Travel Guide
Brick Without Mortar: Reading Mỹ Sơn by the Joint
The Cham built temples out of fired clay and joined them with something nobody has fully identified. A thousand years on, the seams are still tighter than the restorations laid beside them.
VAC Travel11 September 2026
Travel Guide
Cái Bèo: The Oldest Address in Lan Hạ Bay
A cluster of raft houses off Cát Bà sits on top of a shell midden seven thousand years deep. The people fishing there now are not the first, or even the fiftieth, generation to do it.
VAC Travel8 September 2026
Travel Guide
Forty-Two Years in a Limestone Fortress: Why Hoa Lư Was Abandoned
For four decades Vietnam was governed from a valley in Ninh Bình, ringed by karst instead of walls. Then a king wrote a letter explaining why he was leaving.
VAC Travel4 September 2026
Travel Guide
The Names on the Tortoises: An Hour at Văn Miếu Before Nine
Eighty-two stone slabs stand on the backs of stone tortoises in the third courtyard of Hanoi's Temple of Literature. Each one is a list of men who passed, and a set of instructions for how to read them.
VAC Travel1 September 2026
Travel Guide
Thirty-Six Streets, Thirty-Six Villages
Every street name in Hanoi's Old Quarter is a trade, and behind most of them is a village somewhere in the delta that sent its craftsmen to the capital and never quite took them back.
VAC Travel28 August 2026
Travel Guide
Nước Lớn, Nước Ròng: The Delta Runs on the Tide, Not the Clock
In Bến Tre the day has no fixed hours. The canals fill and empty twice, the window shifts later each morning, and everything — the sampan, the market, the run home — is arranged around water that will not wait.
VAC Travel25 August 2026
Travel Guide
The Emperor Who Wrote His Own Epitaph
At Khiêm Lăng in Huế, a twenty-tonne slab of stone carries 4,935 characters composed by the man buried nowhere near it. Most visitors walk past it to photograph the lake.
VAC Travel21 August 2026
Travel Guide
The Bamboo Rib and the Candle: An Hour of Light in Hội An
A Hội An lantern is twelve pieces of split bamboo, a rectangle of silk and about four minutes of flame. What happens in those four minutes is worth arriving early for.
VAC Travel14 August 2026
Food & Culture
Indigo Hands: The Cloth of the Muong Hoa Valley
Long before you notice the terraces, you notice the hands — stained a blue so deep it reads as black. In the villages below Sapa, cloth is still a year's work.
VAC Travel11 August 2026
Travel Guide
The Last Light on Hoàng Su Phì: A Private Harvest at 1,800 Meters
Four hours north of the terraces everyone has already photographed, Hoàng Su Phì ripens two to three weeks before Sa Pa — and almost no Western traveler has ever stood in it.
VAC Travel22 July 2026
