A country sixteen hundred and fifty kilometres long, where north and south are never in season together
Vietnam is planned not as one country but as three bands: north, centre and south get their rain in different months, so the question is not when to visit Vietnam but which part of it in which month. The route follows from that — you cross the country once, in one direction, and by air rather than overland.
The north, with Hanoi and Ha Long, is best from October to April, and Sapa keeps its own months — May, June and September. The centre, with Hue and Hoi An, is dry from January to August and wet from September to December, worst in October and November, when typhoons bring floods and Hoi An's streets end up under water. The south, with Ho Chi Minh City, the delta and Phu Quoc, is dry from November to April, and the rain from May to October comes as short downpours rather than whole wet days. All three bands work at once only in March and early April. In July and August the trip centres on the middle; in October and November the middle is skipped and you fly straight from north to south; from December to February the south is at its best.
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The places on this site sit at both ends and in the middle: Hanoi, Ha Long and Sapa in the north, Hoi An in the centre, Ho Chi Minh City in the south. So book the flight into Hanoi and home from Ho Chi Minh City — both have international flights, and the country is crossed only once. The centre has its own airport at Da Nang, half an hour from Hoi An, and it is the stop between two domestic flights. Ha Long and Sapa are done from the north, before flying south: the first is three hours by motorway, the second a night train or bus away, and both need a night.
At its narrowest, near Dong Hoi, it is about fifty kilometres from the sea to the Laos border. That is why the country looks like an S on the map, a broad north and south joined by a thin strip of coast.
In January Hanoi sees daytime highs of about 20 °C and nights around 14, with fine drizzle, while Sapa runs from zero to ten degrees and occasionally gets snow. Anyone heading north from the south in December or January, where it is over thirty, packs a jacket.
Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet with diacritics — the quoc ngu script was shaped by European missionaries in the seventeenth century and became official only in the twentieth. For a visitor it means names on the map and the menu can be read, even if without the tones they are not pronounced right.
For a population of just over a hundred million there are more than seventy million registered motorbikes. That is not a statistical curiosity but the explanation for why you cross the road at a steady pace and never stop — riders steer around a pedestrian who moves predictably.
The state officially recognises 54 ethnic groups. The Vietnamese, or Kinh, make up about 85 per cent of the population, and in the northern mountains around Sapa live the Hmong, the Dao and other peoples with languages of their own.
Lunar New Year, Tet, falls in late January or February, and everything closes — shops, restaurants, part of the transport — while people travel home, so tickets sell out weeks ahead. It is a date you plan around rather than adapt to.
This isn't a ranking — it's a route. Any one of these could carry a whole trip.
A national park on the UNESCO list since 2003, at the narrowest part of the country. Paradise Cave and Phong Nha Cave are open to ordinary visitors and big enough to take your sense of scale away. Dong Hoi, the town beside the park, has an airport and a station on the north–south line, so the park is a stop between Hanoi and Hue for anyone travelling overland, not a day trip from either.
The last imperial capital, with the Imperial City inside its citadel and royal tombs along the Perfume River; the battle for Hue in 1968 destroyed much of the complex, and what stands has been under restoration for decades. For anyone in the centre who cares more for history than for beaches. In October and November Hue is in its wettest stretch of the year, so it is skipped then along with Hoi An.
The airport that lets you into the middle of the country: Hoi An is half an hour south, Hue a train ride north. The city also has a long urban beach, which makes it a base for anyone who wants the sea as well as Hoi An. On Ba Na Hills stands the Golden Bridge of 2018, a walkway held up by two enormous stone hands — built to be photographed.
The plain where the river reaches the sea; the Vietnamese call it Cuu Long, Nine Dragons, after its mouths. The delta need not be a return trip from Ho Chi Minh City: from its western end fast boats run to Phu Quoc — about two hours twenty from Rach Gia, an hour twenty from Ha Tien — so the south ends on the island rather than back in the city.
An island in the south-west, closer to the Cambodian coast than to the Vietnamese mainland, with beaches and a national park in the north. It is the one place in the country you enter without a visa: arrive from abroad, even with a change in the transit zone of another Vietnamese airport, and you may stay thirty days. Without a visa you cannot continue to the mainland — so visa-free Phu Quoc is a beach holiday, not the start of a tour.
Son Doong in Vietnam is the largest cave passage in the world, up to two hundred metres high and so vast that a jungle grows inside it and clouds form under its roof. A local found it in 1991 and it was surveyed only in 2009.
Vietnam is the world's second largest coffee exporter, right behind Brazil. The French brought coffee in the nineteenth century, and what grows is robusta, stronger and more bitter than arabica. That is why it is drunk with condensed milk.
Short answers to what people ask most before setting out.
It depends on your passport: some nationalities enter visa-free for a set number of days, the rest apply for the e-visa. Apply only on the official portal, evisa.gov.vn — sites with similar names are intermediaries that charge more. The passport must be valid for at least six more months, and the application goes in at least a week before travel, since processing takes up to five working days.
For one band — north or south — seven to eight days is enough. For the whole country, with Hue and Hoi An in the middle, count on twelve to fourteen and two domestic flights.
Not end to end: Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City takes 33 to 37 hours, against about two by air. The train earns its place on the Hue–Da Nang stretch, two and a half to three hours over the Hai Van pass, where the line runs above the sea, and as the night train from Hanoi to Lao Cai for Sapa, since it replaces a hotel night.
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All photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and are used under the licence stated beside each one.
