Visiting Vietnam

[thermionic]

Anyone been there? Which places stick in your mind as worth visiting?

It would appear that it's not exactly easy to commute up and down Vietnam, so we're trying to get as much information as we can now (we travel in 10 days). We're going for 3 weeks and the plan is to start at Hanoi and work south, exiting through HCM.

Thanks in advance.

 

[JohnRoberts]

Top Gear, the BBC car show did an episode where they toured VN on small motor bikes. If you can find a video of that show you might get ideas.  Nice beaches, pretty vistas, lots of rice paddies and water buffalo..

I know one guy who served over there back in the '60s and has returned several times as a civilian doing sound seminars and apparently  enjoyed himself (more so the later visits).

JR

 

[thermionic]

Thanks, John - have managed to find it on Youtube.

The next  step is to figure out whether to put the cat in a cattery, or organise people to come over and feed him. The concern is that he'll go wild whilst we're away (he regularly comes in stinking of perfume, so we know he tarts it around the neighbourhood). But he likes to go outdoors, so a cattery seems cruel... Life's full of decisions, eh?

 

[rob_gould]

It's worth getting an up to date guide book if you haven't already.  As much as Lonely Planet / Rough Guide have become a bit overused these days, they're still useful for working out a general plan, looking at routes, maps, transport information etc etc. 

Of course they have lots of info about tourist sights too, but things that they list as less visited and less well known are much less likely to be so when you arrive, having been written about in the Rough Guide!