SE Asia
 

What is the best month, or months, for traveling in SE Asia?

It depends on the countries you are considering visiting....Some countries have different rainy seasons. Could you be more specific? You will get more help!

Tere,
Many thanks for your response. I should have been more specific. The countries we are considering are Thailand, Cambodia, Viet Nam and Myanmar. We've been thinking of Oct., Nov. and Jan. Of course, we can't have optimally good weather in all of them, but of these three months, do you have any recommendations?

January is probably the best month for those destinations. October and November are the rainy season in central VN. I was in VN in November and couldn't visit Hue, Hoi An because of flooding. None of those countries have monsoons in January.

Thanks, Kathie. It helps us a lot to know that these countries we're looking at are monsoon-free in January. We'll go from there.
P.S. Have you visited Hue? We're thinking of it too.

I haven't yet visited Hue. I'll have to try it another time, since I couldn't go on a previopus trip to VN because of monsoon flooding.

kathie...
we are going to Vietnam in October for 2 weeks. we hope to visit central towns
even if the conditions are less than perfect. If it did storm, will the planes still fly?? is there usually enough warning that we could fly to Saigon??
Living in Maui, we track the storms and usually have time to react. do you know of any weather service that might
keep update info on s.e. asia weather?
thanks in advance

Kathie, I've really bungled my request for info, first being too general and then not even reading your response properly. You said plainly that you couldn't visit Hue. Sorry, sorry. But thanks again for pointing out Jan. as the best for those countries.

Dive, if I were you, I'd just play it by ear. The monsoons are severe enough (and the land low enough)that they have significant (people killed) flooding one out of three years in central VN. I would just say to follow the weather from wherever you are before you plan to go to Hue, and if it looks bad go elsewhere. At the time the monsoons were hitting central VN hard, we were in Hanoi and we barely got any rain, certainly not a storm.

Bali, Java and Sumatra are best May to November. Rest of the year is too rainy and hot. June - September are best of all.

For Burma, January is a good month, but the temperature can be quite cool north of Rangoon (Mandalay, Inle Lake). October and November would be fine because the summer monsoon would be over. ZZ

Sierra, I was in Hue a few years ago and I would definitely include it in your trip. It's beautiful with many interesting sights, most notably, the Royal Tombs, one of my favorites in VN. Try and spend at least two nights there.