Leaving Saigon, we spent the next two and half days exploring the Mekong River Delta, traveling southwest to Can Tho and then northwest to Chau Doc, sometimes by boat and sometimes by bus, before taking a “speed boat” up the river into Cambodia, arriving in Phnom Penh. Along the way, we traveled by tourist boat to a landing where we walked along a rural neighborhood built into the jungle, surrounded by flowering plants, fruit gardens, a...

Ho Chi Minh City—still widely known as Saigon: airport codes, business names, our guide’s casual references—has become a major international city, population 8 million, full of gleaming high rises and such modern amenities as McDonald’s (the first ones in Vietnam) and 7Eleven. English and French are on many signs, instead of or in addition to Vietnamese. Walking around HCMC is not that dissimilar to walking around London. We arriv...

After departing Huế, we drove south for a lunch stop in Da Nang, Viet Nam’s fourth largest city, passing through a new six-mile tunnel financed and built by the Japanese government along the way. (It’s important to note that a time when the US is trying to become more isolationist, China and Japan are investing in infrastructure in developing countries with growing economies). According to Yang, our guide, Da Nang has seen explosive investment gr...

Our Sunday in Huế [pronounced hwě] began with another cyclo ride along the Perfume River and around the ancient city fortress, a 19th Century citadel with thick stone walls and a moat which encircles Imperial City. Huế has an ancient history and was long the center of earlier dynasties dating back several centuries and was the seat of the imperial government until 1945, during the time of the French protectorate, when the emperor abdicated and Hu...

On Friday, after exploring a bit more of Hà Nội, we headed for Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Sight where we embarked on an overnight voyage aboard the Dragon Legend small cruise ship, barely large enough to hold our group of 30. Ha Long, which means “descending dragon,” is an area of about 500 square miles of ocean which surrounds about 2,000 small islands or limestone karsts. Some of the largest islands maintain small communities, but mos...