Ho Chi Minh City.

French bones, street-food soul, and rooms that book out before the season turns.

Ho Chi Minh City, which almost everyone who lives here still calls Saigon, is the commercial engine and appetite of southern Vietnam: a low, dense sprawl on the Saigon River where the Mekong Delta's humidity, the traffic of millions of motorbikes, and a French colonial street grid all press together.