Vietnam travel guide

Travel to Vietnam between Nov – Apr. Those are the months the weather, the crowds and the airfare line up — outside them you trade one of the three.

Currency

Vietnamese Dong (VND)

Language

Vietnamese; limited English outside hotels and tour desks.

Time zone

ICT (UTC+7) — 1½ hours ahead of India

Plug type

Type A / C, 220V

Flight time from India

5.5 hrs

Flying from

Mumbai · Delhi · Ahmedabad · Kolkata

• 

  Overnight on Lan Ha Bay, not Ha Long

  Same limestone karsts, a fraction of the boats. The overnight cruise is the point — kayaking into a lagoon at five, squid fishing after dinner, and waking up with the towers of rock still there in the mist. Check the boat actually sleeps aboard; many day boats are sold under cruise names.

• 

  Hoi An old town after the lights come on

  A preserved trading port of yellow shophouses, closed to cars, lit entirely by silk lanterns from six. Get a suit or a dress made — a good tailor needs two fittings across thirty-six hours, so arrive on day one and collect on day three, not the other way round.

• 

  The Golden Bridge and Ba Na Hills

  The cable car climbs 1,400 metres in twenty minutes to a French colonial hill station rebuilt as a theme park, with the two stone hands holding a walkway that everyone has seen. Go on the first car at 7.30 to get the bridge before the crowds and before the cloud closes in, which it usually does by eleven.

• Cu Chi tunnels and the War Remnants Museum

  Two hundred and fifty kilometres of hand-dug tunnel outside Ho Chi Minh City, a section of it widened so a visitor can crawl through. The museum in District 3 is unflinching and is not suitable for young children. Do them on the same day and keep the afternoon light.

• The Mekong Delta from Ben Tre

  Skip the My Tho coach circuit, which is four hundred people at a coconut-candy demonstration. From Ben Tre a rowing sampan takes you into water-coconut channels barely wider than the boat, past brick kilns and floating markets that are still working markets.

• Hanoi Old Quarter, egg coffee and the water puppets

  Thirty-six streets, each historically one trade, still selling by street. Egg coffee at Giang Cafe is a whipped yolk custard over coffee and is better than it sounds. The Thang Long water puppet theatre is forty-five minutes, entirely visual, and the one show that works with children and grandparents at once.

• Pho, and pho chayVegetarian

  The national bowl is built on beef or chicken bone broth simmered overnight, so it is not vegetarian by default. Pho chay — the vegetarian version with mushroom and charred onion stock — is widely available and genuinely good. Ask for it by name; asking for pho without meat gets you the same broth.

• Banh miVegetarian

  A French baguette with a Vietnamese filling, and the single best cheap meal in the country. Vegetarian versions with tofu, pate-free, are standard in Hoi An and Hanoi. The default sauce includes fish sauce and often a pork pate spread on the bread, so say khong mam, khong pate.

• Quan chay — the Buddhist vegetarian kitchenVegetarian

  This is the sentence worth remembering: any board reading Quan Chay is a fully vegetarian restaurant, and there is one in every Vietnamese town because of the Buddhist tradition. On the first and fifteenth days of the lunar month even ordinary restaurants run a chay menu. It is the most reliable vegetarian infrastructure in Southeast Asia.

• Ca phe sua da and ca phe trung

  Robusta dripped through a phin filter onto condensed milk over ice — roughly three times the caffeine of an espresso and the reason nobody in Hanoi looks tired. Condensed milk makes it dairy but never eggy; egg coffee is the separate, dessert-strength version.

• For a Jain travellerJain friendly

  Vietnamese cooking rests on shallot, garlic and fish sauce, and even a chay kitchen uses onion freely. Carry a written card in Vietnamese, and plan the Jain meals around the Indian restaurants in District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City and the Old Quarter of Hanoi. Outside the cities, assume you will be eating steamed rice and fruit.

Set a meal preference — vegetarian, Jain or halal — when you book and we brief every hotel and restaurant on your itinerary.

• Tailoring in Hoi An — a suit, a coat or an ao dai in thirty-six hours, at a fraction of Indian prices
• Lacquerware and mother-of-pearl inlay, Hanoi
• Vietnamese coffee and a phin filter; skip weasel coffee, which is nearly always fake
• Van Phuc silk village outside Hanoi, for the metre rather than the finished garment
• Conical non la hats, embroidered linen and Sapa hill-tribe textiles at Dong Xuan market
• Cashew, dried jackfruit and black pepper — Vietnam is the largest pepper exporter in the world

Fly between the three regions — Vietjet, Bamboo and Vietnam Airlines all run cheap hour-long hops, and the alternative is a fifteen-hour train. Inside cities, Grab car and Grab bike are cheap, tracked and remove the fare argument entirely; among street taxis only Vinasun and Mai Linh are reliably metered. Hoi An is best on a hotel bicycle. And learn the road-crossing technique: step off the kerb and walk at a slow, steady, entirely predictable pace, because the scooters are aiming at where you will be, not where you are.

• Never freeze in the middle of a road. Vietnamese traffic flows around a predictable pedestrian and cannot react to a sudden stop or a step backwards — this is the single most useful thing to teach a first-time visitor.
• Bag snatching from a moving scooter is common in District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City. Do not hold a phone at the kerb, wear the bag on the pavement side, and put the strap across the body rather than on one shoulder.
• The dong has a lot of zeros and the 20,000 and 500,000 notes are similar in colour. Count change out loud, keep the large notes separate, and use a card where you can.
• Ha Long Bay cruises range from excellent to unsafe under near-identical marketing. Ask for the boat name and licence, confirm it has a night berth rather than a day charter, and avoid the cheapest tier outright — it is cheap because of the boat.
• Print the e-visa. Airlines have refused boarding at Indian airports over a phone screen, and the entry port written on your application is checked against the airport you actually land at.
• Street food is safe and delicious, but the ice, the raw herb basket and the fresh-squeezed sugarcane are where trouble starts. Eat where there is a queue of locals and a turnover of food.

Per person, per day, on the ground — meals, local transport and entry tickets. Flights and hotels sit in the package price, not here.