Hội An doesn’t walk. She struts. Like a Christian Lacroix creation gone rogue from the runway, saturated in color and piled high with fabric, she shifts guises from one sidewalk to the next. All allure in the Chinese Assembly Halls—radiant with gold and incense—she turns reserved, almost brooding, beneath the timber frames of the ancient…

Up for hours, she slips in slippers between the silhouettes, lights up a stove, pushes a bicycle, still muttering about yesterday’s market gossip. It’s a theater of shadows in this hour stolen from the dawn. At this time, Hội An is not yet that washed-out postcard that clusters of selfie sticks will come to trample…

In this season, the sky doesn’t do weather; it directs a goddamn play. It stares into the mirrors of the waterlogged rice terraces and, like Narcissus, watches itself fall in love and tear itself to shreds ten times a day. From Sapa to Y Ty, from Lai Chau to Mu Cang Chai, it gives itself…

Faithful to herself. Champassak remains one of the few destinations in Laos that doesn’t seem to be at war with her own destiny. She possesses that motionless, almost aristocratic class that requires no artifice. Every time I return, I feel as though I’m visiting an old aunt with faded, courtly manners—her makeup peeling under the…

Cao Bang. Three syllables that crack like three machete swings in the mist. At the far reaches of a North-Eastern Vietnam carved by the billhook, this province, ravaged by landscape torments, imposes itself with brute force to remind you that the earth has teeth. And what a jaw it is! You aren’t looking at a…

Hue under the sun is almost too clean. The Imperial City gleams too hard, the tombs posture like aging aristocrats, and the whole place starts looking like a carefully arranged film set. But when the sky closes in—low clouds, fine drizzle, sickly light, that’s when it finally exhales. The stone drinks. The walls weep. Hue…

Going to Sa Dec is like giving a peck on the cheek to an old lady who’s seen a lot. She’s watched them all pass through: colonials in crisp white uniforms with neatly groomed mustaches, Chinese traders, nuns in winged cornets, the heavy Mekong barges, ceremonious Caodaists… and even Marguerite Duras, dragging her dreams through…

Savannakhet is Sleeping Beauty waking up with a hangover. The forgotten, the rebel, the sublime outcast. This is precisely where her genius lies: Savannakhet isn’t in the shop window; she’s the hushed back-office, where the real treasures are kept under a fine layer of dust to keep the rumors at bay. This is a city…

North of Hue, the ancient imperial capital of the Nguyen lords, the fighting reached a maddening intensity during the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1975. This area sat in the immediate shadow of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), that fragile and highly strategic demarcation line separating the communist North Vietnam from the American-backed South. In this…

The Khe Sanh US Combat Base As I head back out, the crushing tranquility of Truong Son clings to my skin. The lightness of the ride collides with the weight of the ten thousand lives resting behind me. Many of them flickered out during the famous siege of Khe Sanh in 1968, my next stop…