Location: Vietnam

HCM, Saigon, take your pick as these are all names that Ho Chi Minh City go by since the fall of Saigon in 1975. The city is Vietnam’s business and financial hub with a prominent history going back hundreds of years but the war is mostly how foreigners associate the city’s history.

The City of Ben Tre is actually where the Vietnam War started when the Viet Cong killed 12 southern Vietnamese soldiers in 1959 and where the preposterous strategy was proposed by a US army officer who said, “It became necessary to destroy Ben Tre to save it” and was bombed till flattened. But this meant the city had a clean slate and rebuilt what it is now today. The completion of the Rach Mieu Bridged in 2009 was when things kicked into high gear as development growing at a rapid pace with tourism following suit.

Con Dao is a group of 16 islands located on the southern coast of Vietnam. It has a storied history with Marco Polo even stopping over the island but later on, it became a prison for political prisoners during the French Colonial era and was continued by the Saigon regime where they locked up and tortured the Viet Cong.