Your guide meets you at Tan Son Nhat and takes you into District 1, twenty minutes or an hour depending on the traffic. The evening is free and the briefing is over a drink. If you land early, the Reunification Palace and the War Remnants Museum are both walkable, and the alley coffee shops off Ly Tu Trong are worth the hunt.

Ninety minutes south to Ben Tre, coconut country, which since the mergers of July 2025 is part of an enlarged Vinh Long province, though nobody local calls it that yet. A motorboat off the main channel into canals narrow enough to touch both banks, a coconut workshop, and lunch with the family who own the orchard. On to Can Tho in the late afternoon, a little over two hours away.

Out on the water at half past five, because the wholesale boats at Cai Rang do their business early and thin out by eight. Each boat still hangs its produce from a pole so buyers can read it from a distance. About 200 boats work the market now; there were over 400 in the 1990s, and the reasons are bridges, supermarkets and children who went to university. Afternoon at Binh Thuy house and the orchards.

Three and a half hours north-west along the Hau river to Chau Doc, now in the enlarged An Giang. We stop at Long Xuyen’s morning market on the way, which trades on the water without any tourist boats at all. In the afternoon Tra Su: a flat-bottomed boat, then a punt, through 845 hectares of cajuput standing in green duckweed. Night in Chau Doc, close enough to Cambodia to see it.

Early on the river among the floating fish farms — the pens hang under the houses, and a hatch in the floor opens onto several thousand basa. Across to Chau Giang, a Cham Muslim village that has been there since the eighteenth century, where the women weave and the mosque takes visitors. Then Sam Mountain, and the long drive back to Saigon, five hours with a stop. Farewell dinner.

A transfer to Tan Son Nhat when your flight requires it. The delta trip pairs naturally with a longer run north — Hoi An and Hue are ninety minutes by air, and we can add them, or a week in Cambodia, which begins an hour upriver from where you stood yesterday. Bags can be stored at the hotel if you have a late flight.