My husband and I will be traveling to Singapore in mid-August of this year for business and are hoping to extend our visit by around seven days to Vietnam (Hanoi, Hoi An, and/or Sapa). According to one travel agent whom I have contacted, August is not a recommended time of year to visit Vietnam, due to it being in the middle of the rainy season. My question is - have any of you ever traveled to Vietnam in August, and if so, what was the weather like? If the rainy season means a daily afternoon downpour, that's fine. But we do not want to be stuck in the middle of a monsoon! Thanks in advance for your advice.

Hi-
I'm wondering this myself as I'm planning a trip there in August. Funny thing is that the airlines consider it "high season" even though it's supposedly the "rainy season" as well.

I was in Cambodia in mid July (also rainy season) and it was more like rain every afternoon, not monsoon. I imagine VN to be much the same.

I went to Ho Chi Minh City in August about 10 years ago. We were there for one week and I do remember it raining a few times (not heavy, just downpours). I remember the weather more for the humidity than the rain because I live in LA where the summers are dry.

However, on that same trip a week later, we encountered a typhoon in Hong Kong. As a result, we had to cancel a day trip to Shenzhen, China. Overall, the rainy weather didn't affect our vacation too much.

Finding this information is NOT difficult. Have you ever heard of the Weather Channel's website, www.weather.com. Just go to the website, click on "Travel" in the horizontal navigation at the top of the home page, click on "Vacation Planner" on the next page that appears, then, on the next page, under "Destination Finder," simply plug in the name of the place in which you are interested under Option 2. This is not rocket science--and you'll get much more reliable info from weather.com than from a message board. Good luck.

WSL:

There's no need to be harsh on Lil_Rhody because she wanted to know someone else's experience. If it makes her feel better to know what my experience was in Vietnam, then good for her. If you feel better getting the stats from a weather website, then good for you. Different strokes for different folks.

WSL- I I looked up Vietnam and specifically Hanoi on Weather.com. While it did give the average temperature for August (80-89 degrees) it did not give any precipitation information which is what the first poster wanted.

On another website, (US State Department for Vietnam I think) it said June-Sept was the "rainy season" and August-October was the Monsoon season. But, really, you never know. 5 years ago I was in Thailand in November, comtemplating going to Vietnam for December and the news had the entire country was awash in a great flood. I wound up in Nepal instead. Most likely there will be some sort of rain every day. Don't let it stop you; all it means is less tourists and more lush greenery.

Thanks for the advice, WSL, but I had already gone to weather.com to check temperatures. I was actually looking for daily precipitation figures. Since I know that Vietnam is a long country, I understand that there could be different weather conditions throughout the country at the same time. This was my first post on the board, and I hadn't realized that my question was such an ignorant one.

Thanks to tcl and Kristina for their reassurances. In case anyone is interested, I just spoke with someone at the Vietnam Embassy Travel Division who told me that it should be hot and dry in Hanoi and Sapa in August but the rainy season in Hue, Hoi An, and farther south.