Our hotels

I always kick off each travel blog with a gallery of the places we'll be staying. As usual, Marc found a great mix for us, thinking carefully about the where, when, why and how of it all. Lucky me!

We'll start off in Hue, at Hotel La Perle [TripAdvisor] [hotel]. In so many ways, this hotel is very Vietnamese: the large and strongly-windowed lobby, and the very tall structure which reminds me of the buildings we saw when we first came to Vietnam in 2005 -- in either greens or blues, and with curved horn-type structures on each corner of the roof -- but do not see any more, boo.

From Hue, we'll go to Hoi An. We haven't been to Hue or Hoi An since that first trip in 2005, and we didn't stay in Hue but only made a day trip then. We did stay in Hoi An, in Victoria Hoi An, but this time we're staying in a different place, Aira Boutique Hoi An [TripAdvisor] [hotel].

Next stop: Mekong Delta! We'll begin in Sa Dec (say the word Dec in a higher tone than Sa, and hit that EC really hard, with a stopping sound to say it properly, as if Dec slammed into a brick wall), which is apparently only known as being the site of Marguerite Duras's story The Lover. (We tried to watch the movie but ugh.) We're staying at Minh Dien [Booking].

From Sa Dec we're heading to Chau Doc, where we'll stay in two different hotels, the first along the river and the second in the mountains. Both are Victoria hotels. First, the one along the river [TripAdvisor] [hotel]:

Then up to the mountains, Chau Doc Nui Sam (Nui means mountain). [TripAdvisor] [hotel]

From there we'll go to Can Tho, a place we visited on our last trip to Vietnam. (Pronounce Tho the same way you pronounce pho, with a short u sound.) There were two notable things about that stay: the hotel has a boat to ferry you back and forth across the river and it's so lovely at dusk, and we had some really great food. The hotel pool isn't bad either. Victoria Can Tho [TripAdvisor] [hotel]

We'll end our trip in Hanoi, a place we love so so so so much. I personally can never get enough of it, even if I hit a freaked-out wall at some point about the way you have to cross the streets (i.e., you look left and right and see about a billion motorcycles coming in both directions and you just step out into the fray and walk across the street without swerving or pausing. They depend on you to keep going so they shift to move around you and at the beginning I'm good with that but then ohmygodIdon'tthinkIcandoit.) At this point we have our favorite pho place at 13 Lo Duc Street and we know the Hoan Kiem Lake surrounds like the back of our hands. We even saw the extremely rare giant turtle that lives in the lake once, which also freaked me out because I. Do. Not. Like. Turtles. What is going on inside that shell, anyway. That species is now extinct, with the last one reported dead in January 2016. Boo. We usually stay in a very particular spot in the Old Quarter, but this time we're locating ourselves in a slightly different area, at the Bonsella Hotel [TripAdvisor] [hotel]:

After this it'll be time to head back to winter in New York, but winter isn't the only reason we'll be sad to leave Vietnam, our very favorite place.