Mekong Delta Loop

There are two legal ways from Saigon to the delta on a motorbike, and neither is the expressway (CT01), which is closed to bikes from end to end. Highway 1 (QL1) is the direct one: about 70 km to My Tho through Binh Chanh and Tan An, wide, legal and joyless, with trucks, buses and factory traffic all the way. This guide takes the back door, QL50. From the centre, cross to the south side of the city and follow Nguyen Van Linh boulevard west until QL50 turns off to the south.

The first 15 km are the worst of the day: a crowded suburban road that the city has been widening since 2022. By May 2026 the work was reported to be more than 90 per cent done, with most of the new six-lane road in use and the rest promised by the end of the year, so it should be better than older guides say, but it will still be busy. Beyond Can Giuoc the traffic thins, and after about 40 km the My Loi Bridge lifts you over the Vam Co River for the first wide view of water and nipa palm. It replaced a ferry in 2015. The old market town of Go Cong, 13 km on, is a good coffee stop, and from there QL50 runs west for about 35 km through rice and dragon-fruit farms to My Tho.

My Tho sits on the Tien River, the northern arm of the Mekong, and is as far as most day trips from Saigon get. Vinh Trang Pagoda, on the east side of town, is worth half an hour, and boats leave the waterfront for the orchard islands in midstream. Then take QL60 over the Rach Mieu Bridge, nearly 3 km of it, into what everyone still calls Ben Tre: Vietnam's coconut capital, where the palms close over the lanes and small workshops turn the crop into sweets, oil, matting and charcoal. Ben Tre city is 12 km beyond the bridge. Arrive by early afternoon and spend what is left of the day on a small boat or a slow lap of the back lanes.

Leave Ben Tre on QL60 and cross the Ham Luong Bridge, then turn west on DT882 to pick up QL57 at Phuoc My Trung. For the next 30 km the road runs along the spine of a long river island through Cho Lach, the delta's plant nursery: village after village raising fruit-tree saplings, ornamental kumquats and clipped topiary, much of it destined for Tết. Around Cai Mon the lanes on either side of the highway are as pretty as any in the delta, and you can wander down one without getting lost for long.

QL57 ends, for now, at the water. The Dinh Khao ferry carries the highway across the Co Chien River to Vinh Long: a crossing of about a kilometre on drive-on boats that shuttle back and forth through the day. You pay a small fare at a booth, ride on, switch off and enjoy ten minutes or so of breeze. A bridge has been approved, and a ground-breaking was announced for December 2025, but it will be years before it opens, so the ferry is still the way across. Vinh Long, on the far bank, is a pleasant riverside town for lunch.

The last 40 km include the only real highway of the day. QL1 runs south-west from Vinh Long to the Hau River, the Mekong's southern arm, for about 25 km. It is a wide road with room at the side for bikes, and a good deal calmer since the expressway alongside opened at the end of 2023 and took many of the cars and coaches with it. The Can Tho Bridge, 2.75 km long, has its own motorbike lanes and a fine view. Can Tho, on the far bank, is the delta's capital and its one big city. Head for the riverfront at Ninh Kieu.

Start on the water. Cai Rang floating market is 6–7 km up the Can Tho River from Ninh Kieu, and it is a wholesale market, not a show: farmers and traders sell fruit and vegetables by the boatload, each boat hanging a sample of its cargo from a pole so that buyers can see what is on offer. It is busiest between about 5 and 6:30am and winding down by 8, so take a boat from the wharf at first light. Be ready for a market smaller than the brochures show. Roads and bridges have taken much of the trade ashore, and a 2025 report put it at about 200 boats, fewer than half the number at its peak in the 1990s. It is still the largest floating market left in the delta, and an hour on the river at sunrise is worth the early alarm either way.

Then the ride, which is a plain one. QL91 follows the west bank of the Hau River for 117 km, through O Mon and Thot Not to Long Xuyen and on to Chau Doc. It is mostly two lanes and built up almost continuously, with trucks, coaches and a great many bikes, so it asks for patience more than skill. A parallel expressway is being built and opened in sections, and should take much of the heavy traffic away over the next year or two; bikes will not be allowed on it. Long Xuyen, at 62 km, is the halfway stop: a busy river city with a waterfront, a big market and, by most accounts, a small working floating market of its own.

North of Long Xuyen the land opens into the rice plain of An Giang, and the hills of the Seven Mountains appear on the horizon to your left. Chau Doc stands where the Chau Doc River meets the Hau, a few kilometres from Cambodia, and feels different from the towns behind you: Cham Muslim villages with mosques on the far bank, Khmer as well as Vietnamese in the market, and floating houses with fish farms beneath them moored along the river. Since 2024 a bridge just downstream of town has replaced the old ferry to the Cham side.

Six kilometres out of Chau Doc, Sam Mountain rises 284 m from dead-flat rice fields. At its foot is the Temple of Ba Chua Xu, the Lady of the Realm, one of the most visited shrines in southern Vietnam; her festival, in the fourth lunar month, joined UNESCO's list of intangible heritage in 2024. Tay An Pagoda and the tomb of Thoai Ngoc Hau, the mandarin who oversaw the digging of the Vinh Te Canal, stand close by, and a road winds to the top for a view over the canal and into Cambodia. Go early, before the heat and the coaches.

Carry on down QL91 for 10 km to Nha Bang, turn south on DT948 and follow the signs along a canal road to the day's main stop. Tra Su is 845 hectares of cajuput, a paperbark tree that likes wet feet, planted in the 1980s and now a bird sanctuary. You leave the bike at the gate and are taken through the forest by motorboat and then by rowing boat, under the trees and across a carpet of green duckweed, with storks, egrets and darters overhead. Allow two hours. In 2026 published prices were about 120,000 VND for entry with the boats extra, or roughly 190,000–270,000 VND (US$7–10) for a combined ticket; check at the gate. The forest is fullest and greenest in the flood season, from about September to November. In February the water is lower, by most accounts, but it is still the best quiet hour of the trip.

Back on QL91, the road reaches the border at Tinh Bien, which has an international crossing and a busy market. Fill up here. Then turn south-west onto N1, 63 km of narrow, straight highway laid along the bank of the Vinh Te Canal. The canal was dug by hand between 1819 and 1824 and runs 87 km from Chau Doc to the Giang Thanh River; for much of the way Cambodia is a field or two beyond the far bank. There is little traffic and little shade: just rice, sugar palms, herons and the occasional border post. About 11 km along, a side road leads 4 km south to Ba Chuc, where Khmer Rouge troops killed 3,157 villagers in April 1978. The memorial and its ossuary are sobering, and worth the stop. N1 ends at QL80, about 6 km short of Ha Tien, and a bridge carries you into town across the mouth of the lagoon.

This is the one long day, and nearly all of it is on one road. QL80 starts at the Cambodian border just beyond Ha Tien and runs the width of the delta to the Tien River. Give Ha Tien the first hour of the morning, for the hillside tombs of the Mac family, who founded the port around 1700, or the cave pagoda of Thach Dong on the road to the border, and be riding by 8. The first 90 km run south-east behind the coast, past the limestone outcrops and cement works of Kien Luong and the rice plain of Hon Dat. It is a wide, flat, fairly quick road, with the sea mostly out of sight.

Rach Gia, since 2025 the capital of the enlarged An Giang province, is the place for lunch: a working port with a long seafront on reclaimed land, a much-loved temple to the resistance hero Nguyen Trung Truc, and boats to Phu Quoc and the smaller islands. From here QL80 turns inland and follows the Cai San Canal north-east for about 70 km. This stretch is slower, with houses along both banks, a bridge every few hundred metres and, around Tan Hiep, a church at almost every side canal, built by Catholic families who were resettled here from the north in the 1950s. The newer Lo Te–Rach Soi highway, which runs parallel a few kilometres away, is closed to motorbikes, and police were booking riders on it in 2026. Stay by the canal.

QL80 meets the Hau River again near Thot Not, where the Vam Cong Bridge, a cable-stayed span almost 3 km long, replaced a ferry in 2019. Motorbikes cross in their own fenced-off lane: follow the signs for bikes, not the car lanes. The road on either side is being upgraded to an expressway, so on the far bank leave it at the first exit, for QL54, and pick up old QL80 through Lap Vo and Lai Vung, which is mandarin-orchard country, for the last 33 km to Sa Dec. You will arrive tired. The reward is one of the delta's most likeable towns, with a riverside market, old merchant houses and the flower gardens to look forward to in the morning.

Spend the first hour in the flower village on the north side of town, where around two thousand families grow ornamental plants on raised frames above flooded plots, wading or paddling between the rows to tend them. In the weeks before Tết the whole district is a sheet of chrysanthemums and marigolds. Then ride to the Sa Dec ferry, a few minutes from the market, for the last crossing of the trip: ten minutes or so across the Tien River.

On the far bank DT850 runs north. After 10 km it crosses QL30 at My Hiep, where a short signed detour leads to Xeo Quyt, a patch of cajuput swamp that hid a resistance headquarters during the war and is now a quiet reserve of boardwalks and paddle boats. Beyond it the land empties out into the Plain of Reeds (Dong Thap Muoi), the delta's back country: lotus ponds, stands of cajuput, storks, and canals ruled straight to the horizon. At My An, 31 km from Sa Dec, you join N2.

N2 is signed as part of the Ho Chi Minh Road: two lanes, flat, straight and exposed, across some 80 km of the plain through Tan Thanh and Thanh Hoa. Trucks use it as a way round Highway 1, and the surface is uneven in places, but it is far emptier than the road you would otherwise be on. The Vam Co Dong River at Duc Hoa marks the end of the delta. From there the last 33 km into Saigon, by DT824, DT825 and Tinh Lo 10 (Tran Van Giau street), are factories, lorries and traffic lights: slow, legal and unlovely. Aim to be through Duc Hoa by 2pm so that you are parked before the evening rush.