Vietnam is three countries pretending to be one
Vietnam runs 1,650 kilometres from the Chinese border to the Gulf of Thailand, and it does not share a season with itself. When Hanoi is cold and grey in February, the beaches at Phu Quoc are at their best. When the south is drowning in the July monsoon, Ha Long Bay is at its clearest. There is no single month when the whole country is at its best, and no itinerary that fixes this.
That one fact should decide your trip. A two-week visit has to pick an end — north or south — and commit to it. Three weeks buys the whole spine with domestic flights over the dull stretches. Anything shorter than ten days and you are choosing a city, not a country. Almost every disappointing Vietnam trip we hear about is the same mistake: treating 1,650 kilometres as one destination with one weather forecast.
The year Vietnam stopped being a secret
Vietnam received 21.2 million international visitors in 2025 — up 20.4 per cent on 2024, the first time the country has passed 21 million, and 17.8 per cent above 2019, the last full year before the pandemic. European arrivals grew fastest of all at 38.8 per cent.
Two practical consequences. Ha Long Bay cruises and the better Hoi An hotels now need booking weeks ahead in high season, which was not true five years ago. And the shoulder months have become the sweet spot rather than the compromise: September and October in the north, March and April in the south, when the weather still holds and the tour buses have thinned.
Prices have not caught up with the visitor numbers. A bowl of pho at a street kitchen is still well under two dollars, and a domestic flight between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City typically runs 45 to 90 dollars booked a few weeks out. That gap between demand and price is the reason to go now rather than in five years.
The north: Hanoi, Ha Long and the mountains
Hanoi is a thousand years old and carries it lightly. The Old Quarter is 36 streets named after the trades once practised in each of them — silk, bamboo, tin, cotton — and a good number still do roughly that. The French left the boulevards and the opera house. Everything else is Vietnamese.
Accommodation splits sharply. The Sofitel Legend Metropole has been taking guests since 1901 and has a wartime bomb shelter under the bar that guests can go down into. At the other end, family-run guesthouses in the Old Quarter go for under 70 dollars a night. Both are legitimate choices here; the middle is the weakest part of the market.
Four hours east lies Ha Long Bay and its roughly 2,000 limestone islands, on the UNESCO list since 1994 and extended in 2023 to take in the Cat Ba archipelago. The advice no brochure gives: take two nights aboard rather than one. The single-night boats all sail the same loop at the same hour. The two-night boats reach Lan Ha Bay to the south, where there is room.
Further northwest are Sapa and its terraced rice fields, and beyond them Ha Giang — a loop of mountain roads along the Chinese border that has not yet become ordinary.
The centre: Hue, Hoi An and Da Nang
Hue was the imperial capital from 1802 to 1945, and the citadel still stands — partly. It was hit hard during the Tet Offensive in 1968, and the gaps are visible. That is precisely what makes it worth the day. The photograph above shows the complex as it was in 1932; walking it now, you can see what went missing.
Ninety minutes south the road climbs the Hai Van Pass, where the mountains run straight into the sea. There is a tunnel, and the buses use it. Do not use the tunnel. The pass is the best hour of driving in the country, and with your luggage sent ahead it is cheap to do properly on two wheels.
Hoi An was an international trading port in the 1600s, where Japanese, Chinese and Dutch merchants met, and it came through the war almost untouched. It is on the UNESCO list and full of tailors who will make a suit in a day. Go between six and eight in the morning, before the day-trippers arrive from Da Nang.
In Da Nang itself, the Golden Bridge is carried by two enormous stone hands 1,400 metres up in the Ba Na Hills. It opened in 2018 and became a photograph half the world has seen. The bridge is 150 metres long. The cable car up takes longer than walking across it. Go early or skip it — by midday the queue is the experience.
The south: Ho Chi Minh City, the Mekong Delta and the islands
Ho Chi Minh City is still Saigon in daily speech, and its nine million residents are busy with something other than the city’s own history. The War Remnants Museum and the Cu Chi tunnels are there and should be seen. But the city’s actual tempo is in District 1 after dark and in the markets at six in the morning.
Southwest of the city the Mekong Delta begins — 40,000 square kilometres of river branches, rice paddies and floating markets. The single most useful thing to know: the market at Cai Rang outside Can Tho trades properly between five and seven in the morning and is largely finished by nine, when the day boats from town arrive. Stay in Can Tho the night before, or do not bother.
Out in the Gulf of Thailand is Phu Quoc, heavily developed in recent years, and further out Con Dao — a former prison island, quiet now, with turtles nesting between June and September. If beaches are the point of the trip, our guide to the ten best beaches in Asia sets them against the competition.
Phong Nha: the caves almost nobody reaches
In Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park lies Son Doong, the largest known cave passage on earth. It is big enough that rainforest grows inside it where the ceiling has collapsed. A local man found it in 1991; a British team first explored it in 2009.
Access is tightly controlled. One operator holds the permit, the expedition runs four days, and it costs around 3,000 dollars per person with a limited number of places each year. It books out many months ahead. If that is beyond the trip, the same park has caves you can visit in a morning — including one with a zipline in over the river and a mud pool inside the mountain.
Eating in Vietnam
Michelin arrived in Vietnam in 2023. The 2026 selection, announced on 4 June, covers 193 restaurants across Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang — 11 with one star, 72 Bib Gourmand and three with a Green Star. It is the first time the star count has reached double figures in the guide’s four years in the country. The two new stars went to ONVIT in Hanoi, the first Korean restaurant in Vietnam to hold one, and Upstairs in Ho Chi Minh City — four tables, and a tasting menu rooted in central Vietnamese cooking.
But the Bib Gourmand list is the one that describes how people actually eat here: 72 places where a full meal costs less than a cinema ticket at home. The cooking is built on fresh herbs, fish sauce and balance rather than richness, and it changes as you move. Clean and cool in the north, hot and complicated around Hue, sweeter in the south where the coconut milk arrives.
Nine UNESCO World Heritage sites
Vietnam has nine UNESCO World Heritage sites — six cultural, two natural and one mixed. Ha Long Bay and Cat Ba, the old town of Hoi An, the imperial city of Hue, the My Son sanctuary, Phong Nha-Ke Bang and the citadel of Thang Long are among them. The most recent was inscribed in 2025: the Yên Tử–Vĩnh Nghiêm–Côn Sơn, Kiếp Bạc monastic complex, the heart of Vietnamese Buddhism.
Nine is a high count for a country this size, and six of them sit on or near the north–south route, which is another argument for travelling the spine rather than flying between two cities. Our guide to the seven most beautiful structures in Asia puts several of them in wider context.
TravelTalk picks three
Three places to sleep: the Sofitel Legend Metropole in Hanoi, for the building and the shelter under the bar. The Nam Hai at Hoi An, for the beach and the distance from the old town. And an ordinary room with a river view in Can Tho — that is the one that gets you up at five for the market. For the top of the market across the region, see our guide to the greatest luxury hotels in Asia.
Three places to eat: ONVIT in Hanoi and Upstairs in Ho Chi Minh City, for what the kitchens have become. And a plastic stool at Bún chả Hương Liên in Hanoi, where there is no star and never will be.
Three things to do: the night train north out of Hanoi, waking up in the mountains. The Hai Van Pass on two wheels between Hue and Da Nang. And Cai Rang floating market at half past five in the morning, before the boats from town get there.
How long to give it
Two weeks: pick one end. North — Hanoi, Ha Long, Ninh Binh, Sapa. Or centre and south — Hoi An, Hue, Ho Chi Minh City, the delta. Attempts to do both end up being a tour of airports.
Three weeks: the full north-to-south spine, with domestic flights over the dull stretches. Hanoi and the bay, fly to Da Nang, Hoi An and Hue overland, fly to Saigon, two nights in the delta.
A month or more: the same route by train instead of plane, with Ha Giang in the north, Phong Nha on the way through, and a final week on Con Dao. Vietnam’s 90-day e-visa is built for exactly this trip, and almost nobody takes it.
Map of Vietnam
Entry, money and getting around
🛂 Visas and entry
- US, Canadian, Australian and most other passports: an e-visa of up to 90 days is issued online at evisa.gov.vn, single or multiple entry.
- Visa-free for 45 days: twelve nationalities, including Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan and South Korea. The arrangement runs from 15 March 2025 to 14 March 2028.
- Health declaration: not required. Decree 165/2026/NĐ-CP introduced one from 1 July 2026, but the Ministry of Health has since clarified that it applies only if activated during a disease outbreak. Airports continue routine thermal screening.
- Passport: valid at least six months, with at least two blank pages.
💰 Money and prices
- Currency: Vietnamese dong (VND).
- Cash still rules at markets and street kitchens; cards are fine in hotels and cities.
- Sample prices: pho or banh mi, under two dollars. Hanoi–Ho Chi Minh City domestic flight, typically 45–90 dollars booked ahead.
- Tipping: not expected, but appreciated.
🚗 Getting around, seasons and health
- Domestic flights connect north and south in about two hours; the train between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City takes a day and a half over 1,700 km.
- Best time: north, February–April and September–November; centre, February–May; south, December–April.
- Health: no mandatory vaccinations; hepatitis A and mosquito protection advised; malaria in some rural areas. Drink bottled water.
- Safety: generally straightforward — traffic is the real hazard, not crime.
🤝 Travel partner
This space is available. We refer our readers to one specialist operator per destination. If you run trips in Vietnam, we would like to hear from you — write to hello@leisuretalk.net.
Where we take Vietnam from here
This page is the spine. The guides that hang off it come in this order: Hanoi and the north, Ha Long Bay, Hue and Hoi An, Da Nang and the central coast, Ho Chi Minh City, the Mekong Delta and Phong Nha. Each will get what this page got: named places, current numbers, and a straight answer about what is worth your week and what is not.
Vietnam sits inside a wider set of guides. Asia is the parent page. If you travel by interest rather than by map, start with golf holidays — Vietnam has built a serious golf coast around Da Nang in under twenty years. And if you would rather watch than read, TravelTalk Lens holds our film library.