Overview
We spent 11 days in Vietnam in February 2026, splitting the trip between Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, Da Nang, and Hoi An. You could easily spend much longer. The country has clearly learned how to make travel easy for visitors, and tourism looks like one of its major industries. As a tourist, it is an unusually comfortable country to move around.
The e-visa process is far easier than it used to be. The form is long, but not difficult, and our result arrived in roughly a week to ten days. Treat that as our 2026 experience rather than a guaranteed processing time.
People and Daily Life
People were warm, helpful, and extremely fond of children. A soldier even gave our daughter a red envelope for Lunar New Year, which was lovely. Family, hospitality, and attachment to the country felt familiar to us as Turks.
There is also a strong disregard for rules. In Hanoi we watched police repeatedly order riders to move their motorbikes, only for several of them to ignore the warning. Traffic is chaotic, lanes are flexible, horns never stop, and far too many drivers look at their phones. Cities can feel polluted and full of rubbish. At the same time, even urban areas remain surprisingly green. Türkiye often feels more orderly and developed, but Vietnam seemed to protect nature inside its cities better than we do.
Tourism workers are generally attentive and safety-conscious. Sometimes the service feels almost over-scripted: people explain every detail, ask questions without listening to the answer, or help with luggage and then leave you waiting in the wrong place. It has a very American style of service layered over an Asian, family-centered society. Both hotels we used offered free dishes ordered from a breakfast menu in addition to the buffet, which was new to us.
Compared with Cambodia, Vietnam felt much safer and the attention toward our baby was affectionate without becoming overwhelming. We did not encounter the overt sex-tourism scene we later saw in parts of Thailand. Dark eyebrows and eyes also seemed popular: I walked around with movie-star confidence after massage staff told my wife how lucky she was. Single travelers, take note. :)
Rural Vietnam was often prettier than the cities, with colorful cemeteries and lush scenery. French visitors were common, probably a legacy of the country's history. The cities, however, bring traffic, horns, air pollution, and rubbish in industrial quantities.
Culture and History
At temples during Lunar New Year we saw unopened food and drink left for ancestors, including beer, wine, and even whisky. We had seen food offerings in Nepal, but unopened bottles of Macallan were a new level.
The visual culture felt like a meeting point between China, Japan, Thailand, and Nepal: Chinese-looking buildings and paintings, Thai-style motifs, and the flags and decoration that reminded us of Nepal. Vietnam's history is long and complicated, with surviving structures and objects from many dynasties. Ho Chi Minh's life is particularly sad. He spent most of it in struggle and died before the 1975 end of the war and reunification. Vietnam fought the French through the First Indochina War, then endured roughly two more decades of conflict culminating in the Vietnam War. It is hard not to feel for the country.
Food and Drink
Vietnamese coffee was the biggest surprise. Almond coffee, coconut coffee, and egg coffee were all excellent. Even plain coffee can taste naturally vanilla-like or nutty. Egg coffee is closer to dessert than coffee, a little like tiramisu, but enjoyable.
Beer is everywhere, especially craft beer in Hanoi and central Vietnam. Drinking on the street was normal. East West Brewing, 7 Bridges, and Pizza 4P's produced some of our favorites.
The cuisine took time to understand, but good kitchens make it brilliantly. Seafood is widespread and especially good: jumbo prawns and oysters were excellent, while squid cake was not for me. Sauces often lean sweet, sometimes with honey. Fresh spring rolls are light and enjoyable, with meat and vegetarian versions.
Meals can combine meat, chicken, pork, seafood, rice, vegetables, and several sweet-sour sauces at once. Hue food often uses rice paper in place of bread. Banana leaves are used for cooking rather than eating. We saw very few legumes. Cashews are heavily processed and exported from Vietnam, yet were oddly uncommon as snacks; sunflower seeds were everywhere.
Yogurt exists and can be a lifesaver when traveling with a baby, though dairy rarely appears in local dishes. Chocolate was less impressive despite local production. Breakfast may include dumplings, seafood, salads, and dishes we would normally call lunch.
A few things we tried:
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Water apple: somewhere between a red pepper, cucumber, and mild apple. I found it neutral; our one-year-old devoured it.
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Egg coffee: sweet, creamy, and more dessert than coffee.
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Fresh spring rolls: consistently good when made well.
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Cantonese siu mai: steamed dumplings that did not suit my taste.
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Pumpkin dumplings: oddly artificial and dessert-like.
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Kimbap: Korean rather than Vietnamese, but we tried it here for the first time and liked it.
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Tilapia: excellent with sweet-and-sour sauce. It is tilapia, not literally a freshwater sea bream, despite the loose comparison sometimes used in Turkish.
Vietnam has enough culture, coastline, food, and variety to revisit every year without getting bored.