5 Best Sights in Around Pham Ngu Lao, Ho Chi Minh City

This huge park, a block behind the Reunification Palace, has a little something for everyone: walking paths for strolling or jogging; tall trees for shade; open areas where exercise classes are held in the mornings and evenings; a miniature Cham tower; a replica Hung King Temple; and an extensive children's playground. There's also a coffee stand, known as the bird café, at the Cach Mang Thang Tam entrance, and every morning bird fanciers bring their feathered friends here for singing practice. Do pull up a plastic chair and enjoy the ruckus and the theater of finicky owners trying to position their birds in order to generate the loudest birdsong. The birds are usually taken home by 9 am—by motorbike, which is a spectacle in itself. Leading up to Tet, the lunar new year, a spring festival is held in the park, with live entertainment and food and handicrafts stalls.

This bustling market, which is more than a century old, has a bit of a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, and if you are unlucky enough to encounter pushy vendors, scammers, and pickpockets it won't exactly be an enjoyable experience. Stay alert, though, and you can have a lovely time exploring the 3,000 stalls. The most interesting section is the wet market at the back. Cheap T-shirts and other tourist goods are for sale in the front section, fabric and haberdasheries in the middle, and some great food stalls spring up beside the market at night.

Spread over three floors in a reportedly haunted French-colonial villa known as Chu Hoa's mansion, the city's Fine Arts Museum offers a comprehensive run through the main stages of Vietnamese art. Strolling around is a pleasant experience as the building itself is architecturally beautiful. While there could be more information to enlighten visitors, the examples of wartime propaganda art and lacquer art are superb.

Vivid statues and colorful floral offerings at this Hindu temple create a microcosm of India in the streets of Saigon. Before the temple was returned to the Hindu community in the early 1990s, the government used it as a factory for making joss sticks (incense) and for processing dried fish. Today it serves a small congregation of Tamil Hindus, but some Vietnamese and Chinese locals also revere it as a holy space.

This long skinny park at the end of Ho Chi Minh City's backpacker district was built on the site of the city's former train station, which was demolished after the last war. The lush park, with its tall trees, is a pleasant spot to rest awhile after a long day of sightseeing. There's a small children's playground, a duck pond, and walking trails, which are full of locals exercising in the mornings and evenings. After dark, the park is where young couples sneak a bit of privacy, sitting on their motorbikes and cuddling. In the weeks leading up to Tet (Lunar New Year), the park is a blaze of color, with a temporary flower market selling potted flowers and shrubs, including bright yellow chrysanthemums, apricot blossoms, and miniature kumquat trees, as well as depictions of dragons and other animals made from fruit and flowers.

The park's proximity to the backpacker area makes it popular with scammers, who try to open a conversation by asking to practice their English or claiming to recognize you. The conversation usually moves on to offers of card games, visiting bars, or going to their home. Never accept any of these offers.