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Vietnam Travel Guide: 9 Months Lived There | Mike & Stacy Travels Abroad
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Nine months lived in Da Nang. A love story that ran its course — and the honest reckoning most travel blogs won't give you.
When We First Moved to Da Nang…
…we were full of so much joy and so much HOPE.
Vietnam was going to be it. For us. For our family. For as long as it would be in our life.
We loved Da Nang at first. It seemed small but full of life. The beach was stunning, and clean. The promenade was clean, appealing, full of places to chill and eat. It was so family-friendly, so welcoming, so genuinely lovely that we kept looking at each other and saying "this is the place."
And for a stretch of months, we believed it.
This is the story of those months. And of what came after.
Vietnam at a Glance
Official information you need before you go.
What We Loved About Vietnam
The reasons we moved there. The reasons we'd go back to visit.
Da Nang's Beach & Promenade
The Da Nang beach — long, clean, white-sand and stretching for miles along the central Vietnamese coast — is genuinely world-class. The promenade running along it is clean, well-maintained, and full of places to chill, eat, and watch the day pass. It's family-friendly in a way Western beach cities have largely forgotten. Kids run free. Vendors are polite. Locals jog at dawn. Old men do tai chi at sunrise.
This is the side of Vietnam that hooked us. It's still beautiful. It's still worth visiting.
Ha Long Bay
One of the most stunning places we have ever visited. Towering limestone karsts rising out of emerald water. Traditional junk boats. Kayaking through floating fishing villages. Caves that feel like cathedrals. Sunsets that don't seem real.
Ha Long Bay deserves its own write-up — and we gave it one. If you're going to Vietnam, this is non-negotiable. Skip the day trip. Do an overnight cruise.
📖 Read our full Ha Long Bay story →Hanoi — Fast-Paced, Worth a Few Days
Hanoi is the opposite of Da Nang. Where Da Nang is coastal and (relatively) laid-back, Hanoi is a thousand-year-old capital pulsing with energy at every hour. The Old Quarter is a maze. Street food is everywhere. The lake is its own neighborhood. The traffic is a religion.
A few days in Hanoi is the right amount of time. Stay longer and the chaos starts to wear; stay shorter and you'll miss the soul. Plan three nights, eat constantly, and let yourself get lost.
Hoi An — Worth Exactly One Day
Hoi An is worth seeing — for a day. You don't need more.
It's pretty at night with the lanterns. It's busy, packed with people, and stuffed with arts, crafts, and clothes. To be honest, it's a textbook "buy buy buy" tourist trap. But the magic is real if you know how to take it in.
Here's our recipe: Go. See it. Buy a lantern. Eat some clay pot chicken and rice. Float a paper wish lantern down the river. Take a quiet moment to release whatever you're carrying. Then carry the memory with you as you travel on.
It's a perfect afternoon-into-evening, easily done as a day trip from Da Nang. The town earns its UNESCO status. It also earns its crowds. Both can be true.
Phu Quoc
Vietnam's largest island, sitting in the Gulf of Thailand. A solid beach getaway for a few days of rest if you're already in-country. Calmer than the mainland tourist circuits and a nice break from the constant horns of Hanoi or Da Nang.
The Cracks That Crept In.
After two weeks, you don't see them. After two months, you start to. After nine months, they're all you can see.
Personal Space Doesn't Exist Here
We've spent serious time in Thailand. Thailand also has a different relationship with personal space than the US. But Vietnam is on another level. It was almost as if people couldn't see us standing there — they'd cut us off walking on the sidewalk, swerve into our space without acknowledgment, push past for their own needs without registering us as obstacles.
This isn't a moral judgment of Vietnamese people. It's a cultural relationship with public space that is genuinely different. Two weeks in, you barely notice. Nine months in, you notice it every single day.
The Honking. Oh, The Honking.
What new visitors describe as "culturally fascinating" becomes a nervous breakdown in the making.
When we tell you that honking in Vietnam is 24/7 and for no reason — we are not sure we can stress that enough. We have watched cars honk at 2:12 in the morning at literally no one. No other vehicles on the road. No pedestrians. No cause. Just an instinctual hand on a horn.
It's sonar.
Like a pod of whales using sonar to communicate position, Vietnamese honking started as a functional driving tool — "I'm here, I'm passing, I exist." But when you have thousands — tens of thousands — of vehicles all honking for that purpose simultaneously, the signal is lost in the noise. The sonar fails. And yet the instinct remains.
It is one of the most genuinely sociological observations we have made about any country we've lived in. And one of the hardest to live with.
The Food Has a Cult. The Food Is Narrower Than You Think.
Two things are true at once: the cult around Vietnamese food is overblown, AND the actual variety of the cuisine is narrower than most visitors realize.
There's a cultural fad now to "love pho" — a kind of performance of cosmopolitanism that often isn't backed by an actual understanding of Vietnamese food, its history, or its structure. The truth, after months of eating it: most Vietnamese meals are very similar to each other. Same base components — rice, noodles, broth, fresh herbs, dipping sauces, pork or chicken or fish or beef — recombined with one ingredient added or subtracted. The dishes are sold to foreigners as wildly different cuisines. They aren't, structurally.
The other dynamic at play: living abroad makes people feel aware of their surroundings because it's unfamiliar. Combine that with affordability ("a $1 bowl of pho!") and the result is an experience that is over-hyped and under-explained. It's not that the food is bad. It's that the religion built around it is bigger than the food itself.
The Construction & Over-Tourism Reality
A specific Vietnam story — but a universal warning about the next "big, better, cheaper" place.
Here is the truth about Da Nang in 2026:
Construction Is 24/7. We Mean That Literally.
It goes around the clock with no exaggeration. It's everywhere. Massive new construction. Old buildings torn down to be rebuilt. Wholesale "remodels" where every interior wall is stripped down to the shell and rebuilt from the inside out.
To Understand Why This Is a Specific Problem, You Have to Know the Architecture.
99.9% of buildings in Vietnam are "tunnel houses" — skinny, deep structures connected to each other and sharing walls. Your neighbor's remodel is, by default, your remodel.
There is no notice. No discussion of allowed hours. No required end date. American-style rules are out the window completely. Ninety percent of the time the construction also takes over your sidewalk and half of your street — piles of sand for making cement, rubble heaps, lumber, scaffolding — left in place for weeks, sometimes months.
Why It Matters: The Wave Will Crash.
Da Nang is over-building. And eventually, it will catch up to them.
The city — and the country — sees this YouTube-and-Instagram boom as their way up and out of the "developing country" status they currently hold at the UN. That hope is reasonable. The investment is real. The infrastructure is being built.
But the truth is that they are riding a wave that will crash at shore. Travelers this decade — especially digital nomads — are always looking for the next big, better, cheaper place. Most will not stay. Soon, they will start hyping up another country. The tourism will slow. The "long-term rentals" Vietnam is building for will dry up.
Why We Eventually Left
The honest answer is layered.
Things had been creeping in over time. The honking. The construction. The food fatigue. The personal-space friction. None of it alone would have driven us out — but together, they were quietly making a case.
The medical situation accelerated everything. While we were in Da Nang, Stacy was diagnosed with menopause at Vinmec, and after the local options didn't fully meet what she needed, we ultimately had to move to Gleneagles in Malaysia for proper hormone replacement therapy. That medical pivot fast-tracked a departure that, looking back, was probably going to happen anyway.
It's a story worth telling in full — about being an expat with a serious health need, about the gaps and surprises of international medical care, and about what it's like when the country you chose for your family can no longer meet your most basic needs.
The full account of the medical journey that ultimately pulled us out of Vietnam — and the search for proper care that took us next to Malaysia.
Vietnam gave us a real chapter. We will always be grateful for it. We will always carry the Da Nang beach mornings, the Hanoi street-food nights, the Ha Long Bay mornings on quiet water.
And we will always be honest about the rest.
— Mike & Stacy
A short visit will probably charm you. A few months will start to teach you. Nine months will tell you the truth. Whether that truth fits you is the question only you can answer.
Plan Your Vietnam Trip
Free resources we built to make this easier for you.
Global Visa Directory
The official Vietnamese e-Visa portal — verified. Plus government visa pages for 197 countries. Apply direct, skip the scam reseller fees.
Explore the Directory →Global Travel Tracker
The spreadsheet we built for long-haul travel. 9 tabs for visas, budget, packing, and world reference data for all 197 countries — including Vietnam.
Get the Tracker →Choose your vibe
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