Why Vietnam should be your next great escape

Could this be the most vivid and inviting destination of 2023? Andrew Eames and Chris Leadbeater light the way

It was dawn in Hue, the former Imperial capital of Vietnam, and the Perfume River was already full of swimmers. On the bank, a couple of families renting paddleboards for life-rafts drew back at the spectacle of a foreigner, in his trunks, marching determinedly to the water’s edge. Normally, not being all that brave about cold water, I would have encouraged them to go in first, but it was much too early for faffing about.

The Perfume River wrapped itself around my skin. Despite the hour, the water was warm and soft, and though without any noticeable fragrance (the “perfume” is apparently seasonal, thanks to the upriver flowering of lotus and cinnamon), it still felt a bit like joining a group spa.

I muddled out to the middle, greeting all my fellow swimmers perhaps a touch too heartily, as the first fingers of sunlight probed through the trees. Knowing some of the backstory of this place, it was exhilarating to see the river reborn as a place of leisure. Some 50 years ago, this would have been just behind the front i Bright future: like the lanterns set adrift on Hue’s Perfume River each lunar month, a visit to Vietnam will lift the spirits

line in an unrelentingly savage war, and there would have been far stiller bodies in the water.

That war killed four million Vietnamese and crushed a fragile, precious country between idealists of left and right. It spawned new protest movements for peace, and inspired scores of epoch-defining films, such as Apocalypse Now. But all that is in the past.

Fifty years on from the Paris Peace Accords, which officially ended the war in January 1973 (though it unofficially continued until the Fall of Saigon in 1975), I had come to see how the nation had recovered from such a dark period. I knew its economy was flying, and its food – particularly pho – was conquering the world. And now that it had emerged from Covid, I wanted to take its metaphorical temperature with a south-to-north train