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This article originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Prices will have shifted and some businesses may have closed; contact specialist Sandy Ferguson for updated rates and information if interested. All listings featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. If you book something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Find more Iconic Itineraries here.
Some places are perfect for the independent traveler. And some, well, aren’t. For our series Iconic Itineraries, we’ve picked destinations that are must-sees but whose tourism infrastructures are so geared to groups that having an authentic experience can seem next to impossible. Not to worry. Working with the world’s leading travel specialists, we’ve created step-by-step trips that let you see the best each place has to offer—but on your terms. Each of our highly detailed itineraries has been vetted and perfected by a Condé Nast Traveler editor, and each can be bought as is with just one phone call or customized at will.
The challenge
So you want to go to Southeast Asia. Great! But so does everyone else. And that’s the trouble: 55 million travelers descend upon the region annually, from backpackers to jet-setters. Problem number one, then, is when to go to avoid the crowds…but still find yourself in bearable humidity. Problem number two is what to see, since you could pick any country in this fecund region and find yourself entertained for weeks or months. Problem number three is how to see it: Do you go with a group tour and end up being yanked from site to site as part of an unwieldy, unyielding block of people, with little time to linger and almost no privacy? Or do you brave it on your own, throwing in your lot with the backpackers and taking your chances as you go?
The solution
The answer to all of these questions is…book a private tour. Yes, it’s more expensive, but when you’re navigating such a diverse and time-consuming region, the advice you’ll get from a knowledgeable travel specialist will soon prove priceless. For help, I contacted Sandy Ferguson of AsiaDesk, who not only constructed a customized itinerary but patiently worked with me to accommodate my particularities and specific requests. Want a romantic dinner for two in Ho Chi Minh City? To participate in a pre-sunrise ritual with the monks in Siem Reap? A private audience with Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed corpse in Hanoi? Ferguson, who grew up in Thailand and maintains a residence in Vietnam, can arrange all of these, and much quirkier assignments, too.
He also has the last word on when to go: Although Thanksgiving through Easter is the area’s official high season, Ferguson recommends traveling in the slightly less crowded months of April and May (if you can stand the heat). He advises skipping the region in March (when the fields are burning and the air is thick with smoke) and early April (when the New Year is celebrated in Thailand and Laos). Here is the itinerary Ferguson and I designed, which covers the highlights of the region’s big four—Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia—and can be altered to suit any traveler’s whims or idiosyncrasies.
Day 1: Bangkok
It’s 8 a.m. and you’re sitting riverside at the Oriental Bangkok hotel in the not-yet-soupy heat, eating a plate of pad thai and watching the longboats cut slowly through the water. In an hour you’ll be meeting your guide in the orchid-bedecked lobby for a day that will give you a sense of the city’s soul, the depth of spirituality that lies beneath its surface flash and sparkle. Hard to believe that only 15 hours ago you were being escorted from Bangkok’s new Suvarnabhumi Airport and driven a half-hour to your hotel before collapsing.
Bangkok is a fascinating place to begin your journey, since so much of what you experience here—from the general friendliness of the people and the efficiency of the infrastructure to the particular blend of heat and sugar that distinguishes the flavors of this region—will resonate for you in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. And yet in other ways, Thailand is sui generis. For one thing, it is the only country in Southeast Asia that has never been colonized by the West. For another, it alone among its neighbors is ruled by a king. One of the great pleasures of this trip will be charting not only the similarities but also the differences—sometimes subtle, sometimes surprisingly profound—among these countries and cultures that lie in such close proximity to one another and whose histories are so inextricable.
Probably the first thing you’ll notice about this city of nine million, however, is its apparently seamless marriage of the old and the new. If last night’s trip from the airport had you zooming over pristine elevated highways, this morning’s ten-minute drive to your first stop, the Wat Traimitr complex, sends you creeping through Chinatown, whose streets are faced with examples of beautiful old architecture, often with a distinctive Portuguese flair (traders and missionaries from Portugal arrived in the sixteenth century). The complex is home to a number of temples, the largest of which houses one of Thailand’s most prized national treasures, the Golden Buddha, a five-and-a-half-ton icon that was constructed in the thirteenth century and rediscovered only in 1955, encased in a crust of stucco (probably to protect it from the invading Burmese in the sixteenth century). Inside, crowds of tourists mill past the great statue, talking and laughing as if at a cocktail party.
Muscle your way to the front and spend a few moments in the gleam of the long-limbed, graceful Buddha. The Thais practice Theravada Buddhism, which came to the country around the third century b.c. from India, where the Buddha, a Hindu prince, had been born 200 years earlier. This sect of Buddhism is recognizable for its Hindu overtones and exuberant palette, a marked contrast to the stripped-down asceticism of Mahayana Buddhism, which pervaded eastern Asia.
By 9:45 a.m., you are en route to the flower and vegetable market, which provides a crash course in the diversity of Thailand’s colors, scents, and flavors, not to mention its fecundity. Your guide will lead you down the main thoroughfare of the flower market, where the breadth of offerings is so extravagant that it seems almost comical: Every few paces there are vendors stringing thick garlands of achingly fragrant, pearly Arabian jasmine or jamming clumps of furled, shell-pink lotus flowers into overstuffed plastic buckets—which, as you’ll see, are as plentiful throughout the region as dandelions. A 15-minute stroll takes you to the produce end of the market, where the visual feast begins all over again: baskets of fiery bird’s-eye chiles; containers of pale-green cabbages; eggplant and watercress arranged like jewels on plastic sheets.
But as transfixing as the market is, tear yourself away by 10:30 for the 15-minute drive to your next stop, the Grand Palace, a vast compound of palaces and temples, one of which holds the country’s most important image, the Emerald Buddha. (First, though, a warning: This time of day is not for the heat-shy—there’s very little shade to be had. The crowds, however, are much thinner, and you’ll be able to move at your leisure.)
Built in 1782, the year modern Bangkok was founded, the Grand Palace was for almost 150 years the seat of both the national government and the king’s residence (parts of it are still used for various state functions). Your first stop is the Wat Phra Kaew Museum, wherein resides a small, well-presented collection of royal treasures, including intricately worked betel-juice bowls and coins from the kingdom of Siam (1768–1932), the precursor to modern Thailand. After exiting the museum, you’ll walk down a short pathway to the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, which is busy with more than a hundred buildings and stupas, most of them blindingly gold and all of them fantastically vibrant. One of the most brilliant is the Phra Mondop library, which houses sacred Buddhist texts.
You’ll then walk under the scaffolding (renovation work on the sanctuary began recently) into the Emerald Buddha Pavilion. Cameras aren’t allowed here, but at any rate, you will be too dazzled by the splendor of the room to care. As you gaze variously upon the floor (which is lined with marble), the ceiling (lacquered a glossy red), and the walls (painted with scenes from the Buddha’s life), it is difficult to keep from thinking of the Sistine Chapel, another monument to another of the world’s great religions. In the front of the room, sitting on a shining throne, is the Buddha. Made not of emerald, as the name suggests, but rather of jade, it stands a surprisingly small two feet tall and is colored a dark forest green. The exact place and date of origin of Thailand’s most iconic sculpture are unknown, but it is generally thought to have come from the northern part of Thailand in the early 1400s, after which it spent more than two centuries in Laos before being brought to Thailand by King Rama I in 1778.
A few more minutes wandering the palace grounds and you’ll be ready to faint, though whether from hunger or the heat will be hard to say. Fuel up and cool down with a cheap meal at the nearby S&P, where you should chase your (highly addictive) sticky rice and mango dessert with an icy glass of refreshing lemongrass juice. Fed and watered, you’re off for a boat ride down the Chao Phraya, the city’s wide, busy waterway. You and your guide will clamber into one of the long, flat boats you saw at breakfast, and then buzz down either Bangkok Noi or Dao Khanong canals for a tour of the city’s “water streets,” neighborhoods of houses whose facades front the street and whose back porches face the water.
As you cut through these narrow channels, past wooden houses on stilts and plumeria trees made colorful by great bursts of vanda orchids, you’re reminded of how much all of Southeast Asia prizes and depends on proximity to great bodies of water: Homes are built on it, goods are conveyed down it, and rice, the principal crop, swallows many tons of it. You’ll stop next at the Royal Barges Museum, where you can admire the ceremonial boats—some of which were once used for battle—before climbing back into the boat to complete your 40-minute ride.
By now it’s almost three and you’re probably wilting from the heat. Have your guide drop you off at one of the city’s many spas, such as the affordable Ruen Nuad, for a massage and facial. Ask to be picked up around 5:30 p.m. for your trip to the Suan Lum Night Market—one of the city’s most popular bazaars, but less frenetic than Chatuchak. Say good-bye to your guide for the night—but first arrange to meet your driver in a couple of hours at a designated spot—and then take off on your own. The vibe here is young and funky, the scene lively, and the evidence of local art and entrepreneurship everywhere. When you’re hungry, grab a plate at one of the numerous food stalls near the entrance, and feel free to stay late: Most of the stores are open well past midnight.
Day 2: Bangkok to Chiang Mai
Meet your guide at 9 a.m. for the half-hour drive to Vimanmek Palace, which opens at 9:30 and which you’ll have to yourself for the first half-hour. The largest golden teakwood structure in the world, the palace was erected in the late nineteenth century as a summer retreat for King Rama V, a well-traveled Europhile who managed to import many Europeanisms (including the banknote and the Western calendar) while also repelling the French and the British, who made overtures toward colonizing the country.
Get back to your hotel before 11 a.m. for a quick shower before your half-hour drive to the airport and your hour-long 12:45 p.m. flight to Chiang Mai, where you’ll be met and driven to your hotel. For a small city—there are only 210,000 residents—Chiang Mai has an outsized share of excellent hotels. Families or those in search of a romantic retreat should go for the Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi, where I stayed. A spectacular re-creation of a Thai palace, it has a fantastic pool and even water buffalo wandering the man-made rice paddies.
After a walk downtown and a light snack at the café adjoining the stylish little boutique Ginger, I did myself a favor and spent the remainder of the day at my hotel, where I ordered dinner from the resort’s Thai restaurant, Le Grand Lanna. You have an early start tomorrow, and besides, it’s nice to escape the heat when you can.
Day 3: Chiang Mai
It’s 5 a.m., you’ve just met your guide, and you’re on your way to Wat Sri Soda, a half-hour away, to experience firsthand the Thais’ close and elemental relationship with Buddhism, which cuts across all class and tribal lines. This temple is home to a great number of acolytes, many of them from the north of the country, where the opportunities are fewer, or from the highland tribes that dot this landscape. This morning you will be leaving offerings of food at the temple. Your guide will have bundles for you to give to one of the monks, who will receive them and then chant a blessing, his and his acolyte’s voices echoey in the drafty reception hall.
On the way down the mountain, look to your right at the small food stands, where the penitent stop to buy packets of rice to distribute to the long, snaking chains of young monks now descending the mountainside, their iron begging bowls held in front of them; the food they collect is taken back to the temple and divided. There is something stirring about this sight, about the realization that even when the country was at its poorest—or now, just a few miles from the Four Seasons and the tiny boutiques opening downtown—there were people lining the roads every dawn, waiting to distribute their alms. Feeding the monks is a way of accumulating merit, a sort of good deed that doubles as an act of karmic burnishing.
You’ll be back at the hotel just before 7 a.m., with time for breakfast (the fried rice is particularly good) and a shower before meeting your guide again at 9 for the 45-minute drive north of town to the tribal villages. One feels in Chiang Mai the same sense of pride, of noblesse oblige, that one senses in other ancient cities with wealthy, royal pasts, like, say, Jaipur and Kyoto; this is a storied place. The city was founded in 1296 as the capital of Lanna Thai, the first independent kingdom in northern Thailand. An important trading post, it was annexed to Burma in 1558 and remained under Burmese rule until 1775, when it was reunited with the Thai kingdom. As you push uphill through wisps of torn clouds, it’s not difficult to see why the land was coveted by so many: The landscape, with its velvety mountains, dense copses of teak trees, and profusion of flowers, looks like a Chinese scroll painting that’s been reinterpreted by Gauguin.
You are on your way to visit two hill tribes—the Lisu and the Karen—of the six that inhabit the northern part of Thailand. Historically nomadic and animist by religion, these tribes have moved around Southeast Asia for centuries, relocating when circumstances force them to do so. Because they are peoples without a state, they have been used as pawns at various points in these countries’ strife-filled recent past. In exchange for their ceasing to grow crops—of which opium had, by the early twentieth century, become the dominant one—and for quitting the age-old but highly destructive practice of slash-and-burn agriculture, the Thai government has subsidized these groups’ villages, promoting them as a tourist attraction. As exploitative as this sounds, there are no true villains here, only an imperfect yet relatively well-intentioned solution to a problem with long-term sociocultural and environmental consequences, as well as a way of providing income to groups that have never fully assimilated, and never will, into their host countries’ societies.
On your way to see the Karen in the village of Mae Mae, your first stop, ask your guide to pause at one of the roadside stands selling rice steamed in a tube of bamboo. The rice—once peeled from the wood—is gluey and sticky-sweet and immensely satisfying. Buy another portion for the road or a quick lunchtime snack; by the time you drive past on your way back down the valley, they’ll probably be sold out. There are about 400,000 Karen in Thailand today, of which the Padaung, the group you’ll be meeting, are probably the most famous. This community consists of 12 families, whose girls and young women sit at their looms, making their people’s signature loose-woven, bi-color shawls and scarves, which cost around $10. Underfoot, small children—the girls wearing thick leg and arm bangles of beaten silver—and roosters play and squawk. During the day, these are villages without men—they must go down-valley for work.
Your next stop, about 20 minutes downhill, will be to visit the Lisu tribe. Relative newcomers to Thailand, they arrived in 1921 and are of Chinese-Tibetan descent. Here, large families live in bamboo houses, the men in vivid, mismatched pants and shirts, some of the women wearing their tribe’s signature palette of green as bright as a beetle’s carapace, black, and blue. Around you will cluster children selling woven-thread bracelets, while around them snuffle well-fed pigs and glossy black chickens.
Driving back to town just before noon, make a quick stop at Mae Malai Market for a glimpse of where the local people do their food shopping. You can either assemble a meal from what’s for sale here—including papayas as long as your forearm, large trapezoids of fresh-harvested honeycomb, and a wide selection of roasted grubs, grasshoppers, ant’s egg sacs, and beetles—or head instead for Tap Tim Grub Ja Oen, a friendly, casual streetside restaurant on the edge of town, for a plate of pad thai followed by another plate of that mango and sticky rice.
By now it’s around two o’clock and the sun will be directly overhead; wait out the worst of the afternoon heat poolside before your guide comes to collect you at 6 p.m. for the half-hour trip to Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep, the town’s holiest shrine, which is set atop the area’s loveliest mountain range, Doi Suthep. The temple can be reached either via its famous 304-step staircase, flanked by balustrades decorated to look like nagas (Hindu-derived serpentine deities), or via a small cable car that zooms you in a smooth diagonal flight toward the upper terrace. The main reason to come to the fourteenth-century Wat Phrathat at sunset (besides the fact that you’ll have it almost entirely to yourself) is to hear the monks chant their nightly sutras, an hour-long ritual that begins at six. As you watch them sitting in one of the most resplendent of the temples, their voices a low and murmuring drone, while above you the sky bleeds from one bruised tone to the next, it is impossible not to feel the pull of centuries, the timelessness of this ancient city and way of life.
You’ll be back in town before eight, and you should have your driver drop you at Dalaabaa, where hot young things go to eat hot Thai food. The restaurant will call you a cab back to your hotel.
Day 4: Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang
You won’t be needing your guide today, but have your driver meet you at around 10 a.m. to spend a couple of hours in Chiang Mai’s quaint downtown, which today is a mix of home furnishings boutiques (owned by expats and locals alike), hostels and cheap backpacker accommodations, and, increasingly, high-end ateliers. Given its historic role as a trading center and the diversity of travelers who have passed through the city, it has always been known as a place that values craftsmanship—a reputation that remains unchanged centuries later. Your driver will drop you off on Nimmanhaemin Road, which abounds with great shops, including Sib Song Pahna, a dusty little storefront whose glass cases contain such treasures as woven-silver clutches and old Burmese gold beads, and, across the street, Studio Naenna, which sells locally woven silk ikats in updates of traditional patterns.
Just be sure to tear yourself away by noon so you’ll have time for a quick bite at nearby La Muang before returning to your hotel to do some last-minute packing. You’ll be picked up again at 2:15 p.m. for the 20-minute drive to the airport to catch your hour-long flight to Luang Prabang, which departs at 3:20. Before you leave Thailand, however, make sure the ticket agent has given you three forms: one for a Laotian visa, one for customs, and one for arrival and departure. Be certain, too, that you have a passport photo with you and that, by the time you land, you have all of your forms filled out.
It’s easy to see why so many nationalities—the Thai, the Chinese, the French, the Americans—found their way to Laos, and not just for its hushed beauty. Bordered by China to the north, Myanmar and Thailand to the west, Vietnam to the east, and Cambodia to the south, this strategically located landlocked Communist country (and former kingdom) of six million has seen much of the region’s unhappy recent history of war and colonization played out on its turf. Despite its difficult past, however, Luang Prabang (which has just 30,000 people) resembles the fantasy of a sleepy Southeast Asian town, a fact not lost on UNESCO, which in 1995 declared LP (as it is called) a World Heritage Site and oversaw the restoration of the city’s French colonial houses and 33 temples. So far, despite the tourists (now 125,000 a year and overwhelmingly of the backpacker persuasion), LP remains free of the tackier effects of globalization—although souvenir shops are beginning to appear on Xieng Thong Road, the town’s main drag.
By about 5:30, you’ll have checked in to the 3 Nagas, owned by a French-Canadian architect who’s lived in LP for the past decade. After you’re settled, go for a short stroll through the northern part of town. Along the way, you’ll admire the lovely old houses—their distinctive peaked roofs and wood-shuttered windows shaded by monkeypod, banana, and trumpet flower trees—as well as the effortless tranquillity that the place exudes, as if in defiance of a painful past. You’ll pass novice monks plucking at guitars, children playing in the gathering gloom, and then, one street down from your inn, the wide, pale expanse of the Nam Khan River, a tributary that feeds into the Mekong.
Continue along the river—but for the occasional buzzing motorbike, the streets are so quiet you could walk down their centers—to Apsara, another of the town’s inn/restaurants. Try the lemongrass-stuffed river fish for two with a side of the country’s main crop, sticky rice—here a marbled blend of red, white, and black short grains—before crashing in your four-poster bed back at the hotel.
Day 5: Luang Prabang
You’ll rise with the sun today—or at least with the roosters owned by the inn’s neighbors, who get going at around 4:30 in the morning—and have breakfast downstairs on the umbrella-shaded patio outside the main house. At 8:30, your guide will meet you for the 45-minute drive to the Elephant XL Camp and Lodge. Wear long pants and sturdy shoes—you’ll be walking today along unpaved roads—and pack your swimsuit as well.
Once at the camp’s headquarters, you’ll descend a steep flight of steps to board a bamboo raft for the three-minute ride across the river. After disembarking, you’ll take a seven-minute walk up a rutted incline that will open onto a clearing, where you’ll find the camp’s five elephants, all of whom used to be employed as logging beasts.
After visiting with the elephants, stop by the restroom (you won’t see another one until lunch) and then you’re off to the Kuang Si waterfall, another 45-minute drive. At the park entrance, your guide will have bought a snack—a plate of watermelon, perhaps—for you to enjoy at the summit. The beginning of the park holds two unusual attractions. The first is a caged playground with ten Asiatic black bears that were discovered in the forest above and rescued from poachers. Just up the path from them is an even rarer sight—a young Asian tiger, found as a sick and hairless cub who had already passed through several traders’ hands.
Your hike up to the falls continues from here, the way marked by a succession of natural swimming pools, each a milky, inviting sapphire and each accompanied by a plashing waterfall. At the second pool, about a ten-minute hike from the tiger, wiggle into your swimsuit in the changing stall and take a quick dip before moving one tier up, where two stepped pools are joined by a small waterfall. Another ten minutes up is the real cascade, a glorious 200-foot-high churn of water frothing into a pool of cloudy opal. Here you’ll stop and enjoy your snack before climbing to one of the pools closer to the top of the falls. You’ll exit the park via a paved road, a smooth-going downhill that allows you to concentrate on the jungle’s bounty, the exuberant sprays of white ginger that pierce the air like torches.
By now it’s 2 p.m. and you’ll be hungry. You’ll be eating like a king tonight (really), so have your guide drop you off for a simple meal at Boungnasouk Guesthouse and Restaurant, where you can devour fried Mekong perch and sticky rice while overlooking the Nam Khan, before heading back to your hotel for a short rest. As the sky darkens, venture out to the town’s Night Market, which is held from 5 to 10 p.m. seven days a week. The market is easy to find: Simply head west on Xiang Thong, past the Royal Palace Museum (on your right), until you reach a stretch of street filled with vendors selling silk shawls of varying quality, piecework bags, and quilts in Hmong patterns.
After exploring the market, loop back toward your hotel, wandering in and out of the increasingly sophisticated shops that line the street—selling silk and other textiles, beads, and jewelry—on the way to your eight o’clock dinner at the 3 Nagas. The chef here is famous for his traditional Laotian food as well as his re-creations of court food; the grilled buffalo meat is particularly good, but save room for the bliss-inducing pumpkin-and-pandanum crème brûlée, whose shattery crust is a delicious pistachio green. Try to resist that second cup of silty, rich espresso; you’re getting up at five tomorrow morning.
Day 6: Luang Prabang to Hanoi
Your guide will meet you downstairs at 5:30 a.m., and then you’re off to a spot five minutes outside the center of town, where you’ll climb out of the car onto an anonymous street, the air dark and quiet around you. On the curb beside you will be a few old women, each holding a bamboo basket of steamed rice identical to the one your guide has just handed you. You are here to feed the procession of monks from the town’s 33 temples, all of whom make a long zigzag through town every morning to collect the day’s food. At 5:45 a.m., a gong from the nearby temple will sound, a sign that the monks are near.
A few moments later, you’ll see them—two long chains of robed monks coming from both directions, each carrying his own metal begging bowl. As they pass before you, you’ll place a portion of rice into each bowl. More than a hundred monks will file by, from barely teenaged boys with patches of acne to wizened men leaning on their canes, all clad in orange robes, their faces implacable and silent. The only noises will be the roosters around you scrabbling in the dirt and the murmurings of the old women to your left and right. By 6:15, the sky will have lightened and the monks will be off to other parts of town (you’ll see them again later this morning, moving down tourist-clogged Xiang Thong and collecting their food as tourists snap photographs and point), so it’s back to your hotel for breakfast.
At 8 a.m., your guide returns, this time to take you to LP’s highest point, Mount Phousi, reached via 328 steep stairs. The reward is a panoramic view of the city—its mountaintops, smoldering with fire from a recently burned field; the river; the clean, modest web of streets. The stupa at Phousi’s top, That Chomsi, not only is one of the city’s most prized but also sits, incongruously, adjacent to the remains of war—an old Russian-made mounted machine gun. (During the Vietnam War, this peak served as the town’s lookout point.)
Then it’s back down the stairs and across the street to the Royal Palace Museum, whose magnificently mirrored temple is in the process of being restored by UNESCO. Inside, pass the Russian-made sculpture of the country’s beloved penultimate king, Sisavang Vong (1885–1959), that looms over the courtyard, skip the collection of royal memorabilia, and head straight for the sensational throne room, whose every wall glitters with murals fashioned from chips of colored Japanese glass. On the way out, make a quick stop in the library to look at the picture of the last king, Sisavang Vatthana, who was sent to a re-education camp in 1975 with his wife when the Communists took over—and never returned. (Pressing your guide about this will result in much nervous tittering.)
By 10 a.m., you’re on the move again, this time to Wat Xieng Thong. After wandering the small grounds for a while, meander solo back down Xieng Thong Road, stopping for a lunch of steamed fish and watermelon juice at Three Elephants before you’re retrieved once more at 1:45 p.m. for your flight to Hanoi.
Too soon, you’re bidding good-bye to LP, and about 80 minutes after leaving Laos on your three o’clock flight, you’re landing in Hanoi, Vietnam’s prized and stately ancient northern city. If LP is sleepy and simple, content with a bit of hard-earned rest and peace, Hanoi and in fact all of Vietnam prickle with a palpable energy, ambition, and impatience, a combination that will come as a surprise to anyone whose familiarity with the country consists of impressions from the 1970s. While Hanoi may not be the country’s most royal or fiercely commercial city, Vietnam’s capital is arguably its most distinguished, one whose three million citizens are proud of their thousand-year-old history and lovely streets.
By now it’s about five o’clock, perfect for a sunset walk around picturesque Hoan Kiem Lake, which lies only a few minutes from your hotel, the Sofitel Metropole. This is the best time to stroll the area: The temperatures are kinder, the crowds fewer, and the walkways filled with local couples and families. On the northern side of the lake, veer west into the tangled alleys of the Old Quarter (which you’ll be exploring in greater depth tomorrow); or check out the streets behind your hotel, where you’ll find superlative embroidered linens at Chi Vang and beautiful French and Chinese objets next door at Kinh Bac Art. Then it’s time for dinner: Grab a taxi for the $3 ride to Quan An Ngon Restaurant, a rollicking no-frills place south of the Old Quarter.
Day 7: Hanoi
After breakfast, meet your guide at nine o’clock and head to your first stop of the day, Ba Dinh Square, the Hanoi equivalent of Tiananmen Square. It was here that Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s independence in 1945, and it is here that he is now buried—in a mausoleum whose architectural style might best be characterized as genera-totalitarian, with its heavy, windowless cement facade and resolutely gray palette. Although viewing the body of “Uncle Ho” is a surprisingly low-key and even slightly disappointing experience—as anyone familiar with visiting the embalmed remains of famous ideologues can attest—what’s perhaps more revealing is Ho Chi Minh’s house, which he had built in 1954, after independence had been achieved. Significantly, he chose a site behind the rococo 1901 Presidential Palace, which is now painted a sunny, likeable yellow but in those heady early days of Ho’s Viet Minh government was surely a loathed symbol of the country’s various centuries under colonial rule, from the Chinese (111 b.c. to a.d. 938) to the French (1858 to 1954, the end of the First Indochina War), and then again under the Americans.
Unlike other famously charismatic megalomaniacs, Ho, who spent the greater part of his young adulthood in France and Russia before returning in 1941 to unite his homeland’s splintered Socialist groups, really did live as parsimoniously as he preached; the house in which he resided from 1958 to 1969, raised on stilts in imitation of the hill tribe style, is spartan and modest, as is the nearby bomb shelter with its ingenious back entrance.
It is difficult to understate the continued affection that the people of Vietnam have for Ho, particularly in the country’s north. The staircase to his house is invariably clogged with Vietnamese, young and old, many from the countryside, who come to this site in pilgrimage, giggling as they jostle in line but reverent as they pass his simple cot. (Even my sparky, sassy guide grew solemn when talking about Ho: “He is like a parent to us,” she told me.)
Now it’s 10:30 a.m. and you’re on your way back to the Old Quarter for a walking tour of the tiny threading alleyways forbidden to cyclos. Meandering through these streets will make you further appreciate Vietnam’s relatively laissez-faire approach to communism, for although the French were tossed out, evidence of their influence is everywhere: in the beautifully maintained two- and three-story structures painted shades of mint green and butter, their walls banked with bougainvillea, and of course in the excellent coffee, which the Vietnamese drink in a condensed brew (the Viet Minh may have been against the French regime, but they knew a good thing when they tasted it).
Like many cities with a long and scholarly past, Hanoi is a café culture, and the streets are clogged with coffee stalls. By noon, the heat will begin to press on you, but no worry: You’re off to meet your cyclo driver, who will take you through the Old Quarter again, bypassing the streets that are closed to cyclos (like the ones you just walked) but moving you at a leisurely clip down the quarter’s wide boulevards. You’ll pass homegrown pho stands, where the patrons sit curbside on low plastic chairs, and ride around the food market, where vendors scoop sizzling spring roll cigars out of seething pots of oil. An hour later, your cyclo driver (tip him $2) will drop you off at your car, which will drive you to Thang Long, which Hanoi foodies swear makes the city’s best cha ca, the scrumptious national dish of fish in a turmeric-dill sauce.
After lunch you’re on the move again, this time to the eleventh-century Temple of Literature, the country’s first university. A series of five courtyards arranged in the Confucian style, it is a reminder of China’s profound influence on Vietnam: Even the form of Buddhism that the Vietnamese practice, Mahayana, came to them via China in the second century a.d., tempered by heavy doses of Confucianism. Besides the stunning, highly lacquered red-and-gold temple sanctuary, the other thing worth lingering over is the 82 stone stelae, each mounted on a large stone turtle, in the third courtyard. The stelae list every candidate for the state examinations between 1442 and 1779, as well as details about each successful scholar.
A short drive takes you to the three o’clock show at the Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre (tell your guide to get you a seat in the first ten rows). Water puppet theater, in which the puppeteers stand behind a scrim, chest-deep in water, manipulating their charges along the pool’s surface, is one of Vietnam’s most charming forms of folk performance. You’ll be out just before four, and then it’s back to your hotel for a short rest before an early dinner—you have an outrageous call time tomorrow morning. Eat tonight at one of Hanoi’s hippest restaurants, the pan-Asian Wild Lotus, for a taste of the region strained through a Vietnamese sieve.
Day 8: Hoi An
Although it’s still dark—after all, it is 4 a.m.—you’re already on your way to the airport for your hour-long 5:30 a.m. flight to Da Nang, in Vietnam’s stately, artistic central region, where you’ll be spending the next two days. After a one-hour drive from Da Nang to the UNESCO World Heritage Site town of Hoi An, you’ll be checking into the Anantara Hoi An (formerly Life Resort)—a briskly run Dutch-owned hotel—at around 8 a.m. Rest up before meeting your guide at ten.
It’s been a long day already, but any jangled nerves will soon be soothed by decorous Hoi An, through whose quiet, picturesque streets you’ll now walk. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the town, which has 88,000 residents, was an essential trading hub, a crossroads for Japanese, Dutch, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese merchants, whose goods passed through this port town on the South China Sea.
For many people, however, Hoi An means one thing: tailoring. The town has long had a reputation for its excellent tailors and seamstresses as well as its variety of silks. If you want something custom-made (or copied), head first to Yaly, where they can make virtually anything using either your own pre-purchased fabric or something from their wide selection. The initial measuring and consultation will take about half an hour.
After that, it’s time for the 90-minute drive south to My Son, site of the central region’s most famous ruins. Thought to date from as early as the fourth century (although most of the structures were built several hundred years later), this temple complex and burial ground is the largest and best-preserved site of the Champa civilization, an Indian dynasty that dominated the south and central parts of Vietnam through the tenth century (the north, as you saw at Hanoi’s Temple of Literature, was ruled and influenced by the Chinese).
By the 1400s, the Champa had been conquered by the native Viets, and the temples were abandoned until the 1880s, when the site was rediscovered by French archaeologists, who categorized the structures into ten groups. The most fascinating and best-preserved are in Group B, where you can see Hinduism twining with Buddhism—the icons of both religions carved into the same building, Shiva sitting alongside Buddha. During the war, My Son was given new meaning by the Vietcong, who used its buildings as a base camp; ask your guide to show you one of the B-52 craters, now overgrown with flowers and luscious greenery, one of the country’s many scars of war made benign by nature’s inexorable march.
You’ll be back in Hoi An by one o’clock, with the afternoon free to wander the streets by yourself, ducking in and out of the shops selling elaborately beaded silk handbags and tribal silver jewelry. After a lunch of banana flower salad at the Cargo Club—the top floor’s a little cooler—head up Hoang Van Thu, make a right on Tran Phu, and stroll a block and a half to the Phuc Kien Assembly Hall, built in the late sixteenth century by Hoi An’s Chinese. Walk through the picturesque courtyard to the temple sanctuary itself, whose ceiling is hung with oversized spirals of smoldering incense and which pays homage to the Goddess of the Sea, an important protector for the town’s inhabitants. Then continue down Tran Phu until you run into the northern edge of the market, where you’ll find everything from bamboo utensils to shining coils of rice noodles.
If you’ve had tailoring done, you’ll probably need to stop by Yaly again at around four o’clock to have a fitting and make adjustments, all of which can be completed on the spot. (The store is open until 10 p.m., so you can always come back after dinner.) As night falls, lanterns are lit throughout Hoi An, heightening its native romance, the kind light making blurred reflections on the Thu Bon River. Walk along the water for a while before grabbing a riverview table at the Banana Leaf Café, then cap off the day with a short stroll back to your hotel.
Day 9: Hue to Ho Chi Minh City
After breakfast, meet your car at 11 a.m. for the two-hour drive to Hue, which from 1802 to 1945 was the imperial seat of the Nguyen dynasty. Although it was the scene of one of the Vietnam War’s bloodiest incidents—the 1968 Tet Offensive, which all but decimated the city—there is something dreamy and untouched about Hue; perhaps it is the gentle, misting rain that seems always to be falling here, or the wide streets surrounding the Perfume River, or even the languorous pace, but it is easy to fool yourself into believing that this is a place that managed to slumber through the country’s recent unhappinesses, awakening blissfully unaware that the world around it had changed forever.
After a quick early lunch at the vegetarian restaurant Dong Tam, it’s off to your first stop of the day, the city’s prized Citadel, a once-spectacular (and now glossily restored) nineteenth-century compound built for Emperor Gia Long in the Chinese style. You’ll enter through the south gate, which has separate doors for the emperor, his mandarins, and the royal elephants.
By now it’s 2:30 and you’re back in the car for the 20-minute drive to the royal mausoleums, which lie south of the city, in a valley cupped by low hills that is almost eerie in its beauty. Fog, gentle as smoke, wisps through the massive mausoleums, all rigorously planned by the Nguyen rulers during their lifetime. Of the three main monuments—each of which consists of a temple, a tomb, and a stela—the loveliest is the one dedicated to Tu Duc (ruled 1847–83). Every dynasty has its ruler (or two) who would rather be doing something other than exercising his kingly powers, and Tu Duc, an artistic and largely ineffectual poet-ruler, was the Nguyens’ black sheep. His complex, surrounded by trees and overlooking a pond out of a Chinese watercolor, is all but a plea for tranquillity, a dream house for a dream life that could never be.
Your next stop, which you’ll reach at around 4:30, is the Thien Mu Pagoda. Although this 1601 Buddhist temple and monastery is the city’s oldest, it’s best known for a sensational bit of recent history: In 1963, one of its monks, Thich Quang Duc, self-immolated in protest against President Diem’s religious repression. The photograph of the monk calmly sitting in the middle of the street, his form blurred by the raging flames, became one of the most horrific and iconic images of the war and helped hasten Diem’s downfall. (When told of the monk’s sacrifice, Diem’s sister-in-law, first lady Madame Nhu, responded, “If the Buddhists wish to have more barbecues, I will be happy to supply the fuel.”) It’s especially chilling to come upon the rust-speckled powder-blue Austin automobile that filled the background of the photo, here placed behind a low gate, an innocuous object that evokes terrible memories. Before you leave, wander back to the sanctuary, where novice monks, their heads shaved but for a thick fringe of bangs, watch the faithful pray.
At five, you’ll leave for dinner and take a short drive to Tha Om, an exactingly restored Chinese Mandarin-style house—really, a series of open-air pagodas, each connected with wooden walkways—that looks into a small, lush garden. The beauty of the house, with its orchid-heavy trees, is eclipsed only by the meal you’ll be served in the fit-for-a-scholar/king parlor: a seven-course feast prepared for you by owner Vinh Tu’s gracious wife, the descendant of a royal concubine. Linger over your meal, which is accompanied by a souvenir fan on whose leaves the menu is elegantly scripted, before finishing your day with a nightcap of thick Vietnamese coffee at Cafe Xua, whose garden sparkles with dozens of tiny lights. It’s the perfect way to say good-bye to this gentle town before you leave for your 80-minute 8:50 p.m. flight to the bustle of Ho Chi Minh City, where you’ll be met and escorted to your hotel, the Park Hyatt Saigon.
Day 10: Ho Chi Minh City
After Hue, Ho Chi Minh City (referred to by locals as Saigon with equal frequency) can feel like a shock to the system. If Hanoi is Beijing, Saigon (whose population hovers at just over six million) is definitely Shanghai—all glitz and speed and unabashed, often ingenious, capitalism. You’ll be eating a late lunch, so indulge at breakfast (the pho here is excellent) and then meet your guide at 8 a.m. for the 75-minute drive to Cu Chi, which you’ll reach before the tour buses do.
Even in the annals of resistance stories, the small village of Cu Chi is exceptional. Its people began digging the web of tunnels that runs beneath the land in the 1940s, during the French occupation. In the Vietnam War, it became a Vietcong stronghold, and by 1965, the people of Cu Chi had burrowed an astonishing 125 miles of tunnels, some only 31 inches wide. During raids or when Americans were nearby, everyone would scramble belowground, while above, enemy soldiers would find themselves in a suddenly abandoned jungle. Not surprisingly—as the short, fascinating propaganda film you should watch before entering the jungle proves—the farmers and peasants of Cu Chi became fierce warriors; later, you’ll pass a display of various homemade booby traps that the residents designed and laid themselves. Fashioned largely from bamboo and recycled iron, they’re inelegant in design but look fantastically painful in practice.
No matter your feelings about the Vietnam War, walking through this village turned living museum is an unsettling experience, a sensation heightened by the various tableaux—plastic full-size models of VC warriors listening to the radio or writing a letter home or sharpening their bayonets—that appear every few yards or so; it’s a little like a theme park for death. Still, one can’t help but admire the villagers’ ingenuity, not to mention their tolerance for uncomfortable circumstances: If, and only if, you’re not claustrophobic, you can follow a park guide down into one of the tunnels, where you’ll walk in a low crouch for about 150 feet before emerging into the sunshine. Clawing your way out of the tunnel, sweaty and gasping for air, your heart racing, you’ll wonder how people bore living in them, sometimes for days, waiting for the all-clear signal.
By 10:30 you’re back in the car for the 90-minute drive to the second of the area’s great oddities: Tay Ninh, birthplace of the Cao Dai sect and home to its principal cathedral. Founded in 1920, the religion, which worships a universal god, is a pick-and-choose blend of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, with scraps of Islam and Catholicism thrown in for good measure. Its adherents have been shrinking in number ever since the war—after President Diem attempted to take over the sect’s territory, their founder fled to Cambodia, where he died—and many of the remaining faithful are now quite elderly.
You’ll enter the temple at noon to catch the beginning of the daily 45-minute religious ceremonies. From the observation deck, you’ll look down at the white-robed parishioners sitting on the geometrically tiled floors and be convinced that you’re in a mosque. Then you’ll look up to the star-spangled ceiling and think of a Catholic church, or to the pillars roped with writhing dragons and feel you’re in a Taoist temple, albeit a particularly exuberant one. The monks, all old men, prostrate themselves in unison with the congregation, while a band of musicians makes a whining cacophony with their zithers in the background. The entire experience is gloriously bizarre.
Back in town around 2:15, grab lunch at the Temple Club, then take a trip to Ben Thanh, where you’ll say good-bye to your guide for the day. Cholon Market in Chinatown may make for a nice stroll, but many things there have to be bought in bulk, meaning souvenir shopping is difficult. Ben Thanh, however, is where Vietnamese and tourists alike come to do their marketing. A hangar-sized (and very stuffy) structure, it’s crammed with stalls selling everything from woven-bamboo baskets to glitter-covered shoes, spangled bags to silk.
Leaving at 5 p.m. or so, take a $2 taxi back to your hotel, drop off your haul, then walk around the corner to the sweet L’Apothiquaire spa, where a manicure, pedicure, and 75-minute massage or facial will set you back only $43. Return to the hotel in time to change before dinner at the sophisticated and gracious Nam Phan.
Day 11: Ho Chi Minh City to Siem Reap
Meet your guide downstairs at 7 a.m. for the 15-minute drive to the Reunification Palace, the site where in the 1960s and ‘70s first President Diem’s government and then Nguyen Van Thieu’s rose and fell. Inside, the palace, which was completed in 1966, is outfitted with a mix of high-sixties swing (shag rugs, pineapple-shaped sconces, an Eamesian chartreuse-and-orange palette), earnest chinoiserie (club chairs upholstered in stitched gold silk), and Cold War paranoia. On the roof, just outside an open-air entertainment parlor that wouldn’t be out of place in a Robert Evans movie, is a sign marking the spot where, in 1975, a South Vietnamese pilot (and Vietcong spy) flew a suicide mission into the palace; his crash caused no major damage, but three weeks later, on April 30, a tank burst through the palace’s gates, ending the Vietnam War.
Back at the hotel by 8:30, have breakfast before being picked up again at 10 a.m. for the half-hour drive to the airport and the hour-long 11:40 flight to Siem Reap, Cambodia. Siem Reap is, depending on how you look at it, either Southeast Asia’s great success story or a cautionary tale in the making. As you settle into your room at the terrifically chic and sleek Hotel de la Paix, you’ll find it hard to believe that it was only 14 years ago that Cambodia opened its doors to tourists, and only a decade ago that the area surrounding Angkor, the series of temples you’ll be visiting today, was fully cleared of land mines. Today, this city of 900,000 hosts some million tourists a year in its more than a hundred hotels. On the positive side, this means that Siem Reap’s booming service industry provides jobs for people from across the country, but on the other hand, such rapid growth also means that the city itself is quickly becoming overrun.
After lunch at the Paix’s excellent restaurant, Meric—go for the Cambodian food—meet your guide in the lobby at 2:30 for your first trip to Angkor Wat, the country’s greatest treasure. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Angkor is not one temple but more than a hundred, constructed during various eras of the Angkor dynasty (a.d. 802–1431), Cambodia’s golden age. Your first stop today is the thirteenth-century Angkor Thom, a massive city-state and the Angkor kings’ greatest triumph. You’ll enter at the south gate, which, like the complex’s other four entrances, is preceded by a long, grand stone bridge over a moat, on either side of which stand two rows of giant carved statues. On the left are 54 gods, on the right are 54 demons, and together they depict the myth of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, which your guide will explain.
From here, you’ll walk down the causeway into Bayon, Angkor Thom’s spiritual (and literal) center and the site of Cambodia’s single most famous sculptures: the carved heads that decorate all four sides of each of the temple’s 54 towers. Some of these enigmatic faces—their mouths curved into the suggestion of a smile, their eyes blank, their expressions somewhere between beatific and fearsome—have aged better than others over the centuries, but even the ones traced with lichen and chipped away by war and nature are spellbinding. The most famous and best-preserved sit on the second floor, from where you can explore the temple’s interior, an interlocking labyrinth of rooms and wide hallways in which are, occasionally, Buddhist shrines, their candles wavering in the thin light. Before you, the rest of Angkor Thom stretches out, a city of ghosts. You’ll leave via the North Exit and walk past the Terrace of the Elephants, once used for ceremonies and as a platform for the king’s speeches.
Back at the hotel by 5 p.m., say good-bye to your guide for the day and walk over to the Night Market, a ten-minute stroll down Sivatha Boulevard from your hotel. Just make sure you’re back in time for a dip in the pool followed by bed; you’ll be up again before you know it.
Day 12: Siem Reap to Bangkok to Home
It’s your last day in Southeast Asia, and so it seems appropriate that you’ll be waking with the monks and the roosters, ready to meet your guide just after 4 a.m. for your half-hour drive up into the hills—past silent, moonlight-washed houses—to visit the monks at the Phnom Krom Pagoda, which overlooks the vast Tonle Sap lake.
Make sure you wear comfortable walking shoes; the temple is accessed by a steep set of stairs, followed by a 20-minute uphill walk to the summit. Once in the temple, you’ll have a chance to give the abbot your offering (provided by your guide), as well as to ask him some questions—about his life, or the Buddha’s, or yours, for that matter—before he and a fellow monk break into their morning chants. The ceremony will be finished at around 5:45 a.m., and then you’ll be able to enjoy breakfast (which your guide will bring for you) with a sunrise view on the cliff overlooking the valley below.
By 6:45, you’ll be in the car, heading back to see more of the important temples of Angkor, which you’ll reach by 7:30. Your first stop is the twelfth-century Ta Prohm, surrounded on all sides by deep jungle. It’s not just because there’s no one else in sight at this hour that this temple feels so haunted; it’s the fact that, although UNESCO has begun its renovation work, Ta Prohm remains a spectacular ruin, the last evidence of a civilization lost to time—you think, wandering its rubbled dirt floors, stepping over mammoth tree trunks, of “Ozymandias,” and are reminded how inviolable a great country feels at the height of its power and yet how quickly it can fall into irrelevance.
The most striking aspect of Ta Prohm, however, is the enormous, sinuous trees that seem to snake upward from its rooftops, their long tentacular roots spilling from the structure’s windows and doors like water. Over the years, these trees have grown integral to the temple; destroying them would mean destroying Ta Prohm as well. And so you walk around a place made by man but being reclaimed by nature, another reminder of humankind’s impermanence, as spectacular as our accomplishments may be. Still, all evidence of human ingenuity is not lost: Pay special attention to the bas-reliefs of dancing girls that decorate the temples’ walls; they are some of the finest, the most playful and intricate, you’ll see in the entire Angkor complex.
You’ll leave Ta Prohm just before 9 a.m., as the swarms of tourists begin to descend for the day. Then it’s off for the ten-minute drive to twelfth-century Angkor Wat, probably the most architecturally harmonious and best preserved of the temples. Angkor Wat’s builders surrounded their complex with a wide moat, protecting it from the nearby forest’s creep, and many of its carvings and structural flourishes remain astonishingly intact and vivid, even almost a millennium later. This is particularly true of the stunning friezes that cover the building’s facade: On the southern part of the eastern wing (where you’ll enter), you’ll again see the myth of Churning the Ocean of Milk, here elaborately carved from stone, the gods and demons straining over a sea swarming with alligators.
There is more astounding stonework on the temple’s upper terrace, which is accessed by a dangerously steep, impossibly shallow-stepped staircase that seems to ascend into the sky at a 90-degree angle; stick to the guardrail and climb sideways, like a crab. At the top, take note of the bas-reliefs of dancing girls, each with a different and complicated coiffure, and then head over to the windows for some pictures of the landscape, still mostly tourist-less at this hour. Walking down the wide, symmetrical hallways—the doors and windows offering shadowbox-perfect views of the treetops beyond—you’ll encounter stone bodhisattvas, their heads shaded by tasseled umbrellas.
On your way back to the hotel just after 11 a.m., ask your guide to swing by Eric Raisina’s atelier, where the Paris-trained designer makes and sells strikingly original silk scarves and dresses. Then tuck into a final lunch at Meric around 12:30, followed by a dip in the Paix’s excellent pool. Shoppers will want to hold off on their last-minute packing to take the 15-minute walk to the Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor. It has a number of beautiful stores, including Khmer Attitude, which sells silver and silk pieces by local artisans, and the pricey but very soigné Lotus.
Before you know it, it’s 6:30 p.m. and you’re back in the car heading to the Siem Reap Airport (which looks more like a residential spa than an airport) for your hour-long 8:05 p.m. flight to Bangkok, where you’ll connect to the 12:40 a.m. Thai Airways flight to New York. Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport is brand-new and offers many distractions, but keep an eye on the clock; the distances between gates are significant, and you’ll want to make sure you’re checked in well before the late-night crush. And anyway, you will probably be too dazzled, too dazed, by what you’ve just experienced in the past 12 days—every form of government from kingdoms to Communists, every flavor from spicy to sweet—to lose yourself in window shopping. Instead, you’ll do what I did: sit down and start jotting notes for your next trip back to Southeast Asia.
How to book this trip
Contact Sandy Ferguson at Asia Desk. The cost of the tour described her is $4,960 per person, based on double occupancy. This includes all hotels, breakfasts, a car and driver, guides, and entry fees. Intra-country flights cost a total of $790. This itinerary is only the beginning of what Sandy can arrange, but be aware that embellishments will cost more. And remember: Though Southeast Asia is cheaper in other ways, the costs of luxury accommodations and touring rival those in Europe. Finally, you should expect to pay a nonrefundable $500 deposit toward the cost of your trip before Sandy can confirm any of the arrangements; final payment is due 45 days before departure (Asia Desk does not arrange bookings that cost less than $3,000).
