Hô Chi Minh-Ville : les quartiers à moto
Central Post Office · Nguyen Hue · Cholon · Thiên Hậu Temple
Photo de région ou transport, pas un arrêt garanti. ©
Connect the civic centre with Cholon, where shopfronts and temple courtyards change the rhythm of the day. Make this a sequence of short rides with long walks, rather than a race across town.
Three hundred years, three names
The city on the Saigon river is young by Vietnamese standards. It was a Khmer trading village called Prey Nokor when the Nguyễn lords of Huế sent Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh south in 1698 to organise the settlers pouring into the Mekong delta and set up a district called Gia Định; a citadel followed in 1790, and by then the town had its Vietnamese name, Sài Gòn. The French took it in 1859 and made it the capital of Cochinchina, laying out the boulevards, the cathedral, the post office and the opera house that give District 1 its shape and earned the city its colonial nickname, the Pearl of the Far East. From 1955 to 1975 it was the capital of the Republic of Vietnam; on 30 April 1975 tanks came through the gates of the presidential palace, and in 1976 the city was renamed for Hồ Chí Minh. Nobody in it calls it that in conversation — it is Sài Gòn, or just ‘the city’ — and since the 2025 merger with Bình Dương and Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu it is a metropolis of some fourteen million people, the largest in the country by a distance.
The French centre
District 1 is where the French built, and the ride starts on its central square. The Central Post Office, put up between 1886 and 1891 to a design credited to Alfred Foulhoux — the Eiffel attribution on the postcards is a myth — is still a working post office, with a portrait of Hồ Chí Minh at the end of the vaulted hall and the old painted maps of Saigon and the telegraph lines of Indochina on the walls. Beside it the red-brick Notre-Dame basilica, finished in 1880 with bricks shipped from Toulouse, has been under scaffolding for a restoration since 2017 that is expected to run to 2027. Two blocks south, Nguyễn Huệ was a canal until the French filled it in 1887 and made it a boulevard; since 2015 it has been a pedestrian street running from the city hall of 1909 to the river, and it is the one place in the centre where the city walks instead of rides. Bến Thành market, with its clock tower, was finished in March 1914 at the head of the old tramlines and still sells everything from fabric to dried squid. These are stops for the feet; the bike waits at the kerb.
Chợ Lớn, the big market
Six kilometres west along Trần Hưng Đạo the city changes language. Chợ Lớn — ‘big market’ — grew up in the late 1770s around Chinese refugees who had fled the Tây Sơn armies at Cù lao Phố, near Biên Hòa, and grew as a separate Chinese city, with its own guild halls, temples and hospitals, until it was merged with Saigon in 1931. It is still the largest Chinatown in Vietnam, home to most of the Hoa who make up a few percent of the city, and it runs on a different rhythm: wholesale streets of a single trade — herbs, fabric, plastic, lanterns — shuttered shophouses, and tea shops open from dawn. Its centre is Thiên Hậu temple on Nguyễn Trãi street, built by Cantonese merchants, by tradition around 1760, to the goddess of the sea who had brought them safely across, with ceramic friezes of opera scenes along the roof and coils of incense hanging from the ceiling that burn for weeks. At the western end, Bình Tây market — built in 1928–1930 by the merchant Quách Đàm, who gave it to the city — is the wholesale heart of the south, and its courtyard is the quiet middle of the noise.
A pagoda of the Jade Emperor and a river
The way back from Chợ Lớn follows Võ Văn Kiệt, the boulevard along the old Bến Nghé canal, to Đa Kao, one of the older neighbourhoods of District 1, where the Jade Emperor pagoda has stood since the first years of the twentieth century. Built by the Cantonese merchant Lưu Minh to the Taoist ruler of heaven, it is the most atmospheric temple in the city: dark, smoky, crowded with carved wooden figures of judges and demons, a turtle pond in the yard, and a hall to the goddess of fertility where couples come to ask for children. It became briefly famous when a visiting American president stopped there in 2016; it did not change. From Đa Kao it is a short run to the Saigon river, which the city ignored for a century and has lately turned to face: the walkway on the Thủ Thiêm side looks back at the towers of District 1 and, downstream, at Landmark 81, the tallest building in Vietnam at 461 metres since 2018. It is the place to end, at sunset, before the traffic peaks.
Why by bike, and how
This is a city of millions of motorbikes, more than anywhere else in the country, and there is no faster or more honest way to see it than from one. The ride is deliberately short — twenty-five to forty-five kilometres — and is really a chain of neighbourhoods with rides between them: the square and Nguyễn Huệ in the early morning, when the office workers are eating on the pavements; Chợ Lớn in the late morning, when the wholesale streets are at full pitch; the pagoda after lunch, in the dark and the incense; the river at the end of the day. Every stop is a walk, and the bike goes into a staffed parking lot with a numbered ticket — always, without exception. Two things shape the day. The first is the heat, which is over thirty degrees every month of the year and heaviest at midday; start at seven and be indoors or on the water by one. The second is the rush hours, from about seven to nine and from four to seven, when the boulevards stop; the route is timed to be off the main roads for both. The traffic itself is slower and more forgiving than it looks, provided you move with it and never stop suddenly.
C’est nous qui menons ce voyage.
Le guide fait partie de notre équipe, nous avons parcouru l’itinéraire nous-mêmes, et vous avez une seule conversation avec nous pour tout le voyage.
- Des guides de notre équipe
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- Notre atelier dans 5 villes et des ateliers partenaires
- Une seule conversation avec nous pour tout le voyage
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