Let's Go Vietnam On a Budget 2007: On a Budget

From the Let's Go series.

Brand-new Let's Go: Vietnam is your insider's guide to Southeast Asia's up-and-coming travel destination. Mixing completely fresh text and maps with Let's Go's forty-five years of practical savvy, it's the only guide you'll need to navigate this rapidly changing country. With a focus on alternatives to Vietnam's most visited destinations and a large section on the remote Northwest Highlands, Let's Go will help you escape from the tourist track. Valuable hints, tips, and listings provide the practical know-how to see the sights, experience the culture, and make a difference. Whether you'd rather drift lazily along an Annamese river or strut your stuff in cosmopolitan Ho Chi Minh City, Let's Go can take you there.

Vietnam is the country, after all, that swallows beating cobra hearts in rice whiskey to relax after-hours. It is the country responsible for the opium dreams of Graham Greene and the amphetamine nightmares of Francis Ford Coppola; it is the country whose will to live has been challenged since its inception by foreign armies without number--from impassive imperial China to the bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge, from colonial France to the napalm bombers of the Americans. Vietnam is hallucinogenic limestone landscapes and dense forests sprawling across chocolate river deltas, insane high-pitched motorbike traffic and 5-to-9 workdays. And travel here is subject to the same extremes. Expect endless, comically crowded bus rides blaring the same four Vietpop songs without cease; expect to spend hours a day negotiating the price of absolutely everything; expect to be pummeled by waves of mind-overthrowing heat and 48-hour batteries of rain.

But what you pay in time, sweat, and energy, you get back a thousandfold. The natural beauty of the country is legendary and spectacularly varied, encompassing brilliant white beaches and lonely mountain passes that pierce the clouds. Jagged monoliths shoot up from mirror-bright bays in the far north; intricate lattices of canals run under mangrove canopies in the far south. The landscape resonates, too, with a history both chaotic and profound via faded, millennia-old relics of fallen dynasties and abandoned tanks and bunkers rusting under new grass. The country's architecture echoes the same contorted past, from eye-bending Cham ruins and bucolic French villas to Soviet concrete monstrosities and glass-and-steel monuments to globalization.

And ultimately, inevitably, you will be blown away by Vietnamese cuisine. Masterfully subtle, in the debt of kitchens from Sichuan Province to Marseille, meals considered prosaic by everyday Vietnamese are nonetheless revered by epicures the world over. And no meal better expresses the country's culinary genius than pho--tender rice noodles under thin sheets of beef, floating in amber broth with ginger, star anise, mint, basil, and lime.

The people of Vietnam are stubborn, demanding, and intensely proud of their country. To travelers unused to constant bargaining and zero personal space, they can be extremely frustrating; they can also be what makes your visit more meaningful than you ever would have expected. The fundamental good nature and sincere extroversion of the Vietnamese are overwhelming. You'll be invited to play pick-up football with kids in the street, celebrate Tet in the living rooms of joyful families, and coach English at every available opportunity. But best of all is their contagious, undying optimism; in the face of warfare, poverty, and hunger, there persists in Vietnam the belief that things will get better--much better--fueled by the tireless will to make them so. Today's Vietnam is modernizing with a vengeance, and the atmosphere is thick with hope and breathless anticipation.

Yes, Vietnam is tough. But you aren't heading to Vietnam for "easy." You chose Vietnam because you want travel to thrill and amaze you--because you want stories that will last you the rest of your life. So go. And take us with you.

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