Using an eSIM in Ho Chi Minh City

What Ho Chi Minh City is like on a phone

Ho Chi Minh City hosts two crowds that barely meet: people in for meetings in the towers of District 1, and budget travellers staying on the western side of the same district before heading down to the delta. The city is large and spread out, so the network is laid out like an industrial city's rather than a tourist town's. What catches people out is that a great many places to stay sit in a hem — an alley branching off a boulevard and then turning several more times — where conditions are plainly different from the street outside.

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Every international flight lands at Tan Son Nhat (SGN), unusually close to the centre — though a short distance is not the same as a short ride at rush hour. Switch the line on before you leave the aircraft so you can order a car and read which lane the app assigns you, because the pick-up point is not directly outside the arrivals doors. The other common entries are cross-border coaches from Cambodia, which terminate around Pham Ngu Lao, and the north–south train into Saigon station. Service holds all the way in, but the map will keep rerouting around the traffic.

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District 1, with its run of office towers, is strongly served and well supplied with masts. In an alley too narrow for a car, walled by three- and four-storey houses, speed falls off in proportion to how far in you go. There is little underground here, but the Thu Thiem tunnel runs beneath the Saigon river and the line stutters while you are in it, returning the instant you climb out the far side. The river buses hug the bank, so they keep service throughout. Out in the northwestern outskirts, among rubber and farmland, things thin out noticeably compared with the centre.

What a day here costs in data

An ordinary day comes to about 1 to 2GB, because nearly every journey is arranged through a ride-hailing app and the map tends to stay open — addresses with sub-numbers inside an alley are hard to find unaided. Cafes here are genuinely where people work, so tethering a laptop through an afternoon moves you up a bracket. Scanning to pay is widespread in coffee shops and convenience stores but costs almost nothing. What actually consumes the allowance is video calls and the batch photo upload at the end of the night.

Districts travellers ask about

• District 1 — The business core, towers and Ben Thanh market together; strong throughout, though under the market's roof with the crowd packed in, everyone slows at once.
• District 3 — Leafy residential streets with long alleys running off them; fine on the main roads, while a place tucked well inside a lane is a good deal weaker than the lane's mouth.
• Thao Dien — Across the river, where long-stay expatriates and riverside cafes are; more open than the centre, so the line is steady, though every trip into town means a bridge or the tunnel.
• Cholon, District 5 — The old Chinese quarter of temples and wholesale markets; normal on the street, but inside the market halls, under steel roofs and between stacks of goods, it slows enough that a payment scan makes you wait.

Day trips out of the city

• The Cu Chi tunnels — Two hours north; above ground the site behaves normally, but down inside the tunnels themselves there is nothing at all, so fix a meeting point with your group before you go under.
• The Mekong delta — South to My Tho or Ben Tre; the riverside towns work, but once a small boat turns into channels roofed over by nipa palm, service disappears in patches and returns when you come back out onto the main river.
• Vung Tau — Reachable by road or by fast boat across the estuary; out in the wide water the line weakens noticeably, while the seaside town and the hill with the big statue behave normally.