A Luxurious Pitstop Backpacking In Vietnam

Backpacking is an adventure that commands recovery. And where better to pitstop in Vietnam than the Four Seasons? Francisca Kellett checks in to The Nam Hai.

Hotel Review: Four Seasons The Nam Hai – Hoi An, Vietnam

Backpacking is all well and good, but we’d been at it for two weeks and we needed a holiday. That’s the thing about backpacking: you forget, if you’ve not been backpacking for, say, two decades, that it’s quite hard work.

It had been an adventure. The husband, our two teenage daughters and I roaming about Vietnam, a country I first visited when I was just a couple of years older than them in the mid 90s. We did the cities, dodging mopeds, marvelling at temples, sitting on tiny stools in tiny cafes sipping sweet, heart-racingly strong Vietnamese coffee. We’d toured the countryside – the emerald rice paddies, the looming Karst mountains, the little villages where farmers worked their fields in conical hats alongside their water buffalo. We’d cycled in rainforests and clambered through vast, cathedral-like caves, eaten pho and bun cha and bánh mì. Ridden in boats, on rafts, in trains, on motorbikes. Dodged typhoons and sat out monsoon storms. Stayed in homestays and on family-owned eco-farms. We were elated but exhausted.

Which is why, when we drove into the Four Seasons Nam Hai, I quite literally laughed out loud with delight. Here was an altogether different experience. We’d done authenticity and adventure: this was five-star Vietnam, and it felt like a balm.

We all know that Four Seasons does luxury well – but here it does it in a low-key, languid, gloriously Vietnamese way. The resort is spread over 35 hectares – large enough to feel blissfully peaceful, even when busy – dotted with villas (some with pools, some not), all centered around a glorious procession of tiered pools, stepping down to a long swathe of white beach, lapped by the South China Sea, shimmering in the soupy-humid heat. All was green and lush, with 4,000 coconut palms (count ‘em), fragrant frangipani trees and flowering bushes lining cobbled paths. Birds fluttered, dragonflies hovered, butterflies zig-zagged over the pools.

Our one-bedroom villa was perfect for the four of us, with recently refurbed interiors that melded dark tropical woods with billowing silks to great effect. The TV room off to one side had been converted into the kids’ bedroom, and our bathroom was big enough to do cartwheels in. My favourite part: the outdoor shower, where I’d rinse off the salt surrounded by waving fronds and flitting dragonflies.

The spa, set beside a lotus-covered lake, did a good turn at morning yoga beneath the palms and soothing massages by the water. Every evening they held a ‘kiss the earth’ ceremony – which sounds cheesey, but writing down a wish or intention, placing it in a little paper lantern and releasing it onto the lake was lovely.

We spent our two days here lounging, lazing, and lounging some more: around the enormous main pool, palm trees swaying pleasingly overhead; on the hot, hot beach, dipping in the bath-warm sea; in hammocks dotted around the resort, or on the various soft surfaces in our villa. 

The Nam Hai is EarthCheck certified, and a guided tour around the enormous organic kitchen gardens, and a long discussion on the benefits of composting and the importance of the coral restoration programmes showed me that the staff are proud of the resort’s sustainability efforts.

There’s a well-regarded cooking school on site, and hourly shuttles to the gorgeous town of Hoi An, where we spent evenings strolling along the old French-colonial streets strung with lanterns, ducking into local tailors for linen shirts, sitting by the river with cold beers and mango smoothies.

And we slept, nearly 11 hours each night. It felt like a two-week holiday shoe-horned into a weekend, leaving us refreshed, revived, and ready to hit the road again for the rest of our adventure.

BOOK IT

One-bedroom Villas from £495 per night. fourseasons.com