Ho Chi Minh City Travel Video Guide

Ho Chi Minh City Travel Itinerary

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Washed ashore above the Mekong Delta, some 40km north of the South China Sea, HO CHI MINH CITY is a city on the march, a boomtown where the rule of the dollar is absolute. Fuelled by the sweeping economic changes wrought by doi moi, this effervescent city, perched on the west bank of the Saigon River, now boasts fine restaurants, immaculate hotels, and glitzy bars among its colonial villas, venerable pagodas and austere, Soviet-style housing-blocks. Sadly, Ho Chi Minh City is also full to bursting with people for whom progress hasn't yet translated into food, lodgings and employment, so begging, stealing and prostitution are all facts of life here.

Ho Chi Minh City started life as a fishing village known as Prei Nokor and, during the Angkor period (until the fifteenth century), it flourished as an entrepot for Cambodian boats pushing down the Mekong River. By the seventeenth century it boasted a Khmer garrison and a community of Malay, Indian and Chinese traders. During the eighteenth century, Hue's Nguyen Dynasty ousted the Khmers, renamed Prei Nokor Saigon , and established a temporary capital here between 1772 and 1802, after which the Emperor Gia Long used it as his regional administrative centre. The French seized Saigon in 1861, and a year later the Treaty of Saigon declared the city the capital of French Cochinchina. They set about a huge public works programme, building roads and draining marshlands, but ruled harshly. After a thirty-year war against the

French, Saigon was finally designated the capital of the Republic of South Vietnam by President Diem in 1955, soon becoming both the nerve-centre of the American war effort, and its R&R capital, with a slough of sleazy bars catering to GIs on leave of duty. The American troops withdrew in 1973, and two years later the Ho Chi Minh Campaign rolled through the gates of the presidential palace and the communists were in control. Within a year, Saigon had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

Your Tips For Ho Chi Minh City

• Southern and central highlands Vietnam Travel Videos
  Vietnam Travel Itinerary
  After a hot and sticky stint labouring across the coastal plains, the little-visited southern and central highlands , with their host of ethnic minorities, mist-laden mountains and crashing waterfalls, can provide an enjoyable contrast. - Vietnam
  

• Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam Travel Videos
  Vietnam Travel Itinerary
  Washed ashore above the Mekong Delta, some 40km north of the South China Sea, HO CHI MINH CITY is a city on the march, a boomtown where the rule of the dollar is absolute. - Vietnam
  

• Hanoi Vietnam Travel Videos
  Vietnam Travel Itinerary
  The Vietnamese nation was born among the lagoons and marshes of the Red River Delta around 4000 years ago and for most of its independent existence has been ruled from HANOI , Vietnam's small, elegant capital lying in the heart of the northern delta. - Vietnam
  

• Mekong Delta Vietnam Travel Videos
  Vietnam Travel Itinerary
  The orchards, paddy fields and swamplands of the MEKONG DELTA stretch from Ho Chi Minh's city limits southwest to the Gulf of Thailand, crisscrossed by nine tributaries of the Mekong River. - Vietnam
  

• Ha Long Bay and the northern seaboard Vietnam Travel Videos
  Vietnam Travel Itinerary
  The mystical scenery of Ha Long Bay , peppered with thousands of evocatively craggy limestone outcrops, is what draws people to the northeast coast of Vietnam, and there are plenty of tourist boats and accommodation in nearby Ha Long City to facilitate your visit. - Vietnam
  

• Far north Vietnam Travel Videos
  Vietnam Travel Itinerary
  Vietnam fans out above Hanoi like the head of a giant pin, the majority of it a mountainous buffer zone wrapped around the Red River Delta. - Vietnam
  

• Vietnam Southern and central highlands Travel Videos
  Vietnam Travel Itinerary
  After a hot and sticky stint labouring across the coastal plains, the little-visited southern and central highlands , with their host of ethnic minorities, mist-laden mountains and crashing waterfalls, can provide an enjoyable contrast. - Vietnam
  

• Vietnam South-central coast Travel Videos
  Vietnam Travel Itinerary
  Extending from the wetlands of the Mekong Delta right the way up to the central provinces, Vietnam's south-central coast was, from the seventh to the twelfth century, the domain of the Indianized trading empire of Champa. - Vietnam
  

• Central provinces Vietnam Travel Videos
  Vietnam Travel Itinerary
  Vietnam's narrow waist comprises a string of provinces squeezed between the long, sandy coastline and the formidable barrier of the Truong Son Mountains, which mark the border between Vietnam and Laos. - Vietnam
  

• Vietnam Central provinces Travel Videos
  Vietnam Travel Itinerary
  Vietnam's narrow waist comprises a string of provinces squeezed between the long, sandy coastline and the formidable barrier of the Truong Son Mountains, which mark the border between Vietnam and Laos. - Vietnam
  

• Far north Vietnam Travel Videos
  Vietnam Travel Itinerary
  Vietnam fans out above Hanoi like the head of a giant pin, the majority of it a mountainous buffer zone wrapped around the Red River Delta. - Vietnam
  

• South-central coast Vietnam Travel Videos
  Vietnam Travel Itinerary
  Extending from the wetlands of the Mekong Delta right the way up to the central provinces, Vietnam's south-central coast was, from the seventh to the twelfth century, the domain of the Indianized trading empire of Champa. - Vietnam