36 Hours in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Embrace the traffic and hop on the back of a motorbike for a whirlwind street food tour with XO Tours, in which the expert, female driver-guides in traditional áo dài tunics navigate through five of the city’s 24 districts. The tours steer clear of the conventional banh mi and pho, instead rolling up for dishes like grilled goat at a hot-pot hub in District 8, and scallops on the half shell in the boisterous seafood street in District 4 (XO Foodie Tour, 1,872,000 Vietnamese dong, or about $79). If you’re even more adventurous, head on your own to District 10’s Ho Thi Ky food street, a long and narrow lane with carts serving dishes like sticky rice cooked in a bamboo branch, and bot chien, fried rice-flour cakes with egg (street-food dishes, 15,000 to 35,000 dong).

Find passionate Vietnamese mixologists in leather aprons using fire, foam and liquid nitrogen at Summer Experiment, the softly lit cocktail bar three stories up in an old apartment building in District 1, the central area with many major tourist attractions, including the nearby Reunification Palace. Try the Heaven Tears, a jiggly sphere that explodes in the mouth with vodka, melon puree and mint (100,000 dong). And ask for one of the homegrown gins like Song Cai, Lady Trieu or Ve de di in the Spiced Plummy Gimlet, blended with a local plum spirit and rimmed with a chili shrimp salt (180,000 dong). If you hear music on the way back down, follow it to COI Saigon (one floor below), which often has free live jazz on weekends until 11 p.m.

At the end of a lane in the Cholon area, or Chinatown, is one of the city's most astonishing Buddhist temples: Chua Van Phat, the Ten Thousand Buddha Temple. Climb the stairs to the fourth floor and step awestruck into a gilded, towering chamber lorded over by a 23-foot tall Buddha in a gold robe, serenely seated on a lotus flower. Little Buddha statues sit on each of the sculpture’s 1,000 gold-painted petals, and in the thousands of niches in the walls up to the carved, paneled ceiling. Locals kneel and pray, incense wafts and a robed devotee chants and taps a wooden drum and singing bowl. If you encounter the temple’s head monk, Thich Truyen Cuong, he may answer your questions about the upper chamber’s decade-long construction. Admission free; donations welcome.

Many Buddhists in Vietnam turn vegetarian each month on the 1st and 15th days of the lunar calendar, but a number of new plant-based restaurants are serving innovative takes on ancestral dishes daily. One standout is Hum Cafe & Restaurant, which opened its three-story, villa-like space with wooden ceilings, lotus flowers and brightly colored drapes, in District 3 in 2012. The thinly sliced and fried lotus root with sesame salt (160,000 dong) are as addictive as potato chips, and don’t miss the winged bean salad with tofu (200,000 dong), the skillet of banana flower in a tomato sauce (190,000 dong), and mango with sticky rice for dessert (80,000 dong).

Visitors with an impulse to shop often head straight to Dong Khoi, one of the oldest streets in the city and a hub of fashionable boutiques like Gia Studios, Lam Boutique and Ha Linh Thu House of Silk. But you can also find hidden gems across the city including Tiny Ink, a small boutique at the end of an alley in District 1. A regular on the runway at Vietnam International Fashion Week, the brand is the creation of the designer Hoang Quyen. The boutique displays an explosion of brightly colored gowns and dresses made with silk, satin and organza fabric, and hand painted with floral art and abstract splashes (dresses range from 3.5 million to 24 million dong).

The city is hardly known for pleasant strolls, given that sidewalks double as motorbike parking lots, and even as ad hoc traffic lanes. But you can find entertaining people-watching on Nguyen Hue Street, a half-mile pedestrian boulevard surrounded by French Colonial landmarks and the Saigon River. Start at the top in the glow of the grand People’s Committee headquarters, then continue through the Le Loi intersection for a view of the palatial Saigon Opera House. Head toward the gleaming towers and the river, wading through the chattering couples and families noshing dried squid or cotton candy, and stopping to join the crowds encircling people crooning ballads or dancing for TikTok videos. Pull up tyke-size plastic stools for a coconut ice cream (15,000 dong) from a cart and watch young locals play da cau, a game that involves kicking a weighted shuttlecock high into the air.

The abandoned and captured United States tanks, planes and helicopters displayed on the grounds of the War Remnants Museum (admission, 40,000 dong) is the first indication that the victors will be telling the story of the wars in Vietnam. The museum is filled with photographs depicting the brutalities that the French and later the Americans committed in their losing campaigns against the Vietnamese. In addition to photos of rows of bodies in open pits, burning villages and instruments of torture, the harrowing displays are heavy on graphic shots of Vietnamese deformed by U.S. chemicals like Agent Orange, with hardly any mention of the atrocities the North and South committed against each other. The museum can trigger a surge of emotions, especially for visiting American veterans, who, 50 years after the United States pulled combat troops out of Vietnam, mostly are in their 70s.

If you have time for one last stop, see what’s on at the Lotus Gallery in District 7, a fast-developing area of wide boulevards and glossy malls, universities and condo complexes. The long-established private gallery moved into a new warehouse-like space in 2022, just down the road from the Mercedes and Porsche dealerships. Exhibits rotate every couple months and center on Vietnamese themes, like the “Soul of the Street” show (Aug. 5 to 31) that will feature works by 10 artists that include watercolors of fish markets and oil paintings of cyclo pedalers. Admission is free.