Overview
Sights And Activities
Planning Your Trip
Accommodations
Cultural Essentials
Beyond Tourism
Basics
Vietnam is tough. Vietnam is the country, after all, that swallows beating cobra hearts in rice whiskey to relax after-hours. It is a country whose will to live has been challenged since its inception by foreign armies without number—from impassive imperial China to the bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge, from colonial France to the napalm bombers of the Americans. Vietnam is hallucinogenic limestone landscapes and dense forests sprawling across chocolate river deltas, insane high-pitched motorbike traffic and 5-to-9 workdays. And travel here is subject to the same extremes. Expect endless, comically crowded bus rides blaring the same four Vietpop songs without cease; expect to spend hours a day negotiating the price of absolutely everything; expect to be pummeled by waves of mind-numbing heat and 48-hour batteries of rain; expect to be stared at; expect motorbike break-downs in deserted mountains. In short—expect adventure. Unparalleled, expectation-breaking, story-making, life-changing adventure.
What you pay in time, sweat, and energy in Vietnam, you get back a thousandfold. The natural beauty of the country is legendary and spectacularly varied, with brilliant white beaches and lonely mountain passes that pierce the clouds. Jagged monoliths shoot up from mirror-bright bays in the far north; intricate lattices of canals run under mangrove canopies in the far south. The landscape resonates, too, with a history both chaotic and profound via faded, millennia-old relics of fallen dynasties and abandoned tanks and bunkers rusting under new grass. The country’s architecture echoes the same contorted past, from eye-bending Chàm ruins and bucolic French villas to glass-and-steel monuments to globalization.
Inevitably, you will be blown away by Vietnamese cuisine. Masterfully subtle, in the debt of kitchens from Sichuan Province to Marseille, meals considered prosaic by everyday Vietnamese are nonetheless revered by epicures the world over. And no meal better expresses the country’s culinary genius than ph—tender rice noodles under thin sheets of beef, floating in amber broth with ginger, star anise, mint, basil, and lime. It’s the national food, the street food, the breakfast-lunch-and-dinner food of both the urban poor and the five-star kitchens. It’s that good.
The people of Vietnam are stubborn, demanding, and intensely proud of their country. To travelers unused to constant bargaining and zero personal space, they can be extremely frustrating; they can also be what makes your visit more meaningful than you ever would have expected. The fundamental good nature and sincere extraversion of the Vietnamese are overwhelming. You’ll be invited to play pick-up football with kids in the street, celebrate T\t in the living rooms of joyful families, and coach English at every available opportunity. But best of all is their contagious, undying optimism; in the face of warfare, poverty, and hunger, there persists in Vietnam the belief that things will get better—much better—fueled by the tireless will to make them so. Today’s Vietnam is modernizing with a vengeance, and the atmosphere is thick with hope and breathless anticipation.
Yes, Vietnam is tough. But you didn’t pick up this book for “easy.” You chose Vietnam because you want travel to thrill and amaze you—because you want stories that will last you the rest of your life. You chose it for the dizzying diversity of landscapes, tastes, and ethnicities that make traveling to Vietnam, dare we say, the greatest adventure on the planet. So go. And take us with you.
When you go depends on where you go. The country’s climate is completely subject to the whims of tropical monsoons, which are unpredictable, especially on the coast. Northwest and southeast monsoons ...more
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For 50 years, we have published the world’s favorite budget travel guides, written entirely by students and updated every year. With pen and notebook in hand and a few changes of underwear stuffed in our backpacks, we spend months roaming the globe in search of travel bargains.