Bach Ma National Park

The villa has no roof anymore. Strangler figs have prised apart the French colonial walls and driven roots through the concrete floors; the swimming pool is a fern garden, the ballroom open to the sky. Cloud drifts through what was once someone's living room, and the jungle has reclaimed every surface.

The French built Bach Ma as a mountain retreat in the 1930s, its 1,450-metre summit a refuge from the coastal heat of Hue and Da Nang; more than a hundred villas were built, most wrecked in the wars and now being consumed by forest. The national park, declared in 1991, protects one of Vietnam's most biodiverse forests — the Annamites here are the crossover zone between northern and southern flora and fauna. The Rhododendron Trail runs through mossy elfin forest where pheasants and langurs move in the canopy, Do Quyen waterfall drops some three hundred metres off the escarpment, and the summit road climbs from tropical sea-level heat to cool mountain mist in under twenty kilometres — with mountain weather always holding the final say on how far a day goes.