Confirm which one your ticket actually uses before you commit to a taxi across the city; that mistake costs an hour and a fare. Nga Tu Ga, north of the centre, takes a slice of provincial traffic. Saigon Railway Station, in what everyone still calls District 3, sends the northbound trains. Tan Son Nhat sits close enough to the centre to make a domestic hop worth chaining onto a road trip. And Bach Dang wharf, on the riverfront, is where the Vung Tau boat leaves when it is running.

Metro Line 1, open since late 2024, runs from Ben Thanh out to Suoi Tien beside the new Mien Dong terminal. Metro plus coach is often faster than a car door to door, and considerably cheaper.

Two pieces of infrastructure have rewritten drive times, and older guidebooks have not caught up. Westward, the expressway network has cut the Can Tho run substantially, and the second My Thuan bridge, open since the end of 2023, has eased one of the worst crossings on that corridor — one of them, not all of them. The Rach Mieu bridge on the My Tho road still backs up badly at weekends, which matters, because My Tho is exactly where the cheap day tours go. Eastward, the expressway completed in 2023 turned the crawl to Phan Thiet into a drive of roughly two and a half to three hours.

The 2025 redrawing, and why your map disagrees with your booking site

A national reorganisation in 2025 rewrote administrative geography across the south, and three parts of it bear directly on planning. First, Ba Ria–Vung Tau and Binh Duong were absorbed into Ho Chi Minh City, so Vung Tau now sits on paper inside the city, and the Con Dao islands are administered as a special zone of it. Second, Binh Thuan was absorbed into Lam Dong, which means Phan Thiet, Mui Ne and Da Lat now share a province — search a booking site for "Binh Thuan" and you may find nothing at all. Third, and least reported abroad, the district tier was abolished nationwide. Ho Chi Minh City is now organised into wards and communes; Thu Duc City no longer exists as a unit; and District 3, Binh Tan and Binh Thanh survive in addresses, on signage and in everyday speech but not as administrative divisions. This article uses those names because drivers and street signs still do. Maps, ticketing systems and printed guides are in various stages of catching up. Search by town or terminal name rather than by province and you will sidestep most of the confusion.

West: the delta needs two nights, not one day

The weakest day out of Saigon, in our experience, is the one-day Mekong tour. It exists in vast numbers, it is cheap, and it delivers a coach to My Tho, a boat to an island, a coconut-candy workshop, a bee farm, honey tea, a man with a python, and a rowing sampan through a canal choked with other rowing sampans. You are back by early evening having seen a delivery mechanism for souvenirs rather than the delta.

The delta rewards distance. Can Tho, around 170 kilometres out, is the pivot: allow roughly three and a half hours door to door on the expressway, and closer to four and a half if you leave on a Friday afternoon or come back on a Sunday evening. That number decides the shape of the whole trip. It is a proper city on the Hau River, with a promenade at Ninh Kieu wharf and, more to the point, the Cai Rang floating market — the largest of the delta's surviving wholesale markets, though not the only one still trading: Nga Nam in Soc Trang and Long Xuyen also work. Be realistic about what you will find. Vietnamese reporting has for several years documented Cai Rang's trading-boat numbers falling sharply as road freight displaces river freight, and a growing share of the traffic a visitor sees is other visitors. It is still worth the early start; it is not the thronged commercial spectacle of the older photographs. Boats leave Ninh Kieu typically from around half past five in the morning and the trading thins fast; arrive at nine and you are looking at empty water. Sleep in Can Tho the night before. That is the reason a day trip cannot work.

With three nights you can go further. Chau Doc, up against the Cambodian border and roughly 250 kilometres out — allow five to six hours from the city — is our favourite stop in the delta: floating fish farms moored beneath the houses, a Cham Muslim community across the water, and Sam Mountain rising abruptly out of the rice with the Ba Chua Xu temple at its foot, a pilgrimage site that draws crowds from across the south. Nearby, the flooded melaleuca forest at Tra Su is navigated by sampan through a carpet of green duckweed, at its best in the floating season, roughly September to November, and underwhelming when the water is low. Sa Dec, with the merchant's house associated with Marguerite Duras's novel and a flower-growing district that peaks in the weeks before Tet, is on the way to Chau Doc — not to Can Tho. If Can Tho is your destination it is a real detour, and treating it as a casual stop will cost you an afternoon.

Stay in canal homestays rather than hotels where you can. A night with a farming family is a different experience from a night in a business hotel.

North-west: tunnels, and a cathedral for a religion born here

Cu Chi is the standard half-day, and the choice of site matters more than anyone tells you. Ben Dinh is about 55 kilometres out — allow roughly an hour and a half each way — closer, more heavily engineered for visitors, and shoulder-to-shoulder by mid-morning. Ben Duoc is perhaps fifteen kilometres further, nearer two hours, has the memorial temple, and is quieter. With a car, go there. Either way, arrive early. The crawl sections are tight, hot and dark, and there is typically a shooting range beside the site; when it is operating the noise carries across the whole visit, so this is not a contemplative morning. If you are claustrophobic, skip the tunnel. The trap displays and reconstructed workshops carry most of the story.

The better version of the day continues to Tay Ninh, roughly another fifty kilometres north-west — about an hour on from Cu Chi, or two to two and a half hours direct from the city. The Cao Dai Holy See is the mother temple of a religion founded in Vietnam in the 1920s that draws on Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and Catholicism: pastel columns wrapped in plaster dragons, a vaulted nave in yellow, blue and red, an enormous divine eye above the altar. We have not seen another religious interior like it. Ceremonies are typically held four times a day as of writing, and the midday one is the one most visitors attend, but this is a working temple with a schedule that can change — confirm locally before you build a day around it. Watch from the upper gallery, keep to the side aisles, remove your shoes, and do not photograph worshippers at close range.

Behind the town, Ba Den Mountain rises out of flat country at around 986 metres and is commonly described as the highest peak of the south-east region, Dong Nam Bo. That is the accurate formulation: it excludes the Central Highlands, where Lang Biang above Da Lat, later in this piece, is more than twice its height. A cable car now runs to the summit complex, which has turned a hard pilgrimage climb into an easy ride and changed the character of the place considerably. Worth an hour on a clear day; on a hazy one you will see very little.

Sequencing, assuming the midday ceremony is running: Cu Chi first thing, drive on, eat afterwards.

East: mangroves, a headland Christ, and the dunes

Can Gio is the surprise. About fifty kilometres south-east, reached by the Binh Khanh ferry, it takes an hour and a half to two hours door to door, longer at weekends when the ferry queues. This is a mangrove biosphere reserve defoliated during the war and replanted afterwards, a restoration project of real scale. Boats run through the channels to the reconstructed Rung Sac guerrilla base, and there is a monkey colony where the macaques will take sunglasses, water bottles and anything unzipped. Be honest about the beach: the water is silt-brown and this is not a swimming trip. Go for the trees and the birds.

For actual sea, Vung Tau is the weekend coast, a peninsula about 100 kilometres and two hours away by road, or roughly the same by water from Bach Dang wharf when the fast ferries are running, which is a far more pleasant journey. The Christ the King statue stands on Nho Mountain with a staircase inside leading to the shoulders and a view over both bays; the interior stairway typically shuts for a couple of hours around the middle of the day, so check before climbing. Bach Dinh, the colonial villa built for a French governor-general at the turn of the twentieth century, is the other thing worth an hour. Back Beach is for swimming, Front Beach for walking. Go midweek: on a Sunday evening the road back is a car park.

Further round, Long Hai and Ho Tram are quieter, with better sand and a cluster of resorts, about two and a half hours out. Keep going and you reach Mui Ne, near Phan Thiet — roughly three hours now that the expressway is open, which puts it inside a two-night trip. The draw is the sand. The white dunes at Bau Trang, in Hoa Thang, sit about 62 kilometres north-east of Phan Thiet, which from Mui Ne is roughly an hour's drive along the coast road, not the twenty-minute hop some itineraries imply. If you want them at sunrise, before the quad bikes, you are leaving in the dark — around half past four in the dry season. Set the alarm accordingly. The red dunes beside the village are smaller and heavily worked by touts, and the Fairy Stream is a shallow ankle-deep wade between eroded ochre banks, pleasant and brief.

One caveat that trips people up: Mui Ne is a serious kitesurfing destination during the north-east monsoon, roughly November to April, which is also the dry season and when most visitors come — and precisely when the sea there is too choppy for lazy swimming. In those months, go to Mui Ne for wind and sand, and to Ho Tram if what you want is to swim.

North: where the air changes

Da Lat, around 300 kilometres north in the highlands at roughly 1,500 metres, is the one trip from Saigon that changes the weather rather than the scenery. It is cool, sometimes cold at night, and it smells of pine. Sleeper buses run overnight in about six to seven hours. Flights are the awkward part as of writing: Lien Khuong airport closed on 4 March 2026 for a runway extension and only resumed operations on 19 August 2026, about three weeks before this was written, so schedules are still being rebuilt. Check that the airport is operating and that your route is actually flying before you assume it. If it is, one leg by air and one by road is the comfortable version, since the overnight bus saves a hotel night but delivers you at an unsociable hour.

What to do there: the art deco railway station and its heritage line, about seven kilometres out to Trai Mat and roughly twenty minutes each way, where a pagoda is encrusted entirely in broken ceramic and glass. The line runs to a published timetable, and scheduled evening services for visitors have also operated since 2024 — check the current timetable rather than the old folklore about trains leaving only when enough passengers turn up, which belonged to the 2010s. Add Bao Dai's summer palace, preserved as a 1930s time capsule, Xuan Huong lake for a morning walk, and Lang Biang, at roughly 2,167 metres, if you want a proper climb. The coffee and the surrounding tea estates are a better reason to be there than any single sight.

The other northern trip, and the one we most often find people have never heard of, is Cat Tien National Park, roughly 160 to 175 kilometres out across the Dong Nai River — a drive of about three and a half to four hours, which is why it needs two nights minimum. This is lowland tropical forest with gibbons, a listed wetland at Crocodile Lake, and a primate rescue centre on a river island that can be visited by arrangement. The pre-dawn gibbon-listening walk is the reason to come. Spotlit night drives have been suspended at various points and vary with park management and season, so confirm before you plan around them. As for large mammals: the Javan rhinoceros is gone, declared extinct in Vietnam in 2010 after the last animal in the Cat Loc sector was killed by poachers, and recent surveys have not confirmed tigers. Elephants and gaur do survive in the park, at low density and in small numbers, but you will almost certainly not see them. Bring repellent and come for the forest and the birds.

Further out: islands and the border

Con Dao is a flight of under an hour from Tan Son Nhat, and the most affecting day we have had within reach of the city. Treat the flight itself as something to confirm rather than assume: the island airport works under runway and aircraft-type constraints and the route has been reduced, rescheduled and interrupted more than once, which is a poor thing to discover when it is the closing leg of a two-week plan. The archipelago held the prison complex used by the French and then the southern regime, and the cell blocks and so-called tiger cages are preserved as a museum; Hang Duong cemetery is visited at night by Vietnamese pilgrims, an experience worth planning around rather than avoiding. Beyond the history there are empty beaches, a national park, and green turtle nesting on the outlying islands in the summer months. Seas are generally calmest in spring and early summer; confirm before booking a boat trip.

Overland, buses to Phnom Penh via the Moc Bai crossing take roughly six to seven hours and leave through the day. The river route from Chau Doc, up to Phnom Penh through the water border at Vinh Xuong and Kaam Samnor, is the more interesting journey, but it has been suspended for extended periods and has since run only intermittently, through a small and changing set of operators. Confirm it is actually sailing before you plan an exit through Chau Doc; the failure mode is standing on the wharf with no way onward. Check visa arrangements carefully too, because leaving Vietnam and returning requires the right entry permission and getting it wrong is a common and expensive mistake.

Three plans that work

Five days. Two in the city. One long day to Cu Chi and Tay Ninh with a car, leaving early. Then two nights in Can Tho for the dawn market, driving back on the last afternoon.

Eight days. Two in the city, three in the delta as far as Chau Doc and Tra Su, then two nights on the coast to finish. In the dry season, roughly November to April, make that Ho Tram rather than Mui Ne if you want to swim.

Two weeks. City, delta, then east and up: Mui Ne for the dunes and the wind, Da Lat for the air, Cat Tien on the way down, and a flight out to Con Dao at the end, booked with the airport caveats above in mind. Do not attempt the delta, the dunes and the highlands in a single week. You will spend it in a minibus.

What goes wrong

Tet is the big one. The lunar new year moves each year between late January and about the twentieth of February — it fell on 17 February in 2026 — and for the best part of a week transport is booked solid, delta homestays close because the family is at home, and prices rise. Check the dates before you fix anything.

The rains run roughly May to October and arrive as violent afternoon downpours rather than all-day drizzle, which is manageable if you front-load outdoor plans to the morning. The delta's floating season, when Tra Su is at its best, is the tail of that period.

Do not hire a motorbike casually for a long run. Vietnam recognises only certain international permits, and travel policies typically exclude claims arising from riding without the correct licence — an exclusion you do not want to discover after a collision on a provincial highway. Check the current requirements against your own licence before you leave home. If in doubt, hire a car with a driver: as of writing that is generally modest by western European standards, though rates vary and are worth confirming, and it converts a stressful day into a comfortable one.

Finally, resist booking everything from an agency window on the backpacker strip. Those tours are cheap because they are volume operations with commission stops built in. For the delta and for Cu Chi in particular, a car and driver for the day costs more and buys back several hours.