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Places to Visit in Vietnam |
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To travel the length of Vietnam at some leisure, see something of the highlands and the deltas and allow for a few days rest, it’s recommended to be in-country for a full month. With a two week itinerary, one can speed up this itinerary by taking advantage of intra-country flights between the north, central and southern regions.
For the majority of visitors, Ho Chi Minh City provides a head-spinning introduction to Vietnam. Set beside the broad swell of the Saigon River, the southern capital is rapidly being transformed into a Southeast Asian mover and shaker to compete with the best of them. The city’s breakneck pace of life translates into a stew of bizarre characters and unlikely sights and sounds, and ensures that almost all who come here quickly fall for its singular charm.
From Ho Chi Minh, many visitors choose to explore the Mekong Delta where one of the world’s truly mighty rivers finally offloads into the South China Seas; its skein of brim-full tributaries and waterways has endowed the delta with a lush quilt of rice-rich flats and abundant orchards. The delta’s largest settlement, Can Tho, provides for a hands-on look into the daily trade of the floating market. For the majority of visitors, Ho Chi Minh City provides a head-spinning introduction to Vietnam. Set beside the broad swell of the Saigon River, the southern capital is rapidly being transformed into a Southeast Asian mover and shaker to compete with the best of them. The city’s breakneck pace of life translates into a stew of bizarre characters and unlikely sights and sounds, and ensures that almost all who come here quickly fall for its singular charm.
The central coast of Vietnam is home to the once bustling seaport of Hoi An. Its narrow streets of wooden-fronted shophouses and weathered roofs make it an enticing destination. Inland, the war-battered ruins of My Son, the greatest of the Cham temples sites, lie in a steamy forest-filled valley. Da Nang, just up the winding coast, lacks Hoi An’s charm but good transport links make it a convenient base for the area, while the echoes of the American War still resound across the sands of China Beach. From Da Nang a corkscrew ride over clifftop Hai Van Pass brings you to the aristocratic city of Hue, where the Nguyen emperors established their capital in the nineteenth century on the banks of the languid Perfume River. The temples and palaces of this highly cultured city still testify to past splendors, while its imperial mausoleums are masterpieces of architectural refinement, slumbering among pine-shrouded hills.
Traveling to the north, Hanoi has served as Vietnam’s capital for close to a thousand years. It’s a relatively small, decidedly proud city, a place of pagodas and dynastic temples, tamarisk-edged lakes and elegant boulevards of French-era villas, of national monuments and stately government edifices. Though life proceeds at a slightly gentler pace than in Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi is till an all-absorbing place, a city on the move, throwing up new office buildings, hotels and restaurants as it jostles to attract its share of international investment and the swell of tourists. From Hanoi the majority of visitors strike out east to where northern Vietnam’s premier natural attraction, Ha Long Bay, provides the perfect antidote to such urban exuberance, rewarding the traveller with a leisurely day or two drifting among the thousands of whimsically sculpted islands anchored in it aquamarine waters.
To the north and west of Hanoi mountain ranges rear up out of the Red River Delta. Vietnam’s northern provinces aren’t the easiest to get around, but these wild uplands are home to a patchwork of ethnic minorities and the country’s most dramatic mountain landscapes. The bustling market town of Sa Pa, set in a spectacular location close to the Chinese border in the far northwest, makes a good base for exploring nearby minority villages.