Vietnam
Hanoi
Motorbikes weaving through incense smoke, colonial decay, and the scent of roasting pork.
The Old Quarter hits you before you're ready. Motorbikes pour through streets so narrow you can touch both sides, weaving between incense-clouded temples and French colonial facades peeling in the humidity. The air is thick with charcoal smoke, roasting pork fat, and the sweet diesel of a city that refuses to slow down.
Hanoi's thirty-six guild streets have operated continuously for over a thousand years, each named for the trade it still practises — Silk Street, Paper Street, Silver Street. The Temple of Literature, founded in 1070, predates Oxford. Hoan Kiem Lake sits at the city's heart, its jade water circled by tai chi practitioners at dawn and beer-drinking crowds at dusk. The French Quarter's tree-lined boulevards contrast sharply with the compressed chaos of the Old Quarter, where entire families live, cook, and trade from shophouses no wider than a doorway. Train Street, where the Hanoi–Lao Cai railway passes within centimetres of residents' front doors, has become one of Southeast Asia's most photographed urban moments. The food scene operates almost entirely on the street — tiny plastic stools, no menus, one dish perfected over decades.
Solo
Hanoi rewards aimless wandering through its layered streets — duck into an alley and find a temple, a tailor, or a pho stall that's been serving one recipe for forty years.
Couple
Egg coffee in a hidden upstairs cafe, cyclo rides through the French Quarter at dusk, and rooftop cocktails above the neon blur of the Old Quarter.
Friends
Bia hoi corners serve fresh draught beer for pennies on plastic chairs — the perfect launchpad for a night that spills across the Old Quarter.
Family
Water puppet theatre, the Temple of Literature's courtyard, and street food tours designed for children make Hanoi one of Vietnam's most family-accessible cities.
- The Old Quarter's thirty-six guild streets date back a thousand years — each one named for the trade it still practises.
- Crossing a six-lane roundabout on foot with no traffic lights is an adrenaline hit that requires total commitment.
- Heritage hotels occupy restored French colonial mansions with wrought-iron balconies and original mosaic floors.
- Street food stalls serve pho from 5am on tiny plastic stools — entire families eat together for less than a dollar each.
Pho cuon wrapped with fresh herbs and dunked in chilli fish sauce.
Egg coffee whipped thick and sweet, served in hidden cafes up narrow concrete stairwells.
Cape Town
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Dawn light crowns a flat-topped mountain while penguins waddle the southern shore below.
Rio de Janeiro
Brazil
Granite peaks erupting from tropical forest between lagoon and ocean, a landscape no city should have.
Noto
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Rebuilt in honey-coloured stone after an earthquake, every facade a Baroque theatrical set.
Dunedin
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A Scottish-built city with the world's steepest street where yellow-eyed penguins nest on the headland.
Cat Ba Island
Vietnam
Limestone overhangs where climbers free-solo directly above the open sea.
Mu Cang Chai
Vietnam
Mountains carved into thousands of mirrored rice terraces reflecting the sky.
Bac Son Valley
Vietnam
A perfectly flat river valley of patchwork rice paddies walled in by sheer limestone mountains.
Can Tho
Vietnam
Hundreds of wooden boats trading pineapples and durian at dawn on the muddy Mekong.