Blissed out on the South China Sea

From luxury beachside retreats with spas and personal butlers to high-class hill stations, Lynn Barber finds Vietnam's reinvention as an upscale tourist destination nothing short of a miracle
A cyclist in Hoi, Vietnam
Exotic city ... Hoi. Photograph: Alamy

For someone of my generation it feels extraordinary to visit Vietnam as a tourist. We spent our youth talking about the Vietnam war, watching it on the news, reading about it in the papers, going on anti-war demos - it was a far louder background noise to our lives even than Iraq is today. I knew the names of all the major towns and strategic rivers; I could have drawn you a map of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But somehow I never pictured them as places, they were just names in the news, and it wasn't until much later, with films such as Apocalypse Now, that I got some sense of Vietnam's beauty. Yet the idea of it becoming a tourist destination in my lifetime seemed inconceivable.

Of course I was forgetting Vietnam's incredible resilience and determination. It has long since recovered from the war and is keen now to attract upmarket tourism and to pitch itself as 'the new Thailand'. Like Thailand, it has glorious beaches, charming scenery and brilliant food - even better in the street cafes than in the hotel restaurants. It is also cheap. The currency sounds expensive - you ask the price of some tourist tat and reel back in horror when you hear it is 100,000 dong, but then you realise that means under £4 and anyway you are meant to haggle. Actually most tourist places don't bother with dong, preferring dollars, but I got fond of my dong.

I spent one of the most blissful mornings of my life on the South China Sea off Nha Trang, lying on a mattress under a white awning on a creaking fishing boat while the boatmen trailed lines in the water. We were chugging along a white-sand bay and round a headland where I saw a sea eagle almost close enough to touch and heard monkeys in the rainforest above.

Out to sea were all the knobbly islets and rock stacks where the salanganes live - the tiny swifts whose saliva-glued nests are used to make bird's nest soup. I was hoping I could persuade the boatmen to take me there, but they explained that the nesting sites were under 24-hour guard and no one was allowed near them. Birds' nests are such a valuable export that they are well conserved by the government and only collected once the young have flown.

Instead, we went to see a lobster farm, a wonderfully rickety collection of rafts buoyed by oilcans, each with a shack containing whole families and their dogs. The fishermen leave the rafts periodically to go out in coracles to check on their lobster pots, using a paddle like a child's beach spade, but mainly they just lie around on the rafts with their families. It looks an idyllic life, except possibly for the dogs. All the children laughed their heads off at the sight of me; I don't know why, but I am always a source of great hilarity in South East Asia.

I was staying at the Evason Hideaway, a spa hotel a few miles down the coast from Nha Trang, and possibly the only hotel that has its own time zone - one hour ahead of the rest of Vietnam. It is at the end of a long isthmus: you reach it by speedboat across the bay and it is so well camouflaged (thatched cabins blending with the foliage just behind the beach) that you can't see it until you arrive.

The great attraction is privacy; the cabins are well spaced out, each with its own garden and pool, which makes them ideal for honeymooners and/or celebs. Prince Andrew came, I was told - but only with his bodyguards, not a girlfriend - and also 'lovely' Princess Caroline of Monaco with her less lovely husband Prince Ernst August of Hanover, who demanded that the fridge be filled with Cristal champagne.

Hideaway is one of those 'simple', 'eco-friendly' hotels, where you are meant to believe you are living a primitive beachcomber existence while actually having flown zillions of miles to get there. There are bikes outside every cabin so you can cycle to the spa or restaurant, but if, like me, you can't face that, you ring your personal butler and demand a golf buggy. In short, it's the sort of hotel I'm sure Gwyneth Paltrow would love and that makes me long to run around shouting, 'Hey, couldn't we build a supercasino here? Let's ask Sol Kerzner!'

But sorry, that's just sour old me. It is perfect for honeymooners and people who love spa treatments - my travelling companions were going into ecstasies over the Six Senses spa. And if spa treatments pall, Hideaway is only an hour from Nha Trang, a really vibrant town with a staggering 6km public beach where everyone goes in the morning to do their tai chi, and then a beautiful harbour with row after row of blue-and-red fishing boats and lively auctions on the quayside. Nha Trang is the place all the backpackers head for: it looks fun. My one complaint about this coast is that you are advised not to swim for fear of jellyfish. I saw a couple and they were huge

Before that, we stayed at another Evason hotel (this one consisting of 1920s colonial villas) in a hill station called Da Lat, which is where the French colonists used to go to escape the summer heat of Saigon. The French called it, optimistically, 'Le petit Paris', but travel writer Norman Lewis, who was never wrong, called it 'a drab little resort'. I found it remarkably like Surrey, except that the local drink is artichoke tea.

The town boasts a boating lake, a pagoda, a cable car and a miniature Eiffel Tower; but, not content with these excitements, I insisted on being taken to what was billed as a 'Variety Creature Strange Unique - Particularly Interesting' in a park out of town. It promised 'Pig with Five Feet, Calf with Two Heads, Buffalo Three Horn, Ox's Six Leg', all of which I longed to see, assuming they would be safely pickled in glass jars.

Horror of horrors, they were alive, in cages, trailing round their extra limbs and heads. I was ashamed of having asked to go there, it was all so sad and squalid, but the local tourists seemed to regard it as a fun day out. Nearby was an embroidery workshop where you could see rows of young women producing exquisitely embroidered pictures of such extreme vulgarity you wanted to cry - all that brilliant craftsmanship devoted to a hideous end result, costing $10,000 and upwards.

The best place we went from Da Lat was a mountain nearby called Lang Bian (2,160m), which you can walk up if you are mad or be driven up in Land Rovers. The drive itself is lovely, through pine forests, but then you come out on top to a fabulous panoramic view of lakes and mountains and the great bowl of Da Lat with its patchwork of market gardens. Again, there are weird tourist attractions - men dressed as cowboys offering pony rides and a larger-than-life statue of Lang and Bian, who were supposedly star-crossed lovers - but, unlike the Variety Creature Strange, I found it entirely charming.

We saw more of the mountains next day when we drove over them to the coast - pine forests at first and then rainforest and glimpses of 'minority' villages where the montagnards (mountain people) live and farm. There are more than 50 tribes, each with their own language, and all have portable houses made of wooden planks and screens, which they move every four years or so to farm somewhere else - a habit the government deplores because it wastes so much forest. Some of the houses are very pretty, like Caribbean chattel houses, but with giant TV aerials.

The road across the mountains sets off very confidently as a smart new motorway from Da Lat then suddenly expires in a swamp of red mud. Incredibly, our minibus got through, but it was alarming to see the rusting car corpses around and cyclists wading thigh-deep through the mud carrying their bikes over their heads. The rest of the road is good in parts, but the bad parts are absolutely terrifying. Coming down towards the coast you pass through prosperous-looking villages with pot-bellied pigs running about and luscious vegetable plots. Vietnam is great for veg.

On the way back, we spent a night at the Millennium Hilton in Bangkok, which is pure James Bond. It has a rooftop restaurant and an amazing swimming pool on the third floor, which is completely flooded, with all the sun loungers in the water - I worry that the waiters will get trench foot. But I was particularly taken with the 'magic' button on the phone that promised to supply your every request, however bizarre. Actually my request was not so bizarre - I wanted a vase for a bouquet of roses I'd been given - but my phone call provoked a lot of puzzled discussion at the other end and the answer: No vase. I'd made the same mistake as I once made in Norwich when I went to a massage parlour in hopes of a massage.

Bangkok is much more fun than Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, which is so heavily polluted by scooter traffic that everyone wears face masks. Maybe it has some louche Graham Greeney charms, but staying just one night meant we never found them. That's the trouble with Vietnam - it takes so long to get there. You have to fly 12 hours to Bangkok, hang around in the airport, then another hour to Saigon, then take an internal flight - or a long bus journey - to wherever you are going. If there were direct flights to Nha Trang, I'd say go like a shot. As it is, I'd say Vietnam is well worth a visit provided you have plenty of time; but it is madness to go, as I did, for a week.

On the other hand, my boat trip on the South China Sea was one of the most magical days of my life and I can well understand why people fall in love with Vietnam.


Lynn Barber travelled with Kuoni Travel (; 01306 747002) which offers 10 nights in Vietnam from £1,967pp. This includes three nights at the Evason Ana Mandara and seven at the Evason Hideaway. The price includes breakfast and is based on two people sharing. Flights depart from Heathrow on Thai Airways and include transfers. A night in Saigon at the Park Hyatt and in Bangkok at the Millennium Hilton can also be arranged.