Live well for $500 a month Vietnam has warm weather, fast internet, cheap, modern apartments, great food, and low prices on everything. In Vietnam, you're not just living cheaply, but living very well for very little money. Whether you're a digital nomad, a long-term traveller, a location-independent entrepreneur, a retiree, or all of the above, and whether your budget is $500 a month or $1,000 a month or $5,000 a month, Vietnam is a great place for you to live. A good meal costs $1, a month of mobile data costs $5, and seeing the doctor costs $3 It's easy to live well in Vietnam. But there's not much information out there about Vietnam. Most digital nomads go to Thailand. Vietnam is actually a much better and cheaper option. Take it from Elly I'm Elly Nguyen, author of the acclaimed My Saigon series of travel guidebooks to Vietnam. In my books, I've shown thousands of travelers the best of Vietnam. Now I want to help digital nomads and others who may be interested in longer stays in Vietnam. Inside info to make your stay a success Prices of everything from meals to massages to apartments Secret three words for finding an apartment for the Vietnamese local price A typical digital nomad's day in Vietnam Being a solo woman in Vietnam Why Vietnamese people like me don't ride motorcycles around town Making (useful) Vietnamese friends and dating Vietnamese girls or guys The lowdown on dealing with government and police How not to find yourself wearing concrete boots in the Saigon river Language tips Reasons you might not like Vietnam This is a complete inside guide to living in Vietnam, with local information to help you decide whether you want to move here, and to make your stay a great one.

Experience real Saigon: My Saigon 2024 Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) offers bustling streets, amazing walks, too-hip-for-you cafes, rocking music clubs, luxurious salons, explosively delicious restaurants, and indoor cat zoos. Saigon is Vietnam. It’s young, practical, crowded, and a little bit brash. Most visitors to Saigon see the same boring “attractions”: boring restaurants, tourist-trap markets, and War propaganda. Saigon has so much more to experience than tourists see. My Saigon gives you the insider track: the most amazing experiences, the cultural backstories, the practical go-to tips, the best coffee, the best food (far beyond pho and banh mi), the best hangouts, the coolest stuff, and hipsters, hipsters everywhere. Details about 90-day and multi-entry electronic visas to Vietnam (new as of August, 2023). Big-picture navigation. History your tour guides aren't allowed to mention. Good hotels for cheap, without hostels, bedbugs, and weird smells. Get mobile data up and running without being scammed. The best pho in Saigon: no, it's not the one in the backpacker district. Awesome, authentic, cheap restaurants where my friends and I eat -- and Tripadvisor has no clue about. Coffee. Did someone say coffee? 1930s coffee, street coffee, "specialty" coffee, all kinds of coffee: I'll tell you where. Hang out with Vietnamese people, munch on dried squid, listen to Viet Pop (if you dare). Make cool friends, date guys or girls, whatever flag you might fly. Bust out with Saigonese slang to make your new friends laugh. Watch out for Saigon's mafia: they run the streets, and they don't announce themselves. Don't unintentionally offend people by wearing a popular tourist souvenir t-shirt. You definitely shouldn't give money to beggars and street kids. Avoiding taxi scams in Saigon is so easy, but most tourists refuse to learn. My Saigon is a guide, a love confessional, an instruction manual, and an ode to the city.

Quy Nhon is a secret beach paradise. Smack in the middle of Vietnam’s eastern coast, Quy Nhon boasts wide-open soft sand, crystal-blue waters, and super-cute fishing villages nestled into limestone cliffs. All with very few tourists. ​​​​​​​The swimming, snorkeling, and just-chilling are amazing. So is the eating: fresh fish, squid, shrimp, and oysters, for the price of fast food in the US. We Vietnamese people love escaping to Quy Nhon. It’s so relaxing and it’s so cheap, even by Vietnamese standards. Foreigners have no idea about this magical place. Now I’m letting you in on the secret. I’ll guide you around the town and show you the public city beaches, the quirky cafes, and of course the tons of seafood restaurants. We’ll go a bit outside the town (take a private car for just a few dollars) to the quieter, more secluded, even more spectacular beaches. There’s one nestled into a cliff, one with a giant Buddha looking down on it, and another one with bird-egg-like stones. I’ll show you a hidden cafe that looks like a treehouse, perched on a mountain top, with spectacular views over the city and the coast. This is the first Quy Nhon guidebook ever published. There isn’t even one in Vietnamese: In my previous guidebooks, we explored Saigon and Hanoi. I showed you Da Nang years before it became popular. Now let’s discover Quy Nhon. Bring your swim trunks.

All-new 2023 Edition Da Nang and Hoi An: the complete travel guide, from a local expert Da Nang is Vietnam's up-and-coming city. It offers urban excitement, Vietnamese culture largely unaffected by tourism, and stunning natural beauty. But Da Nang remains largely unknown and poorly documented, even in Vietnamese-language guides. This is the local's guide to Da Nang and Hoi An that includes a knowledgeable Vietnamese person's take on the best to see, do, and yes, eat and drink in Da Nang and Hoi An. Hang out where the locals hang out, make friends and see the real side of Vietnam, stay at nice hotels for under $20 a night, know what's overpriced, and most importantly, have an amazing time in Da Nang and Hoi An.

Hanoi: a maze of alleys, lakes, pagodas, jazz clubs, cafes, and Soviet statues. Even for us Vietnamese people, Hanoi is infamously inscrutable. It’s Vietnam’s enigma wrapped in a mystery, with egg cream on top. You can take the easy, well-trodden path: the tourist market, the tourist pho restaurant, the tourist beer street, and a dude in a glass case. Or you can go local: eat the pho that Vietnamese foodies eat, drink the coffee VIetnamese hipsters drink, and hang out on the other beer street, the one that’s not in any guidebooks, the one for locals. I'll even show you a super-creepy abandoned amusement park. Instead of canned propaganda, you'll understand the real stories behind the places and people you’re seeing. You'll meet “the locals.” Yes, they’d love to chat with you, they want to practice their English, and no, they don’t hate Americans. Nobody cares about the war anymore. We’ll wander down sketchy alleys and experience amazing places you’d never find in mass-market, foreigner-produced, ChatGPT-written guidebooks. I’ll also teach you practical skills to break away from the guided tours and well-worn tourist attractions: the lowdown on Vietnam visas (the rules were completely changed in 2023), how to get around, how to buy things, what to say, and what (and whom!) to avoid. My guidebooks took you to Saigon and Da Nang. You had a great time. Now, let’s meet the final boss: Hanoi. You’ll love it, I promise.

Dalat is mountain sunrises, chicken soup, paddle boats, and lounge singers. It's where Vietnamese people go to cool off in the summer, or see "European winter" for Christmas. Downtown is a cascade of steep staircases for pedestrians, or infuriatingly narrow one-way streets for the motorized. Even in the hottest global-warmed summer, you don't need A/C here. Dalat is Vietnam like you've never seen it. As heavily touristed as Dalat is, tourists miss the best stuff every time. I got tired of wanting to slap my forehead seeing foreign and Vietnamese visitors alike getting the blandest, most boring version of Dalat — especially on those awful guided tours around tourist traps and gift shops. I've lectured my Vietnamese friends about all the good things they miss in Dalat. That advice -- always with map links and QR codes -- fills this book. This is Dalat the way I know it and love it. We'll eat UFO cakes, conquer mountains, and find how to hide from the screaming tourist groups. Come with me. Let's discover Dalat.