Vietnam has come a long way since the war. Although the Communist party still rules the roost, the country has become increasingly welcoming to foreigners and is now a popular destination for Western tourists. In fact, Gadling’s Stanley Stewart recently visited Hanoi and found it to be a wonderful, timeless city:

War and communism have preserved Hanoi from fifty years of progress. There are moments when it seems like the lost city of Asia, the one you can never quite find, the great teeming, squalid, fascinating metropolis of Marlene Dietrich films and 1930’s novellas. The modern age has transformed Shanghai. Hong Kong and Bangkok are jammed with traffic and skyscrapers. The lanes of Old Peking have given way to boulevards wide enough for tanks. Hanoi alone has retained its street urchins, curbside gamblers, sing-song girls, street barbers, bicycle rickshaws and air of neglect.

It’s great to hear that Hanoi has retained its charm-now, here’s hoping that more tourists will translate into more prosperity for the city and fewer street urchins. Romanticizing poverty in a foreign place is a little bit dangerous. But his visit sounded like a lot of fun: shopping, smoking an unknown (and extremely potent) tobacco blend out of a water pipe in a tea shop, and visiting the pristinely embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh.

If you’d like to visit Hanoi before it loses its charming, old-fashioned “air of neglect”, you’ll need your passport and a Vietnamese visa. Vietnam does not issue tourist visas on arrival, so you will need to apply for yours in advance. Here’s what you’ll need:

• Your US passport
• A completed Vietnamese visa application
• A recent passport photo, taken within the past 6 months.

For more information about getting a Vietnamese tourist visa, see “Vietnamese Visa Requirements for Tourists.”

RushMyTravelVisa can make the process of getting a Vietnamese visa much quicker and easier. We’ll help you with the application, answer any questions you might have, and deliver it to the Vietnamese Embassy for the fastest possible processing.

Apply for your Vietnamese visa the easy way!

Tags: Vietnam, vietnam visa, Vietnamese visa

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Destinations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.