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 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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