Vietnam 🇻🇳

Vietnam was staggeringly hot. Even for someone that grew up in Florida, I was having a hard time dealing with the constant heat and lack of air conditioning anywhere but our hotel room.

🍲 The food here is fantastic! We had everything from literal hole in the wall phở, to some fancy hotel restaurant stuff, and the hole in the wall wins every time. In Hoi An, we found a market square that had a few stalls that served food and one of the ones there ended up being the only place we returned to several times for the White Rose Dumplings which are a very local specialty. It was hard not to overdo it given how good the food is, and the amazing prices of everything.

It’s easy to feel like a big shot when you go to the ATM and take out 1,000,000 of the local currency.

🛵 The traffic here is almost entirely done by motorbike, and there are really not a lot of rules. More than one we saw someone driving down the wrong side of the road to get where they are going. It was organized chaos on a level I’ve never seen, but during our time there I didn’t see a single traffic accident. It somehow just works.

It’s hard to come up with any downsides for the trip. Our route was flying into Ho Chi Minh City, then to Hoi An, and finally to Hanoi in the north. Hanoi had some pretty unbearable smog which you can see below, and of course the heat was rough. I don’t any real complaints about Vietnam Fantastic place and I’d go back in a heartbeat. Also, I now realize how hard it is to write about a place so many years after the event.