I recently went with some overseas Vietnamese friends for a trip to the north and I could sense their disappointment despite their high spirits in the beginning.

On the way from Noi Bai Airport to Ha Long Bay, the bus stopped at Hai Duong Province for people to go to the rest room and buy local food specialties if they wanted to. My friends just went to the toilet and returned to the bus, buying nothing.

“The toilet is too dirty to use. So I don’t think that the food they sell can be clean,” one of them told me.

Arriving at Tuan Chau International Tourism and Entertainment Zone, each person had to pay VND25,000 (US$1.46) to enter, but received no instruction about what it had inside.

There was not enough light and it took some time before we found the site of the dolphin and seals performance, which cost another VND80,000 ($4.67) per person.

Every time the seal climbed out of the water, dozens of people in the front would stand up to see more clearly and some people behind would stand on their seats. The polite audience members had naught to do but sit and watch other people’s behinds.

Then in the Thien Cung cave we felt we were taking a steam bath although it was pouring outside. No one could take a picture as we were all stuck in the lines.

Why do the site managers let people go into the cave that freely? Why don’t they have a person to limit the visitors to a couple of hundred at a time, with a half an hour gap?

If one visitor had collapsed in the queue, I don’t know what could have been done.

Is this leisure traveling? Or a form of torture?

Three-star hotels in Ha Long are not connected to the Internet.

In Sa Pa, streets were crowded and vehicles jammed for hours, with no officer in sight to help.

Some tourist sites didn’t have a toilet and visitors were in no mood for sightseeing or anything else.

Returning to Hanoi, my friends encountered another big problem as most streets had been submerged following heavy rains.

It’s difficult to invite guests to our house, more difficult to make them happy during their stay, and impossible to have them visit again if we don’t try to change our tourism ways soon.

Maybe we need a big campaign, a national program launched with specific details included. Clean, well-equipped toilets, a clean environment, hotels with minimum expected facilities, smooth roads, and fewer traffic jams.

Not to mention a heightened civic sense.