Vietnam Travel Guide

Most Vietnam travel plans go wrong in the same place, and it is almost never the paperwork. It is the map. Vietnam runs 1,650 kilometers from its northern border to its southern tip and narrows to 50 kilometers at the waist, which gives it three climates at once and puts its headline sights a two hour flight apart. Get that one fact straight at the start and everything else in the plan falls into line: how long you need, which month to come, whether you fly or take the train, what you pack. This guide is the overview. It covers what the country is, when to come, how long to stay, how to get in, how to move, what things cost, what to eat and what will catch you off guard. Where a subject deserves more room than a summary, we say so and point you at it.

Vietnam by the Map: 1,650 Kilometers of Country

Vietnam is a long thin country on the eastern edge of the Indochinese peninsula, with China to the north, Laos and Cambodia to the west, and water down the whole eastern flank. The measurements that matter to a traveler are these: 1,650 kilometers from the northernmost point to the southernmost, 50 kilometers across at the narrowest point in Quang Binh, and over 3,000 kilometers of coastline. Just over a thousand miles, top to bottom, on land that is frequently mountainous.

That geometry is why first timers get their plans wrong. A country shaped like this does not have a season, it has seasons, plural, running on different calendars at different latitudes. It does not have a center you can base yourself in and day trip from. And the distances between the places you have heard of are real distances: Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City is a flight, not a drive, and the train between them takes well over a day.

It also explains the variety, which is the actual reason to come. Inside those 1,650 kilometers you get terraced rice mountains on the Chinese border, a limestone bay that has been photographed a million times and still works, an imperial capital, a preserved trading port, some of the largest caves on earth, a delta the size of a small country, and islands in two different seas. Very few countries this size hold that much difference.

One consequence worth knowing before you open an older guidebook. On 1 July 2025 Vietnam reorganized its administrative units, abolishing the district level and merging provinces. Hoi An is now a ward of Da Nang, Phu Quoc sits under An Giang province, and Con Dao is administratively part of Ho Chi Minh City. Nothing changed on the ground, but addresses, signs and maps are updating at different speeds, so give a driver a landmark as well as a street number.

The Three Vietnams: North, Center, and South

The most useful thing you can do with Vietnam is stop thinking of it as one destination and start thinking of it as three, each with its own weather, its own cooking and its own temperament.

Region	Headline Destinations	What It Does Best	Best Suited To
North	Hanoi, Ha Long Bay and Cat Ba, Ninh Binh, Sapa, Ha Giang	Limestone, mountains and the oldest layer of the country	First timers, and anyone who wants real seasons
Center	Hue, Hoi An, Da Nang, Phong Nha	Imperial heritage, caves and the shortest walk from history to beach	Slow travelers, families, cave people
South	Ho Chi Minh City, the Mekong Delta, Phu Quoc, Con Dao	Energy, water, islands and the best street food hours	Food, nightlife and warm water

The North: Where Vietnam Is Oldest

Hanoi is the capital and the better first city for most people: dense, low rise, walkable in the Old Quarter, and the place where the country's Chinese, Confucian and French layers sit closest to the surface. Out of Hanoi, Ha Long Bay and neighboring Cat Ba island are the famous karst seascape, and Ninh Binh is the same limestone on land, reached by rowing boat through flooded rice fields at Trang An and Tam Coc. Further north, Sapa gives you terraced valleys and ethnic minority markets, and the Ha Giang loop is the hardest and most rewarding road in the country.

The north is also the only part of Vietnam with a genuine winter. Hanoi in January is gray and cold enough for a jacket, and the mountains are colder still. That surprises people who packed for the tropics.

The Center: Heritage, Caves, and the Best Beaches to Reach

Central Vietnam is the country's museum and its adventure playground at once. Hue was the imperial capital and still has the walled citadel and the tombs of the Nguyen emperors along the Perfume River. Hoi An, an hour south of Da Nang, is a preserved river port of tile roofs and merchant houses, and the single most photographed town in Vietnam for good reason. Da Nang itself is the region's airport, its beach and its modern city. Inland, Phong Nha Ke Bang holds the cave systems, including Son Doong, the largest known cave passage anywhere.

The South: Heat, Water, and Appetite

Ho Chi Minh City is louder, hotter, richer and more forward facing than Hanoi, and nobody who lives there calls it anything but Saigon in conversation. Its war history sites are the most visited in the country. West of the city, the Mekong Delta is a landscape of channels, floating markets and orchards where the road is often the least interesting way to travel. Offshore, Phu Quoc in the Gulf of Thailand is the developed beach island, and Con Dao, far out in the East Sea, is the quiet, hard to reach, historically heavy one.

When to Go: A Regional Question, Not a National One

Here is the short honest answer. There is no month in which all of Vietnam is at its best, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Broadly, the north is coolest and driest from October to April and hottest and wettest from May to September. Central Vietnam runs its own calendar and takes the worst of the autumn rain and storms, which is why the Hai Van Pass and the roads around Hoi An have bad Octobers and Novembers. The south is hot all year, split into a dry season and a wet one, and the wet season means an afternoon downpour rather than a washout.

The seasonal facts that actually cancel plans are marine. Northern Vietnam's typhoon season runs roughly June to September, and when a storm comes through everything stops at once: in July 2024 nearly 3,900 tourists were stranded on Cat Ba when the boats, the ferry and the cable car all halted together. Con Dao is worse. The Vung Tau ferry there was suspended for five continuous months, September 2025 to February 2026, for the northeast monsoon, and flights are the materially more reliable way in.

One more calendar note. Tet, the lunar new year, falls between late January and mid February and is the one period when the country genuinely changes shape. Families travel, transport sells out, many small businesses close for days, and prices rise. It is a fascinating time to be here and a difficult time to move around.

How Long to Spend: What Actually Fits

The mistake is not underestimating how much there is to see. It is underestimating how long it takes to get between the things you want to see. Every internal hop costs you the better part of a day once you have counted the transfer, the check in and the arrival.

If You Have	What Fits Comfortably	What to Leave for Next Time
5 to 7 days	One region done properly: Hanoi with Ninh Binh and Ha Long, or Saigon with the Mekong Delta	The other two thirds of the country
10 to 12 days	Two regions with one internal flight, usually north plus center	Ha Giang, Con Dao, anything needing a second flight
2 to 3 weeks	The classic north to south run with three or four real stops	Very little, though still not everything
4 weeks or more	The spine plus the mountains or the islands, at a human pace	Nothing, but check how long your visa actually runs

Two weeks is the honest minimum for a first trip that takes in more than one region without feeling like a forced march. Ten days works if you accept that you are seeing two regions, not three. A week is a fine trip, but it is a trip to one part of Vietnam, and travelers who try to stretch it to three spend most of it in transit.

The shape most first trips settle into is a line rather than a loop: land at one end, work your way along, fly out of the other. It saves you backtracking and it means you can book a one way internal flight instead of a return. For route by route detail, including where to add days and where to cut them, see our Vietnam itinerary guide.

Getting In: The eVisa in One Honest Section

Vietnam's eVisa is open to citizens of every country and territory. It runs up to 90 days, comes in single or multiple entry, and is applied for online. The government charges $25 for a single entry eVisa and $50 for a multiple entry one, states a processing time of three working days, offers no faster tier, and keeps the fee if the application is refused.

Where you can use it widened at the end of 2025. Resolution 389/NQ-CP added 41 border gates, taking the total to 83 checkpoints made up of 17 airports, 27 land border gates and 39 seaports. That list is unusually generous by regional standards, and the 39 seaports make Vietnam one of the easier countries in the region to enter by ship.

Not everyone needs one. Two government resolutions currently exempt citizens of 24 countries from needing a visa for 45 days, and a longer list of countries has shorter or different arrangements under bilateral agreements. Check your own passport before you pay for anything, on our eligibility pages. Phu Quoc is the other exception worth knowing: foreigners of any nationality can enter the island visa free for 30 days if they arrive directly from abroad by air or sea, hold an onward ticket out of Vietnam inside those 30 days, and stay on Phu Quoc. Travel on to the mainland and the exemption is gone.

On what we charge, plainly, because the arithmetic is the point. You can do this yourself at evisa.gov.vn for the $25 or $50 government fee. Our price is $54 for a one month single entry, up to $104 for three months multiple, with that fee included, so on the entry option we are adding about $29. That buys a person reading your form before it goes to Immigration, correcting the passport spelling or the unreadable scan at no extra cost, and staying reachable if it stalls. Faster tiers cost more again. Approval is Immigration's decision, never ours. If that trade looks worth it, apply online; if it does not, the government route is right there and we would rather you used it than got it wrong.

Getting Around: Flights, Trains, and the Motorbike Problem

Vietnam is unusually easy to move around by regional standards, largely because it has more airports and more airlines than a country this size usually does, and a single rail line that runs the entire length of it.

How You Move	Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City	Best For	The Catch
Domestic flight	About 2 hours 10 minutes nonstop	Covering the length of the country	The cheapest fares include no checked bag at all
Train	About 32 hours end to end	The coastal legs, above all Hue to Da Nang	Tickets need passport details that must match on boarding
Sleeper bus	Longer again	Budget travel and places without a station	Overnight coach crashes are a known risk
Motorbike	Weeks, not hours	The mountains, if you are properly licensed	The license and insurance problem, below

Flying is the default for the long legs. Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City runs 26 to 32 flights a day and takes a little over two hours; Hanoi to Da Nang is about an hour and twenty minutes. The trap is the fare type rather than the airline. VietJet's cheapest Eco fare carries 7 kilograms of carry on and no checked baggage whatsoever, and buying a 20 kilogram allowance at the airport instead of at booking costs roughly two and a half times as much. Vietnam Airlines includes a 23 kilogram checked bag on all three of its main economy fares, including the cheapest, which is the real difference between the two carriers and rarely shows up in the headline price. Our post on flights and airlines to Vietnam goes through the carriers and the terminals, which matter more at Tan Son Nhat than you would think.

The train is slower and better than its reputation. The north to south line is one of the world's great cheap rail journeys, and the three hour Hue to Da Nang leg over the Hai Van Pass is genuinely spectacular, with a photo stop at Lang Co built into the heritage service. Book through Vietnam Railways rather than a lookalike site, and note that every ticket carries the passenger's name and identity number and can be checked at boarding. Our guide to train travel in Vietnam covers the classes and the booking traps for foreign cardholders.

For the rest, including buses, boats and city transport, see getting around Vietnam. The short version for a first trip:

• Fly the long legs. Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City by land eats two days you do not have.
• Take the train for one scenic leg, because that day buys you the best coastline in the country.
• Use ride hailing apps in the cities, which removes the fare negotiation entirely.
• Hire a driver, not a motorbike, if your license does not qualify.

Money: The Dong, the Zeros, and a Rule That Changed in 2026

Vietnam runs on the dong, and the first thing that hits you is the number of zeros. The State Bank of Vietnam is the sole issuer, and the six notes you handle daily, from 10,000 up to 500,000, are all polymer. Coins exist legally but not in practice, so everything is notes.

The mental trick is to drop three zeros and divide by 26, which is close to exact at the rate observed on 14 August 2026 of about 26,100 dong to the dollar. So 500,000 dong is roughly $19, and 100,000 is roughly $4. The dong is a managed float and moves daily, so treat that as a working anchor and check a live rate rather than memorizing one. Two of the notes look dangerously alike: the 20,000 and the 500,000 are both blue, and confusing them is the classic and expensive mistake.

Cards work more widely than visitors expect in hotels, sit down restaurants, supermarkets and malls, and contactless is normal. Cash is still effectively mandatory for street food, wet markets, motorbike taxis flagged on the street, small guesthouses, local buses and most of the countryside. ATM fees vary enormously between banks, from nothing at all to 50,000 dong a withdrawal with a low ceiling, so it pays to know which network you are standing in front of. Whenever a machine offers to bill you in dollars rather than dong, decline: that rate is set by the machine and is never in your favor.

For what things actually cost, from a bowl of pho to a night in a decent hotel, see how much a Vietnam trip costs. For the currency itself, the notes, the history and the rates, we have a full Vietnamese dong currency guide.

Food: The Country Changes Flavor as You Travel Down It

Vietnamese food is regional in a way that is easy to miss from outside, and the change as you move down the country is one of the genuine pleasures of a north to south trip.

Northern cooking is the restrained end: clear broths, black pepper and lime rather than chili, freshwater fish, and a heavy debt to Chinese technique. This is pho country, and Hanoi's version is a plain clean broth with a small pile of herbs, not the loaded bowl served abroad. Bun cha, grilled pork in a bowl of sweetened fish sauce with cold noodles, is the other Hanoi dish worth planning a lunch around.

Central Vietnam is the spiciest and the most decorative, a legacy of the imperial court at Hue, where dishes were made small and numerous for the emperor's table. Bun bo Hue is a beef and lemongrass noodle soup with real heat, and the region's specialty is a long list of little steamed rice cakes eaten in the afternoon. Hoi An has dishes that barely exist elsewhere, including cao lau, thick noodles that local cooks insist can only be made with water from one particular well.

The south is sweeter, herbier and more tropical, with coconut milk, sugar in savory dishes and an enormous supply of fruit and vegetables from the Mekong Delta. It is also where the sandwich culture is at its best: banh mi is a French colonial inheritance turned into something entirely Vietnamese, and com tam, broken rice with grilled pork, is the everyday Saigon plate.

Two constants everywhere. Coffee is taken seriously and served strong, sweet and iced. And the best cooking is almost always the cheapest, from a stall that has sold one dish, all day, for decades. Our Vietnamese food guide works through the dishes region by region, including what to order when you cannot read the sign.

Culture and Etiquette: What the Incense Explains

If you take one statistic away from this section, take this one. 96% of Vietnamese adults burned incense for their ancestors in the past year, and 92% of those who say they have no religion made an ancestor offering too. Nearly every household has an altar. Once you know that, the country reads differently: the incense on the sidewalk outside a shop at dawn, the fruit on a stand behind a hotel reception desk, the family gathering you keep seeing on an ordinary Tuesday. This is not a Buddhist country in the way it is often described, and it is not a secular one either. It is a country organized around obligation to family, living and dead.

The practical etiquette that follows from it is short and easy:

• Shoes off in homes, and wherever you see a pile of them at the door.
• Give and receive with both hands, especially with anyone older than you.
• Never stand chopsticks upright in rice, because that is exactly what incense looks like on an altar.
• Dress for temples and pagodas: shoulders and knees covered, hats off, and one stick of incense is plenty.
• Ask before photographing a ritual in progress or a family altar.
• Red envelopes for happy occasions, white for funerals, never the other way around.

Names work differently too, and this is the mistake foreigners make most often. Vietnamese people are addressed by their given name with a kinship term in front of it, not by Mr or Ms plus the family name. Given that roughly two in five Vietnamese people share the surname Nguyen, that convention is practical as well as polite.

The honest caveat is that almost none of this is held against you. Vietnamese people are generous with visitors and largely unbothered by foreign mistakes, and a good deal of what circulates online as strict Vietnamese custom is either ordinary courtesy or something only an older generation observes. The short list that genuinely lands badly concerns death, elders and sacred space. Our posts on Vietnamese culture and traditions and Vietnam etiquette dos and don'ts go into the detail, including a fair number of widely repeated claims that turn out not to be true.

Staying Safe and Staying Connected

Vietnam is a low crime destination for travelers by any reasonable measure, and the honest safety conversation is not about crime at all. It is about the road, by a very wide margin. In the first seven months of 2025 Vietnam recorded 10,809 traffic accidents and 6,101 deaths, which is about 29 people a day, and that was a year in which the numbers fell sharply. British government advice puts it bluntly: compliance with road law is poor, travel by motorbike is much riskier than at home, and overnight coach crashes happen regularly.

What that means in practice is unglamorous and effective:

• Wear a real helmet, not the plastic shell handed over with a rental.
• Do not ride in Vietnamese traffic just because it looked easy from the back of someone else's bike.
• Cross the road at a slow constant pace and let the traffic flow around you. Stopping suddenly in the middle is what causes the collision.
• Take the train or a daytime bus rather than the overnight coach wherever you have the choice.

Petty theft exists too, mostly in the busiest parts of the biggest cities, and our is Vietnam safe post deals with that properly, along with food and water, weather and the scams that actually recur.

Staying connected is the easy part. Vietnam has excellent, cheap mobile data, and free Wi-Fi in cafes and hotels is close to universal. A 30 day nationwide data package from one of the three national carriers, Viettel, VinaPhone or MobiFone, costs around 150,000 dong, roughly $6, for several gigabytes a day, and you can buy one at a carrier kiosk in the international arrivals hall at the main airports. MobiFone also grants arriving visitors a free 24 hour eSIM with 10 gigabytes on it, one per passport, which is a useful bridge if you land at midnight.

Two things to know at the counter. You need your original physical passport to register a SIM, because Vietnamese law requires it and photos and photocopies are refused. And check that the package you buy is nationwide: some of the cheaper tiers are zone locked to a home province and collapse to a trickle of data the moment you leave it, which is precisely the wrong plan for a trip down the length of the country.

What Surprises People About Vietnam

The distances surprise people first, which is where this guide started and where most reworked itineraries end up. The second surprise is the coffee, better and stronger than almost anywhere, with a national cafe culture attached. The third is how much of daily life happens outdoors and at knee height, on plastic stools on the sidewalk, and how completely welcome you are to sit down on one.

The less charming surprises are worth saying too. English is common on the tourist track and thin off it, so a translation app earns its place. Prices in the busiest tourist pockets, central Hoi An and Phu Quoc above all, run well above the national average and can be double what the same thing costs in Hue or the delta. Cities are loud, traffic is relentless, and the 2025 administrative reorganization means addresses, maps and published guides still disagree about what places are called.

The biggest surprise, for most people, is how quickly the plan they arrived with stops mattering. The good bits here tend to be the unplanned ones: the wrong turn into a market, the meal you could not name, the conversation with someone's grandmother that neither of you understood. Build a route with slack in it and let the country fill the gaps.

One practical note to close on, since it is the one thing that is hard to fix once you are moving. Your entry paperwork has to be right before you fly, and your arrival point has to be a checkpoint that accepts an eVisa. Everything else in a Vietnam trip is adjustable in the moment. That part is not.