Hanoi, Vietnam 🇻🇳

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What is Hanoi, Vietnam like for Digital Nomads?

Find out in this Digital Nomad Trip Report from Paul, covering 5 months spent in Vietnam’s capital 😍

📆 Time Spent

5 Months

👥 Traveling As

Solo - Without Pets

📍 Location / Area

Tay Ho (like all the other white people)

🏡 Accommodation

1-bedroom apartment

🌐 Internet / Working

• Internet is good across the whole city

• Data is very fast (and around $6 for an unlimited SIM for a month)

• There are LOADS of cafes to work from

🗣️ Language: Vietnamese

• I don't speak Vietnamese

• English levels are pretty good among young people - and people who don't speak English will still make an effort to help you

• Communicating is never a problem

🌤️ Weather

• Grey and relatively cold in winter (not as cold as people like to pretend though; it's not gonna snow)

• Very hot in summer

• The air pollution is the worst I've ever seen (somewhere between 100 and 300 AQI every day; usually averaging about 150-200)

Things to do

• Drink 7 million hyper-strong Vietnamese coffees per day and give yourself an anxiety attack

• Eat loads of super-tasty super-cheap street food (you can still find good street food for around $1.50 per meal)

• Hire a bicycle and ride around the perimeter of Tay Ho lake (17.5km). Or run it.

📈 Best things

• Genuinely unique atmosphere: it's somehow both very modern and very dated; it feels like someone took a tiny traditional village and inflated it to metropolis proportions. I normally hate big cities but I keep coming back here; it's infectious

• The cafe culture and coffee culture. Vietnamese coffee is the best in the world, and the cafes are great

• SUPER affordable. Aside from rent, you could get by here on $10 a day if you wanted to live super-frugallyThe freaking food and the prices!

📉 Worst things

• The air pollution

• It's crap for running/walking

• It's noisy: expect to be woken up by lots of mind-boggling noises. Will it be a rooster? Will it be a funeral? Will it be a man singing karaoke while he drags his own portable speaker down the street at 5am? Who knows!

✅ Go here if…

• They like cheap places

• They like unique atmospheres (I've genuinely never been anywhere like Hanoi)

• They like cycling in busy cities (cycling in Hanoi is one of my favourite things in the world)

❌ Avoid here if…

• They like peaceful, green, not-polluted, predictable cities

• They want a nomad community - most people here are English teachers; there aren't many nomads here. But it's easy to make friends

• They want a 'real' visa (your best option here is a 3-month visa)

See you back here next Friday with a fresh Digital Nomad Trip Report 🔵 until then…

👏 A Big Thank You To…

Paul, from England, for submitting this report!
Paul’s a freelance travel & fitness writer.
You can see more of his work, and connect with him on Linkedin 💼 

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