đ»đł Sabbatical - Vietnam II - The Bad
This is Part II of my Vietnam travel series:
- Vietnam I - The Ugly
- Vietnam II - The Bad (youâre here)
- Vietnam III - The Good
If you think Vietnam is all cheap beer and scenic hikes or rides, think again. This country hands you curveballs, chaos, and tourist traps on a daily basis. Welcome to round two: âThe Bad.â
Accommodation & Booking
Booking a hotel in Vietnam often felt like gambling. And I was in a phase that I was losing both at gambling and love at that timeâŠ
Vietnamâs hotel ratings are fiction. You might book a place with promising photos and reviews and 3â4 stars, only to be dropped at a âsister hotelâ a block or far away. Review farming isnât a joke here. Negative reviews vanish. The same thing is valid for restaurants or bars.
Do you remember the hotel that tried to scam me as soon as I arrived in Hanoi? It has rating of 9.3 on booking, and hundreds of reviews⊠Do you want to hear something even worse? Letâs continue with another story!
Story Time: My Mental Breakdown after 1 week in VietnamâŠ
Three hours on a so-called VIP bus, tossed around like luggage, and Hanoi greets me one more time, with a downpour of rain this time. All I want is a place close to the airport before my early flight the next morning. I book a hotel on booking.com as usual, something with a high rating and hundreds of high reviews. The confirmationâs fishy, though: itâs a partner hotel, there is less info than usual, and the payment was taken instantly.
I get in a taxi and spend almost an hour driving through random backstreets in the rain, hunting for this hotel that apparently only existed online. We get to the address and, surprise, thereâs nothing there! No sign, no building, nada. The taxi driver starts giving me that âyour problem, not mineâ vibe, and heâs annoyed that he canât drop me off at that address. Iâm flipping between Google Maps and the Booking app. I find more suspicious stuff. The hotel name in the URL is different from the name itâs written in the confirmation page. The photos of the hotel have a label with a different name. There are 0 reviews on Google Maps. My battery is 3%. I feel like everything is going wrong, and I have no idea what to do!
I ask the taxi driver to go to the main road and stop at the first hotel we see. We end up at some old hotel that looks like still in the 80s. Of course, the guy at the reception is happy to see me, and then charges me double the price, but I have no other options.
I check in, take a shower, and try to relax a little bit. Turns out there were two places with almost the same name on Google Maps. Of course there were. I found the second one way too late. Did I mess up? Did the hotel ever exist at the second address? Who knows. booking.com failed me, and Vietnam completely broke me, at least for a night.
Food & Drink
Vietnam is a coffee country, no doubt! They proudly offer salt, egg, coconut, and yogurt coffee everywhere. As far as I see, they use Vietnamese, robusta beans, and dark-roasted. They have preparation like cocktail-shakes which is untypical in Western world. However, if you drink your coffee black and love the taste of coffee like me, you will try these Vietnamese coffees once, and then you will hunt down the new wave cafĂ©s or Western-style cafĂ©s, or overpriced cafĂ©sâŠ
By the way, if you like Vietnamese coffees, they have workshops as well, which could be a good activity during the day.
Google Mapsâ menus are usually up to date. But one thing that drove me nuts in Vietnam was the insane amount of review farming. So many places just delete negative feedback and pump up their ratings with fake glowing reviews. I saw âthe best coffee I ever hadâ or âlife-changing phoâ for hundreds of restaurants; either travelers have no standards whatsoever, or every spot is somehow Michelin-level. Trust me, I lost count of how many times I walked in with high hopes and left totally disappointed. At some point, I just gave up and stuck to the Michelin Guide places whenever possible. Even fucking McDonaldâs manages to get a 4.5! If youâre relying on Google Maps ratings here, good luck, because they honestly mean nothing.
Street foods are hit or miss. Walk into a street food place, and youâll see meat and chicken hanging out, unrefrigerated, all day. You ask yourself, do they really get fresh meat every morning at dawn, or do those meats hang there for days? Remember, itâs over 30 degrees day and night! Take a gamble, bring stomach meds if your stomach is not strong!
Ho Chi Minh City has many 24/7 convenience stores that make things easier than any other city in Vietnam. For example, I wanted to hit my protein target every day, and there was literally nothing with high protein in markets except the ones in HCMC.
Hygiene? Questionable at best. I found a 4.9-rated restaurant in Hoi An Ancient Town. It was a home restaurant, which means itâs actually the home of the family that runs the restaurant. So you use their toilet and eat on their terrace. I finished my meal, asked to use the restroom. They pointed me their bathroom, the floors were sticky enough, and guess what: no sink! Only a shower and a toilet, and thatâs it! And in many other places, if the bathroom has soap, consider it a luxury.
One day in Hanoi, on my personal Michelin Guide quest, I found a place near my hotel: right in Old Town, famous for its chicken phá». There was trash all over the floor, just piling up. On both sides of the place, there were motorbike repair shops. So the whole time I was eating, it smelled like straight motor oil and exhaust smoke. The phá» was okay, but I still have no idea why that place is on any list.
More Hygiene & Safety Issues
Homemade alcohol? Sometimes, lethal, tragic stories in Hoi An on Reddit: 1, 2, 3. The worst thing is the restaurant is still open, and they still serve homemade alcoholâŠ
Food poisoning?. Will probably happen.
In central Vietnam, in one of the most touristy beaches in Da Nang, you might swim in sewage water! No, Iâm not kidding.
Iâm coming from the Mediterranean Sea! Come on⊠This was one of the most disappointing things to learn. I spent 10 days next to the ocean without swimming. Luckily, my hotels had swimming pools.
Water shoes are a must, especially on water sports tours. The ones given in cave tours were so slippery, many people struggled to stay upright (in Phong Nhaâs caves).
In Hanoi, as usual, I had my AirPods on, walking fast, exploring streets. Some touts showed naked woman photos in the street to convince me to get a massage, which was unexpected, and honestly DISGUSTING! And many many times, they cut my walking path with their motorbikes, showed me some drugs, and then they left when I said ânoâ.
I mentioned a few scams in different sections so far, but one of the tourist guides summarized them in a nutshell: be aware of fake touts/tourist guides, shoe cleaners, and fake drivers.
Itâs wild how the same problems keep popping up year after year, but Vietnam seems totally content to just let things roll. Nothing ever really changes as far as I heard or read, probably because the tourist numbers keep going up and the countryâs getting more popular no matter what. I guess when people keep coming, thereâs no real push to fix the chaos or step up the infrastructure. If youâre hoping for things to suddenly get better, good luck. I wouldnât bet on it.
Safety resource:
Tours & Activities
Some tours were great, some were memorable for the wrong reasons.
I booked an English-guided Clam Islands trip, through Viator, almost double the normal price, just for the language. Turns out, the guide barely spoke fifteen words of English all day. The rest? All local Vietnamese tourists. And yes, theyâre super loud, a lot of talking, shouting, music, video calls⊠Still, even with the language barrier, they tried to include me. They used Google Translate and asked these questions: âHow many children do you have?â and âWhy donât you travel with your wife?â. Not kidding, literally the first questions they asked. Apparently being a 30-year-old single guy in Vietnam is everyoneâs business.
Even at the hotel the staff went: âHope you liked it here, next time bring your girlfriend!â So from young high school kids to grandpas, everyone wondered the same thing. It was definitely a bit weird.
Mini story: The Water Pavilion Photo Fail
One tour day, we reach the famous Water Pavilion in Trang An. Iâve taken great pictures for a young couple on this trip (at least thatâs what they said after I sent photos to them), so I handed over my camera to them. Itâs my turn now! Iâm finally going to get one of the rare photos that includes me. They take dozens of photos, but every single one, my head or my umbrella totally covers the Pavilion. Thank you, mysterious coupleâŠ
Another tour, adventure this time: It took me a good thirty seconds just standing there, trying to work up the nerve to jump into pitch-black water inside Phong Nha cave. The guide said it was forty meters deep, and letâs be real, no way Iâm the only one thinking about what might be swimming down there with me. But hey, I was one of the 3 people in the group who jumped on that water, not bad, ha?
Random Thoughts
- Hanoiâs Old Town is a paradise for fake brands and confusing price tags. Shopping here flips between haggling for 20 minutes or just accepting nonsense pricing (âscam where you canâ is standard). 100,000 VND can mean anything. Donât overthink it, said the guy who overthought the entire trip⊠Itâs never really about the money, itâs cheap. However, itâs about the constant feeling that youâre getting played.
- Donât text while walking. One step, and the sidewalk flips. Another step, thereâs a motorbike parked.
- ChatGPT was blocked in August 2025, and the only way around that wall is a VPN (I used NordVPN all the time).
Vietnam tested my patience, sense of humor, non-verbal communication, and my digestive system. But even a place that wears you out eventually gives in and hands you a few wins with epic tours, nature and food. Stay tuned for the final round.