The best places to visit in Southeast Asia – as voted by you

21.07.2023 - 08:30 / roughguides.com

Prepare for an assault on the senses. Southeast Asia has a bellyful of thundering motorbikes, fiery volcanic peaks, seething jungle temples and pungent markets. Yet we also love it for its squeaky-clean sands, barely believable islands and pagodas overlooking lily-topped lotus ponds. From temples to tropical rainforests, here are the top ten places to visit in Southeast Asia – as voted for by you.

Pinned on the map midway down Vietnam’s South China Sea coast, Hoi An feels a world apart. Unlike Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi, which have unholy obsessions with the motorbike, Hoi An is lost in a Zen-like communion with days gone by, a legacy of the French, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese who once traded here. From stopped-clock tea warehouses to traditional tailors, its Old Town is framed by mustard-yellow shopfronts and cut through by sinewy canals. Cars and motorbikes are banned from the town centre, so it’s a cycling nirvana: follow dozens of threadbare routes from rice paddies to temples and magazine-cover beaches. See why we consider Hoi An one of the best cities in Vietnam.

Best for relaxation and great views: Hoi An Silk Marina Resort & Spa

Best for boutique style on a budget: Hoi An Hai Au Boutique Hotel

No list of things to do in Cambodia could be complete without visiting Siem Reap – colourful, chaotic and intoxicatingly teeming – is nothing if not infectious. Even in a city forever associated with the glorious temples of Angkor Wat, it’s impossible to leave without snapshots of its street life imprinted in your memory. If ever there was a city that looked great on camera, it’s here.

Justifiably though, it’s Angkor Wat and its galleried temples dedicated to gods and demons that draw the crowds. Explore this landscape of pilgrimage and ritual, of saffron-robed monks and long-tailed macaques, then take a sunset shot while savouring the view from Phnom Bakheng hilltop. But remember: Angkor Wat is to Siem Reap what a first step is to a child: only just the start.

Best for visiting Siem Reap: Memoire d' Angkor Boutique Hotel

Strikingly beautiful, albeit with a few rough edges, Bagan is bound to a complex history that needs a keen mind to understand its genesis. Founded in the second century near Mandalay, it filled out the Ayeyarwady River plains with more than 10,000 temples, pagodas and monasteries, of which around 2200 survive today.

More bamboozling still, there was a time, pre-Aung San Suu Kyi in the late-2000s when visitors were such a rarity it was possible to explore its greatest stupas – the 50m-high corn-cob Ananda Pahto, the colossal Dhammayangyi Pahto – almost entirely alone. The result of Myanmar’s fresh appeal today is skies filled with bucket-list air balloons and boutique B&Bs with interiors echoing