Vietnam is 1,700 kilometers tall and maybe 50 wide in places, and that shape decides how you should move through it. The honest answer: fly the long jumps, take a limousine van for the 2–4 hour hops, ride the train once for the coast between Hue and Da Nang, and let Grab handle everything inside … Read more
Sapa is the most famous mountain town in Vietnam and the most misunderstood stop on the northern circuit. The photos promise rice terraces pouring down a valley wall; the bus drops you in a construction zone with karaoke bars and a fake Eiffel tower. Both are real. The honest answer: Sapa town is a gate, … Read more
Hoi An is the smallest great food town in Vietnam, and it holds a card no other city can play: dishes that exist nowhere else on earth. Hanoi perfected the specialist shop, Saigon collected the whole country’s kitchen — Hoi An kept a handful of recipes so local that leaving town technically means leaving the … Read more
Let us be honest before the bus leaves: Vung Tau is not the beach you came to Vietnam for. We have said as much in our Saigon guide — if you want clear water, the real beach is a 55-minute flight. And yet we keep recommending this day trip, because Vung Tau is not really … Read more
Hanoi perfected Vietnamese food; Saigon collected it. For three centuries this port city has absorbed cooks from the Mekong Delta, central Vietnam, southern China and, briefly, France — and every wave left dishes behind. The result is the widest eating in the country: sweeter than the north, louder, open later, and gloriously unbothered by tradition … Read more
Hanoi is the deepest food city in Vietnam, and it runs on a system most visitors never decode: the specialist shop. A Hanoi kitchen does not have a menu — it has a dish, usually one, often unchanged for two or three generations, served at the hours that dish has always been served and not … Read more
Hue is the most misjudged stop on the Vietnam trail. It gets budgeted half a day — a citadel sprint between Hoi An and the next bus — and then quietly becomes the place travelers say they wish they had stayed. The fix is not more sights; it is more hours at the right times. … Read more
Phong Nha is the biggest thing most Vietnam itineraries skip. Under the jungle karst of Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park — UNESCO-listed since 2003 — lies the greatest concentration of giant caves on Earth, including the largest one we know of. Above ground it is a river valley of buffalo, peanut fields and farmstays that … Read more
The Ha Giang Loop is the best road in Vietnam and one of the great road trips on Earth: three to four days and roughly 350 kilometers through the Dong Van karst plateau along the Chinese border, on a ribbon of tarmac that spends half its time hanging off the side of a canyon. It … Read more
Vietnam is the best-value travel country in Asia right now, and one of the last where the famous version and the real version still live on the same street. You can eat the bowl of phở the guidebooks photograph for $1.50, sleep in a boutique room for $35, and be rowed through a limestone gorge … Read more