VIETNAM
About Vietnam
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.
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