Mỹ (other) Sơn
Don’t think for a moment that Cambodia’s Angkor-era ruins are the only dead things in Southeast Asia. There’s us, of course, but there are also spectacular ruins of the pre-Angkor Champa kingdom that dot Vietnam.…
Hội Án Crafts
Hội Án’s arts and crafts scene is completely different than Hà Nội’s. Hà Nội presents as a typical capital city, collating handicrafts from all over Vietnam, while Hội Án offers a more local perspective and…
Splish Splash
While many of our trips have been focused almost exclusively on culture, we’ve been careful on our Southeast Asia tour to make sure we visit places with natural splendor. And water. I think we’re both…
Landing In Hội An
This is something of a new cadence for us. When we set out we’d settled on about three months at each location, enough time to marinate in terroir. Then we noticed that the last few…
The More Things Change… The More Different They Are
We started with an idea: we would travel until it was no longer fun, and then we’d stop. We ran on that idea for two years before we realized how profoundly stupid it was. We…
Hill Country
After our visit to Cát Bà and Hạ Long Bay, we took one more excursion from Hà Nội. We visited the mountainous northern region of Sa Pa, home to the Mountain Hmong, with a side…
Shopping & Handicrafts
It will not shock you to learn that Vietnam has a rich, deep culture of making beautiful things, and that those things are well represented in Hà Nói. From the 36 Streets to craft villages…
We All Scream For Museum!
Hà Nói is a capital city, and has the allotment of high quality museums you’d expect as a result. From fine art to historical to ethnographic, Hà Nói has it all. So let’s go museuming.…
Are You Experiencing?
Shopping is an experience, and one of our favorites, but it’s hardly the only way to engage with culture wherever we are. There’s performance, generally of some historically culturally relevant art forms, like the Apsara…
Red Flags
I’m trying to wrap my head around the whole communism thing here. Economically, Vietnam has a distinctly capitalist vibe, although it favors small-scale entrepreneurism over late-stage capitalism’s megafauna. That certainly seems like an improvement over our…