Vietnam

Bac Ha Market: Bac Ha is a small highland town northeast of Sapa known almost entirely for one thing: its Sunday market, one of the largest and most colorful ethnic minority markets in northern Vietnam, drawing Flower Hmong, Tay, and other communities from surrounding villages who come to trade livestock, produce, textiles, and household goods. The Flower Hmong's brightly patterned clothing, more vivid than the indigo worn by Hmong groups further west, is a visual signature of the market and distinguishes Bac Ha from Sapa's markets. Outside the Sunday market, Bac Ha is a much quieter, less developed town than Sapa, with far less tourist infrastructure, and most visitors treat it as a single-day or overnight add-on to a northern Vietnam loop specifically to catch market day rather than an extended base.

Bát Tràng: Bat Trang is a centuries-old ceramics village on the outskirts of Hanoi, producing pottery continuously since at least the 14th-15th century using clay historically sourced from the Red River delta. It's the most famous pottery-producing village in northern Vietnam, and its narrow lanes are lined with kilns, workshops, and a large indoor-outdoor ceramics market selling everything from mass-produced tourist souvenirs to genuinely fine hand-painted traditional pieces. Most visitors come specifically to try their hand at the potter's wheel, workshops here offer inexpensive walk-in sessions where you can shape and paint your own simple piece, fired and ready for pickup or shipping a few days later. Beyond the hands-on activity, the village's older lanes still show traditional architecture built partly from discarded ceramic shards and coal-ash bricks, a distinctive local building material born of the pottery industry itself.

Ben Tre is known as Vietnam's coconut kingdom, sitting amid the delta's most extensive coconut groves and built on an economy of coconut candy, coir rope, and coconut-wood handicrafts that visitors typically see demonstrated in small family workshops along the riverbanks. It has a notably slower, greener character than My Tho, with narrower canals shaded by coconut palms rather than the more open river channels further along the delta. The town also carries a heavier weight of wartime history than many delta towns; it was a stronghold of resistance during the war and suffered significant destruction, a history acknowledged more quietly here than at Ho Chi Minh City's War Remnants Museum. Most visitors come for a half-day or full-day boat and bicycle tour through the coconut groves, a rowboat trip on a narrow canal, and a stop at a coconut candy workshop, a gentler, less rushed version of the standard Mekong river circuit.

Can Tho is the largest city in the Mekong Delta and the region's main hub, sitting on the Hau River (a branch of the Mekong) and serving as the base for the delta's best-known floating market, Cai Rang, where wholesalers trade fruit and vegetables boat-to-boat, each boat hanging a sample of its cargo from a tall pole so buyers can spot it from a distance. The market has shrunk somewhat over the decades as roads have made land transport more competitive with river trade, but it remains a genuine working market rather than a staged show, provided you arrive early enough to see it in full swing. Beyond the floating market, Can Tho's own city center has a pleasant riverside promenade, a night market, and access to the delta's canal network for smaller boat trips into orchards and rural villages, a quieter counterpoint to the crowded main market. Most visitors base here for one or two nights specifically to catch Cai Rang at dawn before continuing on through the delta toward Chau Doc or back to Ho Chi Minh City.

Cat Ba Island: Cat Ba is the largest island in the Ha Long Bay area and serves as a quieter, more independent-traveler-friendly base than Ha Long City for exploring the region's karst seascape, particularly Lan Ha Bay, an extension of Ha Long Bay to the south with arguably calmer water and fewer crowds. About half the island is protected as Cat Ba National Park, with hiking trails through limestone forest and the chance, though a genuinely rare one, of spotting the critically endangered Cat Ba langur, found nowhere else on Earth. Cat Ba Town itself is a modest harbor town that has grown quickly to serve backpackers and boat-tour travelers, with a beach strip (Cat Co beaches) a short walk or motorbike ride from the center. Most visitors combine a day or two based here with boat trips into Lan Ha Bay for kayaking, swimming, and floating village visits, often as a lower-key, less crowded alternative to a straight Ha Long Bay cruise from the mainland.

Chau Doc sits at the delta's edge near the Cambodian border, on the Bassac River, and functions both as a genuine Mekong river town and as the standard departure or arrival point for the popular boat route between Vietnam and Cambodia via the Mekong, making it more transit-oriented for some visitors than a pure destination in itself. The town has a distinctive multicultural mix, ethnic Vietnamese, Khmer, Cham, and Chinese communities all present, most visibly in the Cham fishing village across the river, reachable by a short boat crossing, with its stilt houses and a mosque reflecting the community's Muslim faith, a notable contrast to the Buddhist and folk-religion majority elsewhere in the delta. Chau Doc is also known for floating fish farms (cages suspended beneath houseboats) and Sam Mountain just outside town, a pilgrimage site dotted with temples and pagodas that draws Vietnamese visitors especially around Lunar New Year.

Da Lat sits at roughly 1,500 meters in the Central Highlands, and its cool climate, genuinely cool, sometimes chilly at night, is the whole reason it exists as a destination: French colonists built it as a hill-station retreat from lowland heat in the early 1900s, and that legacy still shows in its villas, a mini Eiffel Tower replica, and a general atmosphere unlike anywhere else in Vietnam. The city's cool climate also makes it Vietnam's flower and vegetable-growing center, with greenhouse farms, strawberry fields, and flower gardens ringing the city that visitors tour by motorbike, alongside a genuinely good coffee-growing region nearby that's turned Da Lat into something of a specialty-coffee hub in recent years. Da Lat leans into a slightly kitschy, romantic reputation domestically, it's a popular honeymoon and couples' getaway for Vietnamese tourists, which shows up in its themed cafes, love-heart photo spots, and attractions like the Crazy House (a surreal, tree-like guesthouse built with no interest in straight lines) and the cable car to Truc Lam Pagoda. Outside the center, waterfalls (Datanla, Elephant Falls, Pongour) and pine forests make it a base for canyoning, hiking, and mountain biking that doesn't exist elsewhere in the country in quite the same way, and the surrounding Central Highlands scenery, pine ridgelines and terraced farms, is worth a scooter day trip on its own. The altitude means packing differently than for the rest of Vietnam: evenings can require a jacket even in summer, and winter nights occasionally dip close to freezing, a genuine surprise for travelers coming from the tropical coast.

Da Nang is central Vietnam's biggest city and increasingly its most livable, a mid-size, well-planned coastal city built around a long stretch of white-sand beach (My Khe, once used by American GIs for R&R) rather than an old town or historic core. It functions mainly as a comfortable base and transit hub, with Hoi An 30 minutes south and Hue about two hours north. The city itself has a handful of standalone attractions: the Marble Mountains, five limestone hills with caves, pagodas, and a lift up to viewing platforms; the Museum of Cham Sculpture, the world's best collection of Cham artifacts and a useful primer before or after visiting My Son; and the Dragon Bridge downtown, whose weekend fire show draws a big crowd of locals and tourists alike. Ba Na Hills, a French-era hill station turned theme park about 45 minutes inland, is the big day-trip draw, mainly for the Golden Bridge, held up by two giant stone hands and genuinely striking in photos, though the site is unapologetically a tourist attraction with a cable car queue and a fantasy village that not everyone finds worth the price. Da Nang's own restaurant and cafe scene has matured fast and now rivals Hoi An's for quality without the tourist markup, and the beach itself, while good, is busier and more built-up with resorts than the quieter stretches further south toward Hoi An.

Duong Lam commune: Duong Lam is a well-preserved ancient village about 50km west of Hanoi, notable for its cluster of centuries-old houses built from laterite, a distinctive reddish-brown volcanic rock quarried locally, giving the village a visual character unlike the brick-and-tile villages more common elsewhere in the Red River Delta. It's recognized as Vietnam's first village-level national historic site, and several of its oldest houses, some over 300 years old, remain lived-in family homes rather than museums, with descendants still occupying them and often happy to show visitors around for a small donation. The village is also notable as the birthplace of two Vietnamese kings, and a temple dedicated to one of them, Phung Hung, sits within the village alongside a communal house (dinh) considered one of the finest traditional wooden communal structures in northern Vietnam. Duong Lam makes an easy half-day trip from Hanoi, often combined with the nearby Son Tay area, and rewards unhurried walking through its lane network more than a checklist approach to specific sights.

Ganh Dau is a quiet fishing village and cape at the northern end of Phu Quoc, close enough to Cambodia that its coastline is visible on a clear day, a genuinely different, far less developed feel than the resort strip around Long Beach further south. It's known locally for a stretch of calm, shallow water good for swimming and a small fishing harbor still active with local boats, rather than any single standout sight. Most visitors reach Ganh Dau as part of a north-island motorbike loop, stopping for seafood at simple beachside restaurants and enjoying the relative quiet compared to the island's developed south. The drive out passes through Phu Quoc National Park's forested interior, making the trip itself as much a part of the appeal as the cape.

Ha Long City is the mainland gateway to Ha Long Bay, the limestone karst seascape of roughly 1,600 islands and islets that is Vietnam's best-known natural attraction and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The city itself is a fairly unremarkable, rapidly developed port town whose main function is logistics: hotels, cruise terminals, and a large aquarium and cable car built to give day visitors something to do before or after their boat trip. The bay itself is the real destination, seen either on a day-cruise (usually four to six hours among the closer islands) or, more commonly and more highly recommended, an overnight cruise that reaches further into the bay, includes activities like kayaking or cave visits (Sung Sot Cave is the most famous), and lets you watch sunset and sunrise over the karsts from the boat deck. Cruise quality varies enormously by price tier, and this is one trip where paying more for a better-reviewed operator genuinely changes the experience.

Ham Ninh is a small fishing village on Phu Quoc's calmer east coast, known mainly for its wooden pier lined with simple seafood restaurants and a small daily market selling the day's catch, including the crab the village is particularly associated with locally. It's a much lower-key stop than the island's west-coast resort strip, popular as a lunch stop on a round-island tour rather than an overnight base, and the shallow water here tends to be murkier and less suited to swimming than the west coast's beaches. Ham Ninh is also a common jumping-off point for boat trips into the Phu Quoc National Park's marine areas and for treks up nearby Ham Ninh Mountain, a modest hike offering views back over the coast.

Hanoi is Vietnam's capital and its oldest continuously inhabited city, with a millennium of history layered into a compact Old Quarter of 36 guild streets, French colonial villas, and a lake at its center where locals do tai chi at dawn. It rewards slow walking more than any itinerary of sights: the pleasure is in the density of small things happening at once, a pho stall next to a shop selling only zippers, a shrine tucked between two cafes. The historic core clusters around Hoan Kiem Lake, with Ngoc Son Temple on its small island, and radiates into the Old Quarter's tangle of streets, each traditionally named for the trade once practiced there (Hang Bac for silver, Hang Gai for silk). A few blocks further out sit the French Quarter's wide boulevards and the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum complex, where the embalmed body of Vietnam's founding leader lies in state and can be viewed on a strict, solemn morning schedule. Hanoi's food culture is the city's real headline attraction: bun cha (grilled pork with noodles), egg coffee invented at Cafe Giang in the 1940s during a milk shortage, and pho that locals will argue over by neighborhood. Street food here tends to be eaten on tiny plastic stools rather than at tables, and the best places are often unmarked or marked only in Vietnamese. Beyond the center, West Lake offers a quieter, more residential pace with lakeside cafes and the Tran Quoc Pagoda, while day trips reach the Perfume Pagoda or the Duong Lam ancient village. Hanoi is also the standard jumping-off point for Ha Long Bay and Ninh Binh, and most multi-day northern Vietnam itineraries begin and end here. The climate splits sharply: a genuinely cold, grey winter (December-February) that surprises visitors expecting tropical Vietnam, a hot and humid summer, and short, pleasant shoulder windows in spring and autumn that locals and repeat visitors rate as the best time to come.

Ho Chi Minh City, still called Saigon by most residents and on most signage, is Vietnam's economic engine and its most modern, fast-moving city, a contrast to Hanoi's older, more layered pace. It has the country's tallest buildings, its most developed nightlife, and a rawer, more commercial energy that some travelers find more immediately fun and others find less charming than the north. District 1 holds most of the sights that matter historically: the Reunification Palace, preserved almost exactly as it was when a tank crashed through its gates in 1975; the War Remnants Museum, unflinching in its presentation of the American War and worth the emotional weight it carries; and the Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica and Central Post Office, both French-built and both currently mid-restoration to varying degrees, so check ahead if a fully unscaffolded facade matters to your photos. Ben Thanh Market is the classic tourist stop for souvenirs and street food under one roof, though prices there run high and bargaining is expected; better and cheaper food is generally found at the night market stalls that appear on the streets around it after dark, or in District 5 (Cholon, the historic Chinese quarter, worth a half-day for its temples and wholesale markets). The rooftop bar scene here is genuinely a draw in its own right, with skyline views over the Saigon River that Hanoi doesn't match, and District 2 (Thao Dien) offers a quieter, more expat-oriented alternative with better coffee shops and a slower pace if District 1's density gets tiring. Most visitors also use Saigon as the base for the Cu Chi Tunnels (a half-day trip into the underground tunnel network used during the war) and the Mekong Delta, both reachable on organized day tours or by hired car.

Hoi An is a preserved 15th-19th century trading port, a UNESCO World Heritage town of low wooden shophouses, Chinese assembly halls, and a covered Japanese bridge, all compact enough to see on foot in a day and atmospheric enough to justify staying two or three. It was a major international port for centuries before its river silted up and trade moved to Da Nang, which is precisely what left the town frozen in place rather than redeveloped. The Ancient Town itself charges a token entrance fee that gets you into a handful of historic houses, temples, and the Japanese Covered Bridge; wandering the streets themselves is free. Evenings are the town's best hours, when paper lanterns are lit along the river and vendors sell small floating candles to release on the water, a genuinely lovely, if now very photographed, ritual. Hoi An built its modern reputation on two things beyond the architecture: tailoring (custom suits and dresses made in 24-48 hours, quality varies enormously by shop and is not always reflected in price) and food, especially cao lau (a noodle dish unique to Hoi An, made with water from a specific well) and banh mi, with one particular stall regularly cited among the best in the country. Just outside town, An Bang Beach offers a more relaxed, less developed alternative to Da Nang's beach strip, and the surrounding countryside, Tra Que vegetable village, Thu Bon River basket-boat villages, rice paddies worked by hand, is genuinely worth a half-day by bicycle rather than treating Hoi An as only its old quarter. The town's popularity is its main drawback: the old quarter gets seriously crowded by mid-morning with day-trippers bused in from Da Nang, so early mornings and evenings are when it feels most like itself.

Hue was the imperial capital of Vietnam's last dynasty, the Nguyen, from 1802 to 1945, and its Citadel and Imperial City, modeled on Beijing's Forbidden City, remain the country's most significant royal architecture despite heavy damage during the 1968 Tet Offensive, when the city saw some of the war's fiercest urban fighting. Large sections of the complex are still under restoration, so expect a mix of fully restored halls and empty foundations marked only by information boards. Outside the Citadel, the royal tombs scattered along the Perfume River are arguably more atmospheric than the Imperial City itself: Tu Duc's tomb is a small landscaped park the emperor used as a retreat during his lifetime, Khai Dinh's is a strange, heavily ornamented fusion of European and Vietnamese styles built in concrete, and Minh Mang's is the most classically formal and symmetrical. Most visitors pick two or three rather than attempting all of them. Hue is also considered Vietnam's culinary capital by many Vietnamese food writers, a legacy of imperial court cuisine that produced small, elaborate dishes distinct from anywhere else in the country: bun bo Hue (a spicier, more complex beef noodle soup than its southern cousins), banh khoai (a Hue-style crispy pancake), and a tradition of small tasting-portion dishes. A boat ride on the Perfume River, whether a simple sunset cruise or a dragon boat combined with tomb visits, is the classic way to see the city's relationship to its river, and the Thien Mu Pagoda, a seven-story octagonal tower on the riverbank, is usually paired with that boat trip.

Lang bich hoa Tam Thanh: Tam Thanh's mural village is a small fishing hamlet in Quang Nam province that was transformed starting in 2016 by a joint Vietnamese-Korean community art project, turning the plain concrete walls of ordinary homes along its lanes into a dense, colorful gallery of murals, sea life, village scenes, portraits of residents, painted directly onto the houses people still live in. It's one of very few places in Vietnam built entirely around a public art initiative rather than historical or natural attractions, and it remains a functioning fishing village behind the murals rather than a purpose-built attraction. The village sits on a quiet stretch of central coast well off the main Hoi An-to-Hue tourist corridor, so it draws far fewer visitors than its Instagram-friendly murals might suggest, and a visit here pairs naturally with the nearby, equally uncrowded Tam Thanh beach.

Lang Co is a narrow coastal town and lagoon squeezed between the sea and the mountains at the northern foot of the Hai Van Pass, the dramatic coastal mountain crossing between Da Nang and Hue immortalized in countless motorbike-trip videos and, notably, a Top Gear special. The beach here is genuinely good, calm and less developed than Da Nang's or Nha Trang's, and the town functions mainly as a scenic overnight stop or lunch break for travelers driving or riding the Hai Van Pass route rather than a dedicated multi-day destination. The lagoon side of town supports a fishing and oyster-farming community distinct from the beach side, and a handful of resorts have developed along the coast in recent years, drawn by the same quiet, uncrowded beach that makes Lang Co worth a stop even for travelers not doing the pass by road.

Lao Chai is a Hmong village on the classic Sapa valley trekking route, often the first stop on a day-trek out of Sapa town before continuing to Ta Van. It sits below some of the most photographed rice terraces in the region, and the village's black Hmong community, identifiable by their indigo-dyed clothing, maintains a farming and handicraft economy alongside the trekking tourism that passes through daily.

My Tho is the gateway town to the Mekong Delta closest to Ho Chi Minh City, and as a result it's the most heavily used starting point for day-trip river tours: a boat out to the delta's islands, a walk through a fruit orchard, a small rowboat paddle down a narrow coconut-palm canal, and a stop to hear traditional 'don ca tai tu' folk music, a fairly standardized circuit run by numerous tour operators. It's a good, easy introduction to Mekong river life for visitors with limited time, though travelers wanting a less packaged experience often push further to Ben Tre or Can Tho instead.

Nha Trang is Vietnam's most established beach resort city, a long curve of sand backed by a dense strip of hotels and, increasingly, high-rise towers built for the package-tour markets that dominate its economy. It's less about atmosphere or old-town charm than about a straightforward beach holiday with reliable infrastructure. The city's bay holds several islands offering snorkeling and diving, sold heavily as day-cruise packages that combine a few swim stops with an on-board 'mud bath' and floating bar that has become something of a Nha Trang cliche; independent travelers who want quieter diving should look at operators running smaller, dedicated dive trips rather than the mass party boats. On land, the Po Nagar Cham Towers, an 8th-century temple complex still in religious use, and the Long Son Pagoda, with its large white seated Buddha visible from much of the city, are the main cultural sights, both modest half-day additions to a trip mostly built around the beach. Nha Trang's water quality and beach cleanliness have had real ups and downs as development outpaced infrastructure, and the resort towers now crowd much of the shoreline; travelers looking for a quieter or more upscale coastal alternative increasingly look toward Phu Quoc or smaller central coast spots instead.

Ninh Binh province is often marketed as 'Ha Long Bay on land,' and while the comparison undersells its own distinct character, the description is roughly accurate: limestone karst towers rise directly out of rice paddies and slow rivers rather than the sea, and the classic way to experience it is a rowed sampan boat trip through Tam Coc or Trang An, gliding beneath karst arches and through cave tunnels carved by the river through the rock. Trang An, a larger and less developed river system than Tam Coc, was used as a filming location for parts of the Kong: Skull Island movie and offers a longer, more varied boat route through multiple caves; Tam Coc is more compact and classically photogenic, especially during the rice-growing season when the paddies flanking the river turn green or gold depending on timing. Mua Cave's viewpoint, reached by a steep several-hundred-step staircase, delivers the single most photographed vantage over the whole karst-and-paddy landscape. The area also holds Hoa Lu, the 10th-century capital of Vietnam under its first independent dynasties, now a modest but genuine historical site with temples dedicated to the early kings, and Bich Dong Pagoda, a cave-temple complex near Tam Coc. Ninh Binh works well as a one- or two-night side trip from Hanoi, about two hours by car or bus, and is frequently combined with Hoa Lu and cycling through the surrounding villages.

Phu Quoc is Vietnam's largest island, sitting in the Gulf of Thailand closer to Cambodia than to the Vietnamese mainland, and has shifted over the past decade from a sleepy fishing and fish-sauce island (it's still the country's most famous producer of nuoc mam) into a fast-developing beach resort destination with international flights, large-scale resorts, and a Sun Group entertainment complex anchoring its south end. The island's coastline is its main draw: Long Beach on the west side is the most developed, with sunset views and a dense strip of hotels and restaurants, while the south and Sao Beach offer whiter sand and calmer water with somewhat less development, though that gap is closing fast as construction continues. The north of the island, protected largely as national park, retains more of the original forest and fishing-village character and rewards travelers willing to go further from the resort strip. Duong Dong, the island's main town, has a genuinely good night market for seafood, and the surrounding waters support both offshore snorkeling and diving trips and a large-scale pearl farming and fish-sauce industry that runs tours aimed squarely at visitors. Sun World's development at the southern tip, including the record-length cable car to Hon Thom and a large theme-park and water-park complex, has made Phu Quoc feel increasingly like a manufactured entertainment destination in parts, which is either the appeal or the drawback depending on what kind of island trip you want; it sits at some remove from the island's quieter northern beaches and fishing villages. Phu Quoc's dry season (November-March) is markedly better for beach time than the rest of the year, when the island is subject to the same southwestern monsoon rains and occasional rough seas that affect the whole Gulf of Thailand.

Sapa is a former French hill station turned trekking base in Vietnam's northwest mountains, built around terraced rice valleys and a patchwork of ethnic minority villages, Hmong, Dao, Tay, and others, that give the region its cultural identity as much as its scenery does. The town itself has grown fast and is now dense with hotels and tour agencies, a contrast to the villages just a short walk into the valley. Trekking is the reason most people come: multi-day or single-day guided walks through terraced rice fields down to villages like Ta Van, Lao Chai, and Ta Phin, usually arranged with a local guide, often a woman from the minority communities themselves who also sells embroidered textiles along the way. The scenery is best in the rice-growing months (roughly May-June for planting green and September-October for golden harvest); winter (December-February) can bring genuinely cold, foggy, occasionally near-freezing conditions unusual for Vietnam. Sapa is also the base for Fansipan, Vietnam's highest mountain at 3,143 meters, which can now be summited via cable car and a short climb rather than the two- to three-day trek required before the cable car opened in 2016, a change that divided opinion between those glad of the access and those who felt something was lost.

Soc Trang stands out in the Mekong Delta for its large ethnic Khmer population and the striking Khmer Theravada Buddhist pagodas that result from it, most notably Chen Kieu Pagoda (also called the Clay Pagoda for its terracotta details) and Doi Pagoda (Bat Pagoda), known for the large colony of fruit bats that roost in its grounds. The architecture here, ornate, brightly colored, and distinctly Khmer rather than Vietnamese Buddhist in style, is a visible marker of the delta's ethnic diversity that's easy to miss in towns further north. Soc Trang is less set up for tourism than Can Tho or Chau Doc and works best as a half-day or full-day stop woven into a longer delta itinerary rather than a dedicated base, particularly for travelers interested in the region's Khmer heritage alongside its river life.

Ta Phin is a Red Dao village northeast of Sapa, distinguished from the more heavily trekked Ta Van/Lao Chai valley by its Red Dao rather than Hmong community, identifiable by the women's distinctive red headscarves, and by a local specialty: herbal bath houses using a traditional Dao recipe of forest leaves and roots, a genuinely well-known local wellness practice rather than a tourist invention. The village also has a small abandoned French-era convent and an active handicraft cooperative selling embroidery and indigo-dyed textiles.

Ta Van is a Hmong and Giay village in the valley below Sapa, one of the most commonly visited stops on Sapa treks, and a popular overnight homestay base for travelers continuing on to Lao Chai or further villages the next day. It sits directly among terraced rice fields along the Muong Hoa River, and its accessibility (an easy day-trek or short drive from Sapa) makes it busier with visitors than more remote villages in the valley, though it remains a working agricultural community rather than a staged attraction.

Vung Tau is a beach town on a small peninsula south of Ho Chi Minh City, historically a French colonial seaside retreat and now the default quick beach escape for Saigon residents given its proximity, rather than a destination that competes with Nha Trang or Phu Quoc for beach quality. Its beaches are serviceable rather than exceptional, and its real draw for weekenders is the easy hydrofoil or drive combined with decent seafood and a change of pace from the city. The town's most distinctive landmark is a large statue of Christ the King atop Small Mountain, similar in concept to Rio's Christ the Redeemer though smaller, with an interior staircase letting visitors climb up into the outstretched arms for views over the peninsula and sea. Vung Tau also retains some French colonial-era lighthouses and villas, along with a working oil and gas industry offshore that gives the town a more industrial edge than a purely resort identity.