Travel Guide
Can you eat breakfast at Cái Răng floating market? — A kitchen the size of a doorway
On the Cần Thơ river, some of the boats sell nothing but hot food. How a bowl of noodles crosses two gunwales before dawn, and why the eating is the point.
VAC Travel10 November 2026
Travel Guide
Is Marble Mountain worth visiting in Đà Nẵng? — Noon in Huyền Không
Five marble hills above the coast road, one cave with a hole in its roof, and a carving village that no longer cuts its own stone.
VAC Travel6 November 2026
Travel Guide
Is the One Pillar Pagoda worth visiting? — A room on a stone stem
Beside Vietnam's principal ceremonial square stands a shrine roughly the size of a bedroom, balanced on one pillar. The scale difference is the point.
VAC Travel3 November 2026
Food & Culture
What's the difference between Hanoi pho and Saigon pho? — Two bowls, one border
A clear northern broth and a sweet southern one are separated by about seventeen hundred kilometres and a political border that no longer exists. What travelled, what changed, and what to order at each end.
VAC Travel30 October 2026
Travel Guide
Does Hội An flood in October and November? — The river comes inside, and the town knows it
The Thu Bồn rises most autumns and the old town takes water. What that actually looks like on the ground, and why a few travellers plan for it deliberately.
VAC Travel27 October 2026
Travel Guide
Can you still visit the floating villages in Ha Long Bay? — The address that moved ashore
Most of the families who lived on the water in Hạ Long moved to the mainland in the 2010s. What is left on the rafts is still worth an hour, provided you know what you are looking at.
VAC Travel23 October 2026
Food & Culture
Luộc, Nướng, Xào, Hấp: Four Words and Most of a Vietnamese Menu
Vietnamese dish names are built like an instruction rather than a description. Learn the verb in the middle and you can order confidently from a board you have never seen before.
VAC Travel20 October 2026
Travel Guide
Nine Urns, Three Seas: The Bronze Inventory of a Kingdom
In a courtyard at the back of Huế's citadel stand nine bronze vessels cast in the 1830s. Between them they carry the empire's rivers, coastlines, trees and weapons — an encyclopedia poured in metal.
VAC Travel13 October 2026
Travel Guide
Fifteen Minutes, Four Forests: Reading Fansipan on the Way Up
The cable car out of the Hoàng Liên valley climbs 1,410 vertical metres in a quarter of an hour. What passes under the cabin is a compressed transect of forest that would take a botanist a week to walk.
VAC Travel9 October 2026
Travel Guide
Bàng Leaves and a Kiln Village: An Hour Inside Hỏa Lò
The French called it Maison Centrale. The street name came from the stove-makers who worked there first, and the most eloquent object in the compound is a tree.
VAC Travel6 October 2026
Food & Culture
Two Yolks and a Bowl of Hot Water
Cà phê trứng was invented because Hanoi had no milk. Seventy-odd years later the glass still arrives sitting in a hot water bath, and the reason is entirely practical.
VAC Travel2 October 2026
Travel Guide
Three Working Days: What the E-Visa Estimate Does Not Tell You
Vietnam's official processing estimate is honest as far as it goes. The trouble sits elsewhere — in a single line of the approval PDF that most travellers never read closely.
VAC Travel29 September 2026
Travel Guide
The Coconut Doesn't Leave Bến Tre Whole
In the canals south of the Hàm Luông, a coconut is taken apart four ways before anyone thinks about drinking it. The husk, the shell, the flesh and the leaf all go somewhere different.
VAC Travel25 September 2026
Travel Guide
The Cloud Line: One Hour on Hải Vân, Where the Weather Changes Sides
Twenty-one kilometres of switchbacks separate two climates, two former kingdoms and two versions of the same day. Most traffic now goes under the mountain in six minutes. We go over.
VAC Travel22 September 2026
Food & Culture
The Cauldron at the Top of the Market: Thắng Cố and Corn Wine at Bắc Hà
On a Sunday morning above the Chảy river, the busiest corner of the market is not the textiles. It is a wide iron pan on a wood fire, and the low benches around it.
VAC Travel15 September 2026
Travel Guide
Brick Without Mortar: Reading Mỹ Sơn by the Joint
The Cham built temples out of fired clay and joined them with something nobody has fully identified. A thousand years on, the seams are still tighter than the restorations laid beside them.
VAC Travel11 September 2026
Travel Guide
Cái Bèo: The Oldest Address in Lan Hạ Bay
A cluster of raft houses off Cát Bà sits on top of a shell midden seven thousand years deep. The people fishing there now are not the first, or even the fiftieth, generation to do it.
VAC Travel8 September 2026
Travel Guide
Forty-Two Years in a Limestone Fortress: Why Hoa Lư Was Abandoned
For four decades Vietnam was governed from a valley in Ninh Bình, ringed by karst instead of walls. Then a king wrote a letter explaining why he was leaving.
VAC Travel4 September 2026
Travel Guide
The Names on the Tortoises: An Hour at Văn Miếu Before Nine
Eighty-two stone slabs stand on the backs of stone tortoises in the third courtyard of Hanoi's Temple of Literature. Each one is a list of men who passed, and a set of instructions for how to read them.
VAC Travel1 September 2026
Travel Guide
Thirty-Six Streets, Thirty-Six Villages
Every street name in Hanoi's Old Quarter is a trade, and behind most of them is a village somewhere in the delta that sent its craftsmen to the capital and never quite took them back.
VAC Travel28 August 2026
Travel Guide
Nước Lớn, Nước Ròng: The Delta Runs on the Tide, Not the Clock
In Bến Tre the day has no fixed hours. The canals fill and empty twice, the window shifts later each morning, and everything — the sampan, the market, the run home — is arranged around water that will not wait.
VAC Travel25 August 2026
Travel Guide
The Emperor Who Wrote His Own Epitaph
At Khiêm Lăng in Huế, a twenty-tonne slab of stone carries 4,935 characters composed by the man buried nowhere near it. Most visitors walk past it to photograph the lake.
VAC Travel21 August 2026
Travel Guide
The Bamboo Rib and the Candle: An Hour of Light in Hội An
A Hội An lantern is twelve pieces of split bamboo, a rectangle of silk and about four minutes of flame. What happens in those four minutes is worth arriving early for.
VAC Travel14 August 2026
Food & Culture
Indigo Hands: The Cloth of the Muong Hoa Valley
Long before you notice the terraces, you notice the hands — stained a blue so deep it reads as black. In the villages below Sapa, cloth is still a year's work.
VAC Travel11 August 2026
Travel Guide
The Last Light on Hoàng Su Phì: A Private Harvest at 1,800 Meters
Four hours north of the terraces everyone has already photographed, Hoàng Su Phì ripens two to three weeks before Sa Pa — and almost no Western traveler has ever stood in it.
VAC Travel22 July 2026
