Field Notes — Roaming Sparrow

Six Years in Vietnam: My Complete Travel Guide

Hello Friends,

For about six years, Vietnam was home. I landed in Hanoi, found my feet in Hoi An, and settled into Da Nang for the long haul — and somewhere in there this country stopped being a place I was visiting and became the place I lived. I rode its mountain passes, drank an absurd amount of its coffee, ate my way through its street stalls, celebrated its festivals, and slowly filled this blog with the little corners of it that I loved.

This page is the map of all of that — my complete Vietnam travel guide, built not from a research binge but from six years of actually living here. It is the front door to everything I have written about the country, sorted by region so you can wander it the way I did: the coffee shops and mountain passes, the lantern-lit streets and highland villages, the long motorbike hauls and the quiet ordinary mornings. Grab a cà phê sữa đá and come explore.

Table of Contents

Start Here: The Regional Roadmaps

If you are planning a trip and want the big picture first, start with these three overview guides. They break the country into its three natural stretches and point you at the highlights of each.

Six Years in Vietnam: My Complete Travel Guide

Da Nang — My Home Base

Da Nang is where I put down roots the longest, and it shows in how much I wrote about it. This is a city of beaches and mountains and an almost bottomless café and bar scene, and I spent years poking into every corner of it — the specialty coffee spots and co-working haunts, the bars and speakeasies, the art and culture, and the wild nature sitting right on the edge of town. Here is Da Nang, the way I lived it.

Hoi An — Where It Started

Hoi An was my first real home in Vietnam, and it holds a special place for me. It is a lantern-lit old town of tailors and tea houses, riverside night markets and beaches a short ride away, wrapped in a slower, older rhythm than the big cities. These are the pieces from my Hoi An days — the first few, and the many after.

Hue — The Old Imperial Capital

North up the coast from Da Nang, past the Hai Van Pass, sits Hue — Vietnam’s old imperial capital, all perfume-river calm and centuries of history.

The Magnificent Thien Mu Pagoda

Dalat & the Central Highlands

Head inland and up, and the coast gives way to the cool, pine-covered hills of the Central Highlands — a completely different Vietnam of mountain air, farmland, and some of the most humbling moments I had in the whole country.

Saigon & the South

Down south, Ho Chi Minh City — Saigon — is the country’s loud, fast, endlessly energetic heart. I did not live there, but I visited, and these are the nights and journeys that stuck with me.

The North — Hanoi & Beyond

The north is where my Vietnam story began, in the chaos and charm of Hanoi, and where some of the wildest adventures live — up in the mountains near the Chinese border.

Vietnam Life: Food, Coffee & the Road

Not every memory fits neatly on a map. These are the pieces about the texture of daily life in Vietnam — the food, the legendary coffee, the festivals, the long motorbike hauls, and the quiet slices of the everyday that made living here what it was.

The Country That Became Home

Six years is a long time to spend anywhere, and Vietnam gave me more than I could ever fit on one page. From the lanterns of Hoi An to the coffee shops of Da Nang, the mountain passes and the highland villages and the roar of Saigon — it all became home, one small adventure at a time. Thank you for exploring it with me.

If you have wandered any of these places yourself, I would love to hear your own Vietnam stories. Cheers.