Signs advocating against plastic waste can be found all over Cù Lao Chàm Island. Photo courtesy of Cham Island Tours

AF Reeves - @afreeves23

Reporting in from Lentas, Crete after what is almost a decade away from a European coastline, the first thing I notice is what's missing. No music blaring from speakers wired only to the taste of the individual. No trash snagged in the tamarisk trees or drifting at the tideline. No faux mythic temples or exaggerated statuettes of the minotaur and such, from some outdated idea of what a tourist wants to see. What's left is more simple and what made me love Việt Nam from the moment I landed. It is something harder to name. It would be crass to call it originality or authenticity. Yet it's wholesome. Whatever it is, it feels natural, original, unmistakably Greek. And that feels enough to be special.

I reflect on Việt Nam a great deal when I feel this. Not with resentment, more with years of curiosity, endearment and gentle critique. As someone who loves a place enough to want better for it. So many of the spots worth visiting there are now suffocating under the weight of their own popularity: crowded, loud, littered. Trash is what confuses me the most. This is a country whose collective sense of responsibility towards one another I hold in high regard, to the point of bragging to friends. Yet, somewhere between that innate cultural cornerstone and the nation's natural beauty, something is leaking.

Then there are the new resorts, glossy and air-conditioned, rising along stretches of coast that a decade ago had nothing but fishing boats. Who are they for? Domestic tourists chasing a weekend away, or foreigners chasing the Gram? I'm never entirely sure, and I suspect the developers aren't either. What troubles me more is the aesthetics sitting beneath the question: the new-age false buildings, the strange statues, present even at the high-end places, bizarrely amusing at best, tacky otherwise. Vietnamese architecture is extraordinary. It's original, diverse, photogenic to the point of being moving. So why reach for someone else's imitation when the real thing, weathered and specific and yours, is right there? Construction should not exist for the sake of itself.

It occurs, at least from this quiet Cretan hillside, the vantage point of my supposed arrogant Western privilege, that Việt Nam is getting more popular by the year, both with its own people and foreign visitors. While that growth has to go somewhere, I'd rather it went towards restoration and regeneration than replication.

All may not be lost though. As curious as I am an alarmist. I went looking, and it's more encouraging than the occasional beach trash may suggest. Khánh Hòa Province is finalising conservation work on national monuments, with restoration proposals for Po Nagar due in 2026. Hưng Yên restored over two hundred heritage sites between 2021 and 2025. At Tràng An, more than seven thousand locals work the boats and the cleanup rounds that keep the karst landscape presentable. It’s stated that the national tourism strategy through 2030 places cultural and eco tourism as its heart.

Hội An, Huế and a handful of others cannot continue to be the only places of their kind. Somewhere, surely, there is a Vietnamese Lentas: remote, unbothered, still itself. I hope that when the well is tapped, which it will be, it rejuvenates places rather than paving over them. Give people the real thing. No need for plastic. VNS