Ha Long Bay Ho Chi Minh City hoi an mekong Delta Saigon Vietnam Cave Vietnamese Food vietnam food Vietnam Vietnam Travel Vietnam Tourism Halong Bay Hoi An Hoi an Vietnam Vietnamese Cuisine

Vietnam should be on the top of everyone's travel list. It's that simple. With its dramatic landscapes, fascinating history, epic food and pulsating energy, Vietnam will electrify all of your senses and seize you from all angles. Vietnam is at once crazy and serene, thrilling and relaxing.

There are endless reasons to hop on a flight to Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City and travel down or up this amazing country by train, plane, bus or -- the preferred method of transport -- motorbike. If you need persuading, here are 21 reasons to fall head over heels in love with Vietnam:
1.Street food

The best place to eat in Vietnam is on little, plastic stools on the sidewalk. Whether it's noodle soups, like the iconic pho or bun ca (the fish and pork-based soup garnished with dill pictured here), or bun cha -- char-grilled pork served over rice noodles with herbs and dipping sauces -- the street food in Vietnam is nothing short of amazing. At any hour of the day, you'll find Vietnamese people of all ages congregating under market awnings or outside store fronts, chowing down and enjoying each other's company. Eating on the street is by far the most exciting -- and accessible -- way to truly experience daily life in Vietnam, and it's also where you'll find the best food
2. Motorbikes

One of the first and more important things to learn when visiting Vietnam is how to cross the street. It may be intuitive at home, but the traffic in Vietnam's major cities seems so chaotic and incessant, that getting from one side of the road to the other feels almost impossible at first. You'll find cars and people in the street, but the preferred mode of transportation is motorbikes, and the stream of two-wheelers feels like unpredictable, roaring rapids when you're standing on one sidewalk trying to get to the next. According to The Diplomat, there are currently 39 million motorbikes in Vietnam, up from about 4 million in 1996. That's a lot of bikes -- and with at least two people on every bike -- that's also a lot of people. The trick to crossing the street is to walk steadily, at an even pace. If you're moving at a predictable rate, the motorcyclists will move around you. Eye-contact with oncoming bikers doesn't hurt either. The most important thing is to keep moving and not to stop or speed up. Once you've got the hang of crossing the street, you can really appreciate the beauty of the organized chaos.
3.Coffee

As the second biggest producer of coffee in the world, Vietnam knows a thing or two about coffee. Most importantly, coffee comes with sweetened condensed milk (a.k.a. the best stuff on Earth) pretty much without exception. It's also an integral part of the culture, served in cafes and... drumroll... on the street, of course.
4. Mekong Delta

The Mekong Delta is an area in Southwestern Vietnam where the Mekong River dumps into the sea. Visitors can go to Can Tho, the largest city in the area, and get a real taste of rural life in this region affectionately known as the "rice bowl." Traveling up the backwaters, visitors will be wowed by the floating markets and above all else, the friendly people who live in the region.



5.Caves
Mammoth caves that hold entire jungles and lakes are still being discovered in Vietnam. Son Doong Cave, the biggest cave in the world, was only first explored in 2009, and didn't open to tourists until 2012. Trips into Son Doong are still highly controlled, expensive and limited, but there's a vast network of caves that are much more accessible. Paradise Cave, pictured here, in Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park, is 19 miles across and offers a variety of tours into its interior, including an easy walk on the boardwalk at the beginning of the cave and a trek past the boardwalk for the more adventurous. Headlamps and nerve are required. Visit before the sights become overrun with tourists.


6.Markets

Markets in Vietnam may not be cavernous underground worlds of stunning rock formations and skyscraper high stalagmites, but they can be cavernous worlds unto themselves. Markets like this one in Danang sell everything from fabric for clothing to dried baby shrimp. Needless to say, you can get lost exploring the rows for hours. They're most active in the early morning and late evening, when the temperature cools down a bit and shoppers come out. During the middle of the day, you might find shopkeepers taking a nap in front of their stalls. When we say you could spend all day in these markets, we seriously mean it.
7.Fresh Seafood

One of the most extraordinary things about the markets in Vietnam is that the food doesn't smell at all. You'll walk into the food section and see freshly caught fish, snails, crabs and prawns and brace yourself for a fishy smell. But because the fish you see in the market was caught just a few hours ago, you won't smell a thing. We swear.
8.Fresh meat
Same goes for the meat. When you see a pig's head laid out on a table next to a slew of other cuts, you'd assume something would smell. The meat was butchered no more than four or five hours ago so it doesn't give off any smell. You can tell it's super fresh by the bright red color. If you see browning meat, it may be a day old and will cost less. Most people buy their meat the same day it was butchered, however, making for some extraordinarily fresh dishes and surprisingly pleasant market experiences.

9.Fresh vegetable
You might not recognize all the vegetables you'll find in Vietnam, but you should try them all. From bitter melon to morning glory, the vegetables go into everything from shredded salads -- like green papaya salad -- to stir-fries. Like all the other food you'll find in Vietnamese markets, everything is super fresh.

10.Fresh fruit

Don't be alarmed if you see spiky fruits you can't identify. It could be a durian, dragon fruit or rambutan (pictured here) -- and they're all worth a try. (Be warned: durians smell like feet and are not for the faint of heart.) You'll also find mangos, papayas, mangosteens, jack fruit and a fleshy fruit with a bumpy green skin called custard apples, among more familiar fruits like pineapples, bananas and watermelons.
11. Vistas
Views of the horizon are magnificent, especially at sunset, all over the country. The mountainous vista pictured here -- filled with sharp undulations, like shoulders standing side by side


12. Ha Long Bay
Speaking of vistas, Halong Bay, the UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Gulf of Tonkin, is every bit as spectacular as people say. It IS worth the roughly four hour drive from Hanoi, and it IS worth fighting the swarms of tourists to see. The bay used to be littered with a lot more trash, but with recent clean-up efforts, it's much better these days. The 1,600 islands jut out of the sea, seemingly one on top of the other, creating a dramatic scape of mountains, sea and sky

13.History
Vietnam's history is tumultuous and complex, the country having been occupied and divided by various countries for decades. Colonial influences are visible everywhere, from the architecture to the food and the coffee. The aftermath of the Vietnam War is apparent too -- in the museums and monuments but also in the faces and stories of survivors and the overwhelmingly young population. Interwoven with our own history, Vietnam's past is not only fascinating, it's also important to learn about.


14. Banh Xeo-Rice Pancakes
Bánh xèo are rice pancakes, and while they may sound ordinary, they are anything but. Grossly underrepresented outside of Vietnam, this practically perfect dish isn't well-known to many non-Vietnamese. Made simply with rice flour and water, the pancakes are very basic, but somehow also sublime. They owe their yellow color to turmeric, not eggs, and they'll typically have some small prawns cooked inside. The real fun comes when you add all the fresh herbs you want, and dip them into a sweet and sour sauce.

 15.Sapa
Sapa, a hill station in the Northwest of Vietnam, is one of the country's most stunning areas. Its dramatic rice terraces and surrounding peaks make this mountainous area well worth the short trip from Hanoi. You can take an overnight train from Hanoi to Sapa, which makes it a popular destination on the tourist circuit.

16.City parks
In the early morning hours and around dusk, you'll find groups of Vietnamese men and women doing every exercise under the sun. Large groups of people, young and old, gather around an instructor and follow aerobics routines with music blaring in the background. A few feet away, a group will be practicing ballroom dancing, flanked by some guys playing basketball. Meanwhile, walkers and runners will be circling the periphery of the park. It's a wonderful sight to behold and scene in which to partake if you're up for it.

17. Beaches
Vietnam's beaches may be one of the country's most unsung beauties. While travelers may think of Thailand and Cambodia as the countries to visit for white sand and clear water, Vietnam boasts beaches that rival these countries' beloved tourists spots. Sure, some beach towns in Vietnam, like Nha Trang and Mui Ne, get a lot of attention, but quieter, less-traveled beaches like Doc Let are the real treasures. Con Dao and Phu Quoc are some of the most gorgeous islands in South East Asia, and travelers would be wise to hurry there now, before these isolated, idyllic spots suffer the same fate as the over-traveled beaches in Thailand and Cambodia.

18. Fresh herbs
In Vietnam, it's all about the herbs. Plates piled high with fresh herbs like Thai basil, coriander, mint, and dill, and greens like Morning Glory accompany everything from soups to spring rolls. The crisp, refreshing addition of these herbs and greens cuts salt and fat and brings levity to some of the heavier dishes. Used as garnishes or wraps, herbs also serve as great palate cleansers and most of all, they make food really fun to eat.


19. Hoi An
A UNESCO World Heritage town, Hoi An is one of the most picturesque, lovely places to visit in all of Vietnam. Located in the center of the country, just outside of Danang, Hoi An used to be a flourishing port town from the 15th to the 19th centuries, before the Thu Bon river silted up and basically halted trade in the region. Fortunately in the 1990s, the town was declared a World Heritage site and tourism has since revived the so-called "Venice of Vietnam." Thanks to the international residents -- from the Chinese and Japanese to the French -- during the port years, Hoi An boasts a variety of local specialities that you can't find anywhere else in the country. Dishes like Cao Lau and White Rose Dumplings are reason enough to visit Hoi An, and when you factor in the gorgeous, canal-side setting and preserved colonial French architecture, it really does become a national treasure


20. Noodle Soups
Pho (pronounced fuh, fyi), may be Vietnam's most iconic dish, but it's just the beginning of the country's amazing noodle soups. Noodle soups are typically eaten for breakfast, oftentimes at a street stall or in a market. They run the gamut and include Bun Bo Hue, a beef bone broth-based noodle soup for which people (including Anthony Bourdain) travel to its namesake town Hue. Bun Ca, a pork and fish-based soup with dill and tomatoes, is a noodle soup specialty to Hanoi. You could spend months in Vietnam without eating the same noodle soup twice -- although once you get hooked on one, you'll definitely return for seconds.


21. People
Kind, thoughtful, industrious, optimistic, generous -- the people are the heart of country, and if you visit, you should take every opportunity to get to know them.



Source: Huffington post

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cha ca hanoi hoi an. ho chi minh hue nem pho vietnam food

Food is at the very heart of Vietnamese culture. Almost every aspect of social, devotional, and family life revolves around the procurement, preparation, and shared pleasure of nourishment. Even commercial life: more than half of Vietnam’s population makes a living in agriculture or the food trade. Markets are on every corner; cooks on every curb. A sneeze elicits the blessing com muoi, or “rice with salt.”

On a recent train ride from Hue to Hoi An, food was everywhere in sight. At each station stop, vendors rushed up to the windows proffering homemade treats: shrimp cakes, jerky, sticky rice. One vendor came aboard and walked the aisles, selling sun-dried squid. (An American traveler bought one, thinking it was a decorative fan.) In the bar car the train conductor and his staff spent the whole ride not collecting tickets but preparing lunch: cooking noodles, shelling prawns, trimming basil into woven baskets.

Follow any lane in any Vietnamese city at any time of day and you’ll find some contented soul crouched over a bowl of broth or rice. Then again, if you lived in Vietnam, you’d eat all the damn time, too. The food is beautiful to behold, if only for the colors alone: turmeric-yellow crêpes, sunset-orange crabs, scarlet-red chiles, deep-purple shrimp paste, and endless jungles of vivid green. Vietnamese cooking is fresher, healthier, lighter, and brighter than, for instance, Chinese or Indian or French, three of its closest relations. Though it is often described as “honest” and “direct”—cooks resist fussy ornamentation (except in Hue; more on that later)—this is a cuisine rich with nuance, carrying a complexity that is all the more surprising for its being served in, say, a plastic bowl with a Tweety Bird logo, on a flimsy table on the pavement. Flavors and textures are deftly arranged so each note rings clear, from the piercing highs of chili paste and nuoc mam (fish sauce) to the bottomless depths of a stock that’s been burbling since dawn. These are tastes that sate, soothe, and just as often shock you awake—particularly the pungent greens and herbs that figure in almost every dish. After the wonder that is Vietnamese produce, the stuff back home seems like a recording of a recording of a cassette that was left out in the sun.

Hanoi

I’ve spent roughly 100 days in Hanoi over the past 12 years, and I don’t recall ever once seeing blue sky. Not that I’d have it any other way. Like London or Seattle, this is a city that becomes itself under cloud cover. During those moist, moody afternoons, when mist hangs over the streets like smoke from a cooking fire, Vietnam’s gorgeous old capital feels more intimate than it already is.

Even in the heat of summer, Hanoians favor cockle-warming dishes suited to far chillier climes. The most renowned of these is Vietnam’s de facto national dish: pho bo, eaten at any time of day but especially for breakfast. Taking root in an earthy, long-simmered beef broth—shot through with clove, ginger, and star anise—the soup is filled out with rice noodles and one or more varieties of raw or cooked beef, tendon, or tripe. Southerners sprinkle fresh herbs and bean sprouts on top, but a Northernpho is generally unadorned, with only a few scallions and a bit of cilantro cooked into the broth and perhaps a squirt of rice vinegar.

Pho Gia Truyen, on Bat Dan Street in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, doesn’t look like much from the outside—or from the inside, for that matter. The room has a clock, two fans, three bare lightbulbs, and a handful of communal tables. The only decoration is the food itself: hulking slabs of brisket suspended from hooks, a hillside of scallions on the counter, and a giant cauldron puffing out fragrant clouds of steam like some benevolent dragon. A cashier takes your money (about a dollar a serving), her colleague fills a bowl with noodles and chopped scallions, and a teenager with a faux-hawk ladles strips of ruby-red beef into the broth to cook for two seconds, then spoons it all into the waiting bowl. Half of Hanoi queues up for a seat, while others slurp their soup perched on motorbikes outside. All wear serious expressions, and eat in a silence that feels not joyless but reverential. The stock is so wholesome and protein-rich you feel yourself being cured of whatever might ail you, perhaps of anything that ever could.

A proper restaurant culture, the sort with waitstaff and normal-size chairs, is still in its infancy here, but Vietnam has a long tradition of eating out—quite literally so. Western notions of indoors and out are reversed: at a typical Old Quarter house in Hanoi, the motorbikes are in the living room and the stove is on the sidewalk.

When people here crave a particular dish, they usually visit a particular street vendor, often on a particular lane (which may even be named after said dish). The best way to tackle Hanoi is to treat the city as one vast progressive buffet, moving from the spring-roll guy to the fermented-pork lady and onward into the night.

Or you could make it easy and hit Quan An Ngon (locals call it simply “Ngon,” meaning delicious). The owner recruited an all-star roster of street-food vendors to cook their signature dishes in the courtyard of an old villa, added menus and table service, and watched the crowds pour in—not just foreigners but also well-heeled Vietnamese, who can’t get enough of the place. (There’s also a branch in Saigon, a.k.a Ho Chi Minh City.) The quality is excellent, the atmosphere convivial, and seats hard to come by after dark. Come for breakfast and the food is even fresher (and the cooks outnumber the patrons). Most of these dishes are traditionally served all day, so the morning menu is much the same. My ultimate breakfast: an order of bun cha (grilled pork in a marinade of sweetened fish sauce with a side of rice vermicelli) and a bowl ofbanh da ca, a fabulously tangy fish soup from Haiphong laden with chunks of tilapia, chewy, fettucine-like banh da noodles, dill, scallions, and the magical rau can (a woody stalk with a strong, cedary bite).

Speaking of fish, Hanoi cha ca is one of the great Vietnamese dishes, a note-perfect blend of raw and cooked ingredients, assertive and delicate flavors, with a DIY element as a bonus. It’s often associated with a century-old Hanoi institution called Cha Ca La Vong, which is very good, indeed, though I prefer the more peaceful surroundings and local clientele of its rival, Cha Ca Thanh Long, a few blocks away. The firm white flesh of the snakehead fish is first marinated in galangal, shallot, shrimp paste, and turmeric, and briefly seared on a grill. It’s then brought to your table in a large pan with bowls of shaved scallions, crumbled peanuts, chiles, and a hedgerow of bright-green dill. A tabletop brazier is ignited. This is where you come in: tossing everything into the sizzling pan, sautéing the fish to a golden brown, then laying it onto a bed of cool vermicelli, with a few more dill sprigs for good measure. Add a dollop of supremely funky shrimp paste if you dare (and you should).

For all their obsessive eating and snacking, Hanoians tend not to linger at table. Most finish dinner in seven minutes flat. Where they do while away the hours is at the local café. Hanoians drink a lot of coffee: thick, rich, tar-black stuff, sometimes cut with condensed milk but often taken straight. The bohemian soul of Hanoi’s café scene is Nang, a 1956 landmark on Hang Bac Street whose 74-year-old owner, Ms. Thai, still brews nearly every cup herself. (Her father-in-law, who lived in Paris for a spell, taught her how to French-roast the beans.) Ms. Thai’s blend, sourced from Dong Giao, in the northern Nghe An province, is strong enough to power a 125 cc motorbike. The café is only eight feet wide, with tiny wooden tables and tinier wooden stools, occupied all afternoon by young Vietnamese men sporting the currently in vogue greaser look: slicked-back hair, black leather jackets, skinny jeans, white pocket T’s with single cigarettes poking out. The place looks exactly as it must have in 1956—a perfect microcosm of a city that’s always had a tenuous relation to the present tense.

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