History weighs heavily on
Vietnam
. For more than a decade, reportage
of the war that racked the country
portrayed it as a savage
netherworld, yet, only twenty-odd
years after the war's end, this
incredibly resilient nation is
beginning to emerge from the
shadows.
As the number of tourists finding
their way here soars, the word is
out that this is a land not of bomb
craters and army ordnance, but of
shimmering paddy fields and
sugar-white beaches, full-tilt
cities and venerable pagodas. The
speed with which Vietnam's
population of 77 million has been
able to transcend the recent past
comes as a surprise to visitors who
are generally met with warmth and
curiosity rather than shell-shocked
resentment and war fatigue.
Inevitably, that's not the whole
story. The adoption of a market
economy has polarized the gap
between rich and poor: average
monthly incomes for city dwellers
remain at about $50, but drops to
$15 in the poorest provinces.
For the majority of visitors, the
furiously commercial southern city
of Ho Chi Minh City provides
a head-spinning introduction to
Vietnam, so a trip out into the rice
fields and orchards of the nearby Mekong
Delta makes a welcome next stop
- best explored by boat from My
Tho, Vinh Long or Can Tho
. Heading north, the quaint
hill-station of Da Lat
provides a good place to cool down,
but some travellers eschew this for
the beaches of Vung Tau
and Phan Thiet . A few hours'
ride further up the coast, the city
of Nha Trang has become a
crucial stepping stone on the Ho Chi
Minh-Hanoi run. Next up comes the
enticing little town of Hoi An
, full of wooden shop-houses and
close to Vietnam's greatest Cham
temple ruins at My Son . The
temples, palaces and imperial
mausoleums of aristocratic Hué
should also not be missed. One
hundred kilometres north, war-sites
litter the Demilitarized Zone
(DMZ) , which cleaved the
country in two from 1954 to 1975.
Hanoi has served as
Vietnam's capital for close on a
thousand years and is a small,
absorbing city of pagodas and
dynastic temples, where life
proceeds at a gentler pace than in
Ho Chi Minh. From here most visitors
strike out east to the labyrinth of
limestone outcrops in Ha Long Bay
, usually visited from the resort
town of Bai Chay , but more
interestingly approached from tiny Cat
Ba Island . The little
market-town of Sa Pa , set in
spectacular uplands close to the
Chinese border in the far northwest,
makes a good base for exploring
nearby ethnic minority villages.
Vietnam has a tropical monsoon climate
, dominated by the south or
southwesterly monsoon from May to
September and the northeast monsoon
from October to April. Overall, late
September to December and March and
April are the best times if
you're covering the whole country,
but there are distinct regional
variations. In southern Vietnam
and the central highlands the
dry season lasts from December
through April, and daytime
temperatures rarely drop below 20°C
in the lowlands, averaging 30°C
during March, April and May. Along
the central coast the wet
season runs from September through
February, though even the dry season
brings a fair quantity of rain;
temperatures average 30°C from June
to August. Typhoons can hit the
coast around Hué in April and May
and the northern coast from July to
November, when flooding is a regular
occurence. Hanoi and Northern
Vietnam are generally hot (30°C)
and very wet during the summer, warm
and sunny from October to December,
then cold and misty until March.
