Visit Regions Of Vietnam

Vietnam seduces all the senses. Rice paddies run to rippling mountains. The air is fragrant with frangipani flowers and the scent of sizzling stir fries. Bays bob with Chinese junks, butterflies drift from the trees like falling confetti and the breeze rattles the coconut fronds on hundreds of miles of balmy, palm-shaded beaches. With temples and teeming cities, bays of islets and folds of misty mountains, all of South East Asia seems crammed in here.

You could spend an age here. Hanoi – the capital has bustling French boulevards and rushing Chinese style streets of shop houses, sprawling around a series of temple-dotted lakes. Those famous karst mountain islands – jutting from an emerald sea are a little to the north in Halong Bay. Central Vietnam holds the old imperial city of Hué, the dizzying Hai Van Pass and the pretty café-filled, terracotta-roofed port village of Hoi An – where gondolas drift under Japanese bridge on a tiny river. There are great beaches too – in Na Trang, Mũi Né or the jewel-like (and little visited) islands of the Con Dao archipelago. The south is home to Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City – where Asian verve meets French panache in great little restaurants, cafes, tree-lined boulevards and exciting clubs and bars. It’s here where you can clamber through tunnels used by the Viet Cong and see the skyscrapers of modern Asia shimmer in the winding Saigon river. In the far south, the mighty Mekong River spreads its fingers into a vast delta, dotted with bustling towns where commerce still takes place on the water in floating markets and via goods laden barges.

The food is fabulous – from sublime soups packed with prawns, herbs and spices to crispy Banh Mi baguettes and the Vietnamese people are warm, welcoming, beguilingly honest and forthright and blessed with a wonderful sense of humour.