Central Highlands

The Central Highlands were never one place, and Vietnam only started treating them as its own country's interior relatively recently. This is Ê Đê, Gia Rai, Ba Na, M'nông, and K'Ho country — longhouses, some matrilineal societies, and a shared instrument that ties the region together more than any border does: bronze gongs, each one believed to house its own spirit, rung to mark births, deaths, harvests, and the changing of seasons. UNESCO recognized the tradition in 2005, the same period it started disappearing fastest — the knowledge that used to pass from elder to child interrupted by decades of war, resettlement, and a coffee economy that reorganized the region around cash crops instead of ceremony.

The coffee itself came with the French, planted here from the 1850s onward because the volcanic soil and elevation turned out to suit robusta better than almost anywhere else on Earth. Đắk Lắk is now the beating heart of Vietnam's coffee industry, the world's second-largest producer. Đà Lạt, higher and cooler still, became something else entirely — a French hill station built from the 1890s after the bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin pushed for a highland retreat from the coastal heat, and it kept the villas and the temperate air long after the French left.

One thing worth knowing before you go: elephant riding, long sold here as a highlight, is being phased out province-wide under a welfare program running through the end of 2026. Lang Thang won't book it, on principle, whatever stage the transition is at when you read this.