The Luang Prabang old town. Note the terrifyingly rickety bamboo bridge
Halong Bay is home to a few floating villages. This particular one is much less atmospheric than the one we visited in Cambodia, despite its stunning karst island harbour location, but it seemed a bit more of a working village. In addition to income from tourism, the residents fish and cultivate oysters for pearls.
Hanoi’s Old Quarter: bicycles, motorcycles, cyclos; anything and everything for sale, all grouped together; buildings and monuments, shops and houses.
Hoan Kien Lake in the centre of Hanoi’s Old Quarter. I especially love the pop-up lakeside fitness club.
Hoi An owes most of its charm to the fact that the river silted up, so it wasn’t a useful enough port to bother bombing during the war. Nowadays, the various boats and bridges are big tourist draws.
Hoi An’s streets — a World Heritage Site, and beautifully vibrant, even on a cloudy day.
Da Nang — Vietnam’s fourth-largest city. We were only here for a morning en route to Hoi An, but a stroll around yielded a pretty cathedral, a busy market, a cool suspension bridge tricked up as a dragon (the head breathes fire on big holidays), and very good, very cheap, coffee.
The floating village of Kompong Pluk, built on stilts in the mangrove forests on the edge of Tonlé Sap lake. Colourful houses stretch down “streets,” with their canoes and fishing boats parked up below, the kids splashing all around. We were there on a Sunday, but the school run (the building on the bottom right) must be a sight to behold.
French colonial architecture in Saigon: The Opera House The Continental Hotel A statue of Ho Chi Minh in front of the old Hotel de Ville Notre Dame de Saigon Sam in front of the post office The former municipal court house
Kowloon, one of the districts of Hong Kong, is amongst the most densely populated places on the planet. Its 2,000,000 or so people are crammed into 47 square kilometres; at the same density, London or Toronto would have a population of around 75 million.