Human tragedy eclipses tourist turmoil amid Vietnam’s deadly floods

A traveller’s close call in flood-ravaged Hoi An reveals how easily visitors can escape — and how many locals cannot. Craig Hill writes.

BY THE TIME our private car nosed into Hoi An, much of the town was already more river than road. Brown water lapped halfway up the tyres as we pushed through what had once been streets. Motorbikes sent up gentle bow waves, kids splashed barefoot in the street river and our tour guide, grinning in the rear-view mirror, called it “just a little flood, very normal”.

My wife and I exchanged a look. For her, it was unease; for me, it was something closer to controlled alarm. Years of State Emergency Service training back in Australia had taught me that when water is moving across a bitumen road, you take it seriously. I pointed to the level on the wheels and asked if it was safe. The guide waved a hand. “No problem. Tomorrow, all fine.” His facial expression said otherwise.

When we reached the hotel, the road outside was only just beginning to flood. I knew it wouldn’t be long before we were flooded in. I crossed the road to the convenience store for supplies, including a dozen cans of Saigon Lager. Three hours later, the streets were completely underwater for as far as we could see from our seventh-floor balcony.

Up in our room, I did what any modern traveller does in a crisis: I pulled out my phone, switched on global roaming and checked the radar on the internet. A smear of angry colour sat right over central Vietnam. More storms lined up offshore, marching towards us. Every forecast told the same story: the water wasn’t done yet.

I rang the tour operator in Australia. Calm voice, professional reassurance: the situation was being monitored, no need to worry. I hung up feeling like I’d just reported a house fire and been told to “open a window and relax”.

An hour later, the phone rang again. This time, the tour operator sounded different. Tomorrow’s tours were cancelled. The floods were worse than expected.

Sitting on the bed with the water still rising in the streets below, we talked it through. Our next stop after Hoi An was Ho Chi Minh City, and the news sites I’d scrolled through between radar checks were now full of images of streets there turning into rivers, too.

We called the operator back and made the decision: cancel the rest of the tour, get home. To their credit, they didn’t argue. They arranged a boat to collect us from the hotel the next morning and take us to higher ground where our guide and driver would be waiting. They booked new flights from Da Nang to Ho Chi Minh City, a hotel for the overnight stop and seats all the way back to Brisbane. All at their expense.

That night, the rain drummed on the roof like an accusation. From our balcony, as I drank the Saigon Lager, we watched the water rise, step by step, up the staircase from the courtyard. We packed our bags with relative calm. It felt less like preparing for a holiday and more like preparing to abandon ship. We were still able to get meals delivered to our room from the hotel restaurant. They weren’t new to this sort of disaster.

We also reflected on the trip so far. Falling off a buffalo in Ninh Bin (I landed on my feet, but I should have known better at my age), climbing partway up the mountain at the Mua Cave, river boating through caves under mountains on the river at Tam Coc and other memories I will write about at some future time.

Dawn came grey and heavy. Staff moved with a quiet efficiency that told us this was not their first flood. Then, with a soft bump, the boat arrived at the front steps where yesterday a car had dropped us. And, of course, I fell down the stairs and twisted my ankle getting into the boat.

Climbing into the metal boat with our suitcases felt surreal, like we were extras in someone else’s disaster movie. We sat at the back of the boat, and a couple of Vietnamese girls, also staying at the hotel, climbed in the front. As we pushed off, the hotel floated away behind us, its ground floor now part of the river.

We glided past shops we’d planned to visit, their shutters barely above the waterline. Mannequins stared out from drowned display windows; plastic chairs bobbed between columns. For miles around, houses sat in water up to the bottom of their doors. Families ferried belongings in basins and tubs, men pushed makeshift rafts loaded with gas bottles and sacks of rice, and women stood on rooftops waving phones in search of a signal.

I felt a knot of guilt alongside the relief. We had the privilege of stepping into a boat that would take us not just to higher ground, but to an airport, to another city, to home. Most of the people we passed had nowhere to go except upstairs.

On the road out of town, in the relative safety of the car, my wife finally exhaled. We watched the flooded fields slide past, the brown sheet of water broken by the tops of trees and power poles. The SES volunteer in me catalogued everything: the speed of the current, the scoured edges of the road, the makeshift sandbag walls. The traveller in me mourned the Hoi An we hadn’t seen: dry streets, glowing lanterns, markets humming instead of drowning.

We had to pull our jeans above our knees, take off our shoes and put on sandals to wade the final 100 metres to dry land, as the water at the end of the trip was too shallow for the boat to continue. There had been a little rain during the boat ride, but we’d had the foresight to bring our ponchos with us.

At Da Nang airport, with our clothes still damp, we checked in for the first leg home. We were going back to Brisbane with far fewer photos than planned, but with a story we hadn’t come looking for: a reminder that beneath every postcard city is a place that floods, breaks, endures — and that, as tourists, we step briefly into lives that cannot be evacuated so easily.

Back home, we watched the disaster unfold. As I write this in the wee small hours of the morning, six days after we climbed into the boat, at least 90 people are dead in the floods and a dozen more are missing.

Granted, most of these were further south, between Hoi An and Ho Chi Minh City, but still a little concerning. However, whatever disappointment we felt about cutting the trip short was suddenly dwarfed by that number. Human tragedy trumps a tourist’s inconvenience every time.

Craig Hill is a Brisbane-based Writer, Teacher, Business Consultant, Social Justice Campaigner and Journalist. He was the Legalise Cannabis Party candidate for the Federal Seat of Bonner at the 2025 Federal Election and author of the twelve-book Doctor Who Anthology episode guides. Twitter: @CraigHill01