You don't need to be an 'investor' to invest in Singletrack: 6 days left: 95% of target - Find out more
Hello friends - we're making plans to visit Vietnam for 10 days in April and we were hoping to pick your collective brains. Unsure whether to go for Ho Chi Minh or Hanoi, or maybe fly in of one and out of the other? What must-sees and must-dos (and must-do-nots!) are there? Anyone used the trains, specially overnight ones? I'm assuming car- or bike-hire is prolly a non-starter? Will it ne warm enough to paddle in the sea? Do I need to learn the language? Thanks in advance! 🙂
I hear the surfing's pretty good, though I don't think it's a popular sport locally.
Follow that up with a boat trip up river to see a temple
We loved Vietnam. Flew into Hanoi, out from Saigon, took overnight train, flew, ordinary train, taxis, were going to get escorted motorbikes from Hue to Hoi An but the weather stopped that. We took some trips with Ethnic Travel which included homestays and they really took us away from other tourists.
3 weeks flew by
We went in January. Swam in Ha Long bay, fine.
Windsurfed just in shorts a few days in Mui Ne. Sweltered in Saigon and cycling round Mekong Delta near Can Tho.
When you see the traffic in the cities there's no way I would drive myself. Not bad, just incomprehensible. But crossing the road as pedestrian is a brilliant sport once you've learned the way to do it!
April might be still a bit chilly up in Hanoi. But if it isn't, Hanoi is a pretty good introduction to Vietnam. I went in January 2019 and froze my butt off in 10c temps and chilly rain, pretty soon I flew to south Vietnam to get warm. There's good food everywhere though, plenty of interesting sights, nice people, totally safe, cheap. Much like the rest of vietnam really. I'll work my way down from north to south.
Ha Long Bay is a frikkin' nightmare to be honest. I'd probably give that a miss. Chock full of tour boats and people, total madness. I reckon if you go on one of the multi-day boat tours you might reach less spoilt parts of Ha Long Bay, but it could just be more of the same for three days solid.
Hue is the cultured food capital of Vietnam, so go there for Bun Bo Hue noodle soup and plenty of captured American army tanks etc. The town itself has a cool ancient citadel in the centre of it - kind0f like the forbidden city in Bejing - which is well worth a visit.
Next up, Hoi An. I absolutely loved this place, but others might find it cloyingly touristy. Great, absolutely amazing food, beautiful streets, many ancient temples, very photogenic, bridges, lanterns by night. It's a bit like a Vietnamese equivalent of a perfectly preserved tudor village, if such a thing existed in the UK, or maybe a picturesque Cotswold village that really comes alive at night. Very plesantly touristy, not in a bad way. You can also hire a bike to cycle to the beach from here, which is cool to see traditional fishing boats. It's also possible to hire a motorbike to drive out to Khmer style temples in the countryside.
Na Trang - a bit sleazy to be honest. Cheap, concrete seaside resort. Does have geothermal MUD POOLS though!
Da Lat - amazingly cool somewhat ideosycratic hill station town with a railway station that you can take a tourist train into the hills from AND a botanic gardens AND pedalos on the lake, PLUS a perferctly preserved 1960s interior Summer Palace of Bao Dai, the last king of Vietnam. Nice to hire a motorbike here and explore the surrounding hill country. The town market is great for getting your fix of mulberries, should you need that.
Mui Ne - fabulous massive beautiful sandunes beside the sea. Follow a lovely creek walk into the dunes and do your best Lawrence impersonation when you get there. Great for kiteboarding here, or windsurfing, as I did. Hire some kit and head out into tropical waters in boardshorts with a solid force 4/5 blowing every day. Check out the fishing village in the evening for some cool cliched sunset shots of fishing boats. Hire a motorbike from here - and head up the coast some way for MORE and biggerer sand dunes.
Ho Chi Minh / Saigon - one of my favourite places in the whole of SE Asia. Amazing food everywhere, really cheap too, such a great buzz to the whole city. Eat from little food market stalls - they have the best and cheapest food. Visiting the Independence Palace is deeply moving - this was the last stand and evacuation point of the government of S. Vietnam before it was defeated. Virtually everything has been perfectly preserved inside since like a 1960s / 70s time capsule. Absolutely fascinating. You can take a day trip out from Saigon to the Chu Chi Tunnels - a preserved NVA tunnel system that is open to tourists and you can crawl through them! You can also pay to fire a massive machine gun on a stand here, which I found somewhat distasteful, but the massive sound of the thing going off was absolutely terrifying. Visit Saigon zoo to see HIPPOS! and sad looking TIGERS! Go shopping in the covered tourist markets to buy amazing KNOCK OFF stuff! Five years later, I'm still using the amazing knock off North Face rucksacks, bags and t-shirts I bought there, which must actually be the real thing to be honest, the quality is soooo good.
TL,DR: you can't go wrong really, just hit up the main areas your guide book or the internet suggests and try the lovely food, which is absoultely everywhere. There's such a mix of stuff in Vietnam, it's awesome.
- Nope, you don't need to learn any language. English is spoken most places
- The trains look good for long distance overnight transport - need to book advance, which is why I never managed to take one
- There are really comfortable tourist busses that rapidly and easily connect all the main tourist centres. You sleep in your own 'pod' in the bus, which is super comfortable. The busses have WiFi and stop at random places on the way in the middle of the night for cheap high-quality meals.
Awesome, thank you all! (Well, half... 🙂 )
We went to Vietnam in 2019, we flew into and out of Hanoi and over 2 weeks only did the Northern half of the country, plan to go back and do the rest another time.
Some of the things we did, and happy to share more details if you PM me.
We spent a couple of days on a boat going round Ha-Long, these are lot's of nice islands, was on a traditional type junk and great fun.
We spent three days cycling, did a bit of a tour with a guide and a support truck and bus, this was really good fun (despite the rain) and meant you got out into the country.
We took a couple of overnight train, this was good, but make sure you get the luxury train (we didn't for the first trip)
In Hanoi we went on a few trips including a trip round the local food stalls.
We booked the entire trip ourselves, just found places on TripAdvisor or via google and then emailed them asking for their best price (always got a discount for the four of us).
The train we booked ourself and was quite easy to do.
Didn't need to speak any Vietnamese as English was spoken in most places and where it wasn't pointing seemed to work.
We base ourselves in a Hotel in Hanoi for the first week and then went off on overnight trips and the hotel looked after the rest of our luggage.
Only thing we did that I wouldn't do again was Scuba Diving (we are all qualified divers, and it isn't a great place for diving)
PM if you want more details, and I can probably dig out the Excel with the people/hotels we used for the various trips
MrSparkle
Chelte – nam?
I was expecting something a bit less exotic as well. ;o)
me and some friends did 2 weeks in 2018 travelling from north to south via the train - starting in hanoi and ending in ho chi min / Saigon. lots of good recommendations above, however i'd also add phong nha national park to them - we had a couple of days there and didn't want to leave. amazing scenery, incredible cave systems and fairly underdeveloped when we were there - got the train to dong hoi and then private transfer form there.
other highlights were hanoi (especially the French quarter and the local bia hoi's) and hoi an, especially after all the tour coaches leave at c 6pm. we did a boat trip in halong bay, but a 2 night one so you got further into the bay and got to go to cat bah island and see the floating fisherman's villages. it was quieter going further in (we were also out of season for the Russians and Chinese who turn up on mass according to our guides), but if your on a tight time budget i'd just do a one day / one night trip and accept it's going to busy - the scenery is still stunning.
if i was doing it again, i'd spend more time in the north and likely end the trip at hoi an as saigon didn't really add much for us - just another big westernised city - although the day trip to the chu chi tunnels was great
re the trains - yes get the tourist sleeper coaches that are privately operated. they tag a couple of them on to the state run trains. the four birth sleepers are comfortable enough and clean but pricey (comparatively). the standard ones looked like an uncomfortable nights sleep
having spent a reasonable amount of time in SE asia, vietnam is definitely one of my favourites and would love to go back as theres a least another trips worth of stuff we would like to see but couldn't squeeze in. it's also incredibly cheap for most things, even by SE Asia standards
Do I need to learn the language?
Oh, you don't know? That's 'cause you weren't there, man!
Follow that up with a boat trip up river to see a temple
But don't get out of the boat. Never get out of the boat!
We were in Vietnam in 2018 and thought it was fantastic. Everyone we net was really friendly and we had a great time following what is undoubtedly a well trodden path (Hanoi, Hue, Hoi An, Ho Chi Minh City, etc.).
If I'm honest I didn't rate Ho Chi Minh much. Its a mega city and the kids pestered us to have drinks on the 52nd floor of a hotel that could have been anywhere, but I loved the chaos of Hanoi, and the homestays were some of the highlights.
As for the language, I did spend some time learning the basics, its not as bad as you think. Its not ideographic like Chinese etc, but like all languages has some quirks. If nothing else, Xin chao (sin chow) "Hello" is a must.
I'd go back in a heart-beat.
One of the memories that sticks out is when we caught the midnight train from Da Nang to Phan Thiet. As well as all the departure boards in the station being obliterated by a full screen banner saying "Your Norton Antivirus has expired" we got into our 4 berth sleeper carriage and said hello to the 2 chaps that were already in their bunks. When we woke up at 7am the bunks were occupied by 2 different blokes.
The other stand out was the Cai Rang floating market. Again organised with Ethnic Travel. Stayed at a homestay in bamboo huts, woken up at 4am and 4 of us put on one of those rickety boats with the pilot standing at the back with one of those 20 foot poles with a hedge trimmer engine at one end and a propeller at the other. She whipped us round all the barges and tied up at a coffee boat and a noodle boat where we passed breakfast across to market traders who had moored next to us. At the same time watching "proper tourist boats" about 100 metres away full of people seated in rows with life jackets on, presumably wishing they were part of the action.
Totte'nam for proper not-posh thank you very much!
I hear the surfing’s pretty good, though I don’t think it’s a popular sport locally.
Best to avoid playing ‘Ride Of The Valkyries’ on a boombox, though…
I was heading there through a 'back road' on a dirtbike once,fortunately we changed the plan, as 49 people(christians sect expecting the end of the world right then) were killed by the Laos/Viet army there at the time.
How are the beaches, tell me about the beaches!
I spent a couple of years working in 'nam and I was so glad to leave. The strange language, the desolation, the unfortunate souls who were doomed to work there for their entire lives, the oppressive leadership and terrible food. Yeah, Ford's Dagenham plant was a tough place to be.
its easy to get hold of a bike - you can either buy one for a few hundred quid or rent one. they're mostly manual, learning to drive a clutched bike by riding it through the streets of HCMC (which is manic) with the floppy weight of my now wife on the back was an experience, I'd reccomend learning how to do it at home. We got one, lobbed it on a train, went up to nah trang and drove it back on one trip, loved it so much we went back a few years later to do the north
its super easy to arrange travel when you're there - no real need to book stuff in advance. Make sure you get into the rice paddys and ha long bay in the north, sit on kids plastic chairs in the rain and have a few beers, get a tailor made suit for £100 in the middle. an epic trip.
Sixteen months in a stinking tiger cage?
We spent a few weeks there about 10 years ago, loved Hanoi, went to By To Long bay (sp?) much quieter than the other. Took the night train out to Sapa and explored the highlands on bikes and foot, great scenery and far less touriststy. Walked Mt fans fansipan in a day, we didn't like the look of the camps used for multi day trips and I think there's a cable car up there now. I'll always remember walking the last part down, the sunset, through forests of fire flies and then under the most incredible night sky.
Really enjoyed Hoi An also but then left ourselves nowhere near enough time to explore Ho Chi Minh or the south properly, which was a regret. We did also fit in a few days at Ankor Wat which was superb, flying direct from Na Dang midway in the trip. I also think there are some impressive caves been discovered part way down in the west of the country.
We'd love to go back, I'm sure it'll have changed dramatically. Hopefully the wonderfully crazy approach to crossing roads hasn't.