Not everyone touring Vietnam can give Ho Chi Minh City five days. If you’re combining it with Hanoi, Hoi An or Ha Long Bay, a long weekend here might be all your itinerary allows — and that’s genuinely fine. This guide is built around triage: what to prioritise, what to happily skip, and what to save for a longer return trip, so you leave with the real...
We had counted forty-three elephants. Then three more emerged from the tree line at the edge of the waterhole, and we stopped counting. Forty-six wild elephants — mothers, babies, teenagers playing in the shallows — going about their afternoon as if we were not there. Our jeep was silent. Nobody spoke. This was Minneriya National Park on Day One of our Sri Lanka...
My Son Sanctuary is a cluster of partly ruined Hindu temples in a jungle valley about an hour from Hoi An — the religious and political heart of the ancient Champa Kingdom, and one of Vietnam’s lesser-visited UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Most travellers heading to Southeast Asia put Angkor Wat on their list; far fewer know that My Son’s oldest structures...
A fog horn blasts through the market without warning. Within seconds, vendors are snatching their awnings back with practised ease — umbrellas folded, produce pulled, stall covers whisked away — and then a full-size train rolls through the middle of the market, centimetres from where you were standing thirty seconds ago. The whole thing takes less than two minutes...
The Cu Chi Tunnels sit roughly 40–70 km northwest of Ho Chi Minh City, depending on which of the two visitor sites you choose — and getting there is less straightforward than it looks on a map. Traffic on Highway 22 can turn a “quick” trip into a three-hour ordeal, and the tunnels themselves are split across two very different sites. This guide covers...
Are you considering visiting Hoi An? Sammie Pearsall from the rambling renegade fell in love with Hoi An and visited many times over the years. Sammie shares with us her love of Hoi An. We also fell in love with Hoi An and spent 3 weeks in the old town and out at An Bang Beach. Three weeks gives you a completely different relationship with Hoi An than a weekend visit...
There are places in the world that exceed every expectation, regardless of how many photographs you have seen beforehand. Ha Long Bay is one of them. We had seen the photographs for years before we visited — thousands of them, on travel blogs, in magazines, on the walls of Vietnamese restaurants. Limestone karsts rising from green water. Junks and sampans threading...
We left Hanoi on the overnight train to Sapa at 10 pm on a Friday evening and arrived the next morning, having experienced something we had not fully anticipated: one of the most extraordinary short trips of our three months travelling Vietnam from north to south. Sapa is a mountain town in northern Vietnam at 1,600 metres above sea level — cool when the rest of...
Most visitors to Ho Chi Minh City do the Mekong Delta as a day trip. They board a minibus at 7 am, travel two hours south, spend three hours on a boat, see a floating market and a coconut candy stall, and return to the city by late afternoon. It is a perfectly good day out. What it is not — and cannot be — is the Mekong Delta. We spent four days on the delta with...
Your first glimpse of Mai Chau comes as the bus winds down through the Thung Khe Pass — the mountains falling away on both sides, the valley appearing below through the trees, rice fields spreading across the flat ground in every shade of green and gold depending on the season. It is the kind of view that makes the entire bus go quiet. We arrived as part of three...
Most travellers on the Vietnam north-to-south circuit give Hue two days. We arrived planning to stay three and stayed for a week. By Day Four, we had found a favourite café, a favourite restaurant, a cyclo driver who knew where to take us and a morning routine that began with egg coffee on the riverside and ended with salted coffee at Ca Phe Muoi that permanently...
We arrived in Hanoi on a Friday evening after a long flight from Australia and did what we always do in a new city — found a bar, ordered something cold, and let the place announce itself on its own terms. The Mint Bar at the Pullman Hanoi was exactly right for that first hour. Outside, the city hummed with motorbikes. Inside, the cocktails were excellent, and the...