Viet Nam - Overview

Viet Nam is flanked by the South China Sea to the east and shares borders with the People’s Republic of China in the north, and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and the Kingdom of Cambodia to the west. Over 85 million people from 54 different ethnic groups live on its narrow “s-shaped” 331,000 km2 and along its more than 3,000 km of coastline. Three-quarters of this land is hilly and mountainous, and arable land accounts for only 28.4 %

Ho Chin Min  City View.

 In 1986, after decades of conflict and struggling to speed up its economic recovery and reconstruction efforts, Viet Nam restructured its economy through the doi moi (renovation) reforms, shifting from a centrally-planned economy to a “socialist market economy.” And over the past decade it has had one of the best-performing economies in the world. Vietnam is one of the fast-rising GDP and per capita income rates. Vietnamese men, women, and children are now living longer, they are healthier, have higher incomes, and generally are better off than they were 25 years ago. Even during the recent economic slowdown and despite high inflation rates, the economic growth rate continued to grow and was at 6.78% in 2010.

Contributed by this impressive economic growth backed by investment in social programs, Viet Nam has now reached lower middle-income status and will achieve nearly all of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals at the national level by the deadline year of 2015. 

But drill down further to the provincial and regional levels and despite these overall improvements, Viet Nam’s over 26 million children, about 30 per cent of the population, are not benefiting equally from this new prosperity. Gaps between the rich and the poor, between male and female, and between ethnic Kinh Vietnamese and the country’s many minority populations are clear.

Ho Chin Min Old City Area

 Economic disparities, gender inequality and massive inequity between rural and hard-to-reach mountainous areas and the more affluent urban areas of the country are substantial. Access to adequate water and sanitation, to health services and to education, especially secondary education, are major issues. Ethnic minorities continue to be among the poorest and have benefited least from the country’s economic growth.

Even as the general poverty rate fell from 58 per cent in 1993 to 14.5 per cent in 2008, rural and ethnic minority populations are emerging from poverty at a much slower pace. In 2008, nearly 50 per cent of the country’s ethnic minorities were living in poverty, compared to 8.5 per cent of majority Kinh people.

Just that, about the general economic and ethnics overview of Vietnam. However, Vietnam is one the most travel destination to Asia. What you pay in time, sweat, and energy in Vietnam, you get back a thousand fold. The natural beauty of the country is legendary and spectacularly varied, with brilliant white beaches and lonely mountain passes that pierce the clouds. Jagged monoliths shoot up from mirror-bright bays in the far north; intricate lattices of canals run under mangrove canopies in the far south. The landscape resonates, too, with a history both chaotic and profound via faded, millennial-old relics of fallen dynasties and abandoned tanks and bunkers rusting under new grass. The country’s architecture echoes the same contorted past, from eye-bending Chàm ruins and bucolic French villas to glass-and-steel monuments to globalization.

Old Remnant of Hanoi.

 Inevitably, you will be blown away by Vietnamese cuisine. Masterfully subtle, in the debt of kitchens from Szechuan Province to Marseille, meals considered prosaic by everyday Vietnamese are nonetheless revered by epicures the world over. And no meal better expresses the country’s culinary genius than ph—tender rice noodles under thin sheets of beef, floating in amber broth with ginger, star anise, mint, basil, and lime. It’s the national food, the street food, the breakfast-lunch-and-dinner food of both the urban poor and the five-star kitchens. It’s that good.

The people of Vietnam are stubborn, demanding, and intensely proud of their country. To travelers unused to constant bargaining and zero personal space, they can be extremely frustrating; they can also be what make your visit more meaningful than you ever would have expected. The fundamental good nature and sincere extra version of the Vietnamese are overwhelming. You’ll be invited to play pick-up football with kids in the street, celebrate T\t in the living rooms of joyful families, and coach English at every available opportunity. But best of all is their contagious, undying optimism; in the face of warfare, poverty, and hunger, there persists in Vietnam the belief that things will get better—much better—fueled by the tireless will to make them so. Today’s Vietnam is modernizing with a vengeance, and the atmosphere is thick with hope and breathless anticipation.

Yes, Vietnam is tough. But you didn’t pick up this review for “easy.” You chose Vietnam because you want travel to thrill and amaze you—because you want stories that will last you the rest of your life. You chose it for the dizzying diversity of landscapes, tastes, and ethnicity that make traveling to Vietnam, dare we say, the greatest adventure on the planet. So go. And take us with you.