Award-winning travel writer, Ellie Fazan, explored vibrant Vietnam the ETG way with her son in tow. Here’s her travel story:
“Let’s go! Let’s gooooo!” shouts my baby son in delight from the back of the bicycle. It’s tempting to join him and yell for the pure joy of it, as we whizz through verdant rice paddies on two wheels.
Things become slightly more restrained as we enter Hoi An. The yellow-hued city is a pretty puzzle of highways and byways, with little regard for any kind of traffic laws. When it comes to crossing the road, you just need to take a deep breath and go for it. Once our bikes are safely parked on the edge of the madness, we make our first stop: lunch, so head straight to the Central Market.
Spilling out over several streets it’s a colourful patchwork of exotic fruit and colourful vegetables, punctuated by lurid North Face bags (which are manufactured here and sold everywhere at cut prices). The Vietnamese value fresh ingredients so much that families shop twice daily for their meals, and at some of the street food stands you even see them growing their own herbs in boxes. At the centre of this maze is an undercover food hall where vendors vying for attention. We ate with Mrs. Huong who endearingly told, “Please, I am not lucky today.” Her stall was empty, but despite appearances, she cooked us perhaps our best meal of the holiday, the highlight of which was clams so fresh she sent someone to get them from the nearby seafood market. Served in a clear broth with lime and lemongrass – we’re still talking about it.
If I were to plan things differently, I’d have spent more time in this magical city, and I already plan to come back without boys or baby to shop. Hoi An is a place of craftsmen and women: Japanese artist Saeko Ando lives and works here, making incredibly beautiful art from natural Vietnamese lacquer, a tree sap mixed with natural pigments from plants and minerals, which she applies to bamboo in countless layers and sometimes inlaid with eggshells, mother-of-pearl, and gold leaf. It’s where French photographer Réhahn is based, best known for his colourful photographs of the city. And it’s where the foldable lantern was invented by Huỳnh Văn Ba – and you can still visit his family’s workshop to see them being made.
But as my mum always says, better to leave a party wanting more. And anyway, we have a very important date to keep, at Zannier Bãi San Hô, a six hour drive away (with plenty of stops for roadside banh mi). The last part of the journey is potholed with street-food stalls spilling onto it, a lattice of fish traps abutting the shore. It doesn’t look like it would lead to a five-star property. But then that’s the charm of a Zannier hotel: super luxurious, but with a specific sense of place. Just the kind of place we’re after…
As we arrived, our host Ly, beautifully dressed in a traditional oyster-coloured silk dress, bravely plucked my sticky baby son out of our car. With this simple action, she ushered in a sweet sense of relief after a gloriously chaotic few days in Hoi An. We wandered into the library, where a huge window out over the ocean and cold fresh towels awaited.
We had two glorious villas, a Paddy Field Villas and a Hill Pool Villa which bagged the best view. Other highlights include a vast and heavenly bed, huge standalone bath and infinity pool overlooking the bay. While I wouldn’t describe this as a family resort, they had included a welcome box on our bed which was both thoughtful and playful: it included a family of rubber ducks he delighted racing across the infinity pool, nappies, baby wipes and a children’s toothbrush and toothpaste – all things we’d managed to abandon in the previous places we stayed.
The next morning, we started our day with a buzzy Vietnamese iced coffee topped with a cloud of condensed milk in the main restaurant Nhà ở. High on the hilltop with dramatic views over the infinity pool and sparkling South China Sea, the breakfast was the star of the show. Alongside an incredible spread of everything from cold cuts, cheeses, pastries and fantastic local salads, you can make your own mimosas (passionfruit, mango or raspberry), build your own Bahn Mi or create your own congee, complete with century egg. Meanwhile, in the central courtyard, there’s a live cooking station, where local chefs prepare daily delicacies over coal-fired plates. And the à la carte menu includes American-style pancakes and fragrant pho.
On our final night we snuck down the hill into the village to eat at a local restaurant. This region is famous for its shellfish, and we watched a family fish our supper out of traps in front of us – we sat on red plastic chairs and ate charred prawns with tamarind sauce and clams in lemongrass broth as the sun set behind an ugly concrete bridge and it was fantastic.
After two nights, we left completely rejuvenated and ready for the next part of our adventure: a 12-hour night train to Ho Chi Minh City, still called Saigon by the locals. Now this is a stretch of the journey that everyone told us would be a mistake, but you can’t come to Vietnam and not try the railways, and it ended up being one of the most memorable parts of our journey. When Saigon fell in 1975 and the United States pulled out of Vietnam, the effort to restore this railway was a way of kick-starting the national economy and demonstrating the country’s engineering prowess. The train – connecting Hanoi in the north with Ho Chi Minh City in the south – was named the Reunification Express. Onboard we met a family travelling with two children, their granny, two cats and a dog who’d set up a mobile kitchen in between their bunks. Sid completely fell in love with them, and they fed him dinner. We ate cold noodles piled with herbs and crispy pork fat that we’d bought from a street food stand outside the station. We slept almost through the night, waking up as we pulled into Ho Chi Minh City. It’s a buzzing city, often overlooked or seen as a jumping off point for exploring the Mekong Delta, but it’s a destination in its own right.
Located on lovely leafy Suong Nguyet Anh Street, Fusion Suites Saigon feels a world away from the rest of vibrant District 1. Here, there are plenty of local Vietnamese restaurants, coffee shops and it’s across the road from Tao Dan Park – one of the oldest parks in the city where you can see locals practicing Tai Chi or walking with their birds in the morning. It was also conveniently close to one of the most famous Bahn Mi cafes in the city where we joined a jostling line of locals for a banh mi so big it came with a glove to eat it with. I didn’t need to eat anything else that day, but I’d booked myself in for the chef’s tasting menu at Anan, Vietnam’s only Michelin-starred restaurant. I laughed when one of the courses was a miniature banh mi: the tiny baguette that was one of the crispest, most delicate things I’ve ever eaten, stuffed with paté and wrapped in palma ham.
Among other things – including a fantastical afternoon at the Botanical Gardens – we spent a morning at the Chu Chi Tunnels with a charming local guide called Claude who brought the history of the tunnels to life with emotive storytelling. This year marks 50 years since Saigon fell, and although you see communist flags everywhere this is a country that has left its past in the past. A day exploring the Mekong Delta is a reminder that an arable way of life predominates here, but the cities of Vietnam are youthful, dynamic and modern. We got exactly what we wanted from our journey but ten days wasn’t enough time here. Vietnam is a fascinating country and we’re already planning our next adventure.
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