Hi there, we use cookies to improve your experience on our website. You can update your settings by clicking the Privacy policy link at the bottom of the page. What do you think of this person's awful experience in Do Son? Is his experience common? Would like to hear comments from people who've visited Do Son. Westerners advised to avoid Do Son I was in Do Son twice, while staying in Hai Phong.
I advise westerners to avoid Do Son for the following reasons. Taxi drivers will become aggressive and demanding for a Bigger tip than you're offering and frankly, since this is a tiny area and there are no police or protections for tourists, its better to buy them off. There are people living and operating businesses that simply Hate westerners and will take your money, not give the service and literally generate a crowd of people to surround you and frighten you off. They also try to provoke you into striking one of them, by publicly humiliating you, and setting up situations that you "accidentally" fall over an object someone puts in your path as you're backing away from a threatening situation.
If you do strike first, this gives the entire crowd legal grounds to give you a good beating. Prostitutes there are young college girls, making money from the Vietnamese and other Asian men coming there in droves. You're white, you're a westerner and they will have nothing to do with you.
It's a pity that this place is so racist, corrupt, and dangerous to western travelers that have no initial reason to suspect it. It's quite typical of the underlying theme of people in Northern Vietnam, but it comes to a free for all boil in Do Son. How a government with such obvious goals to attract tourism can turn a blind eye to this kind of on-going situation in a 'tourist attraction" is amazing.
I say this, because government employees that I talked with in Hai Phong, simply shrugged their shoulders and excused the peoples actions by saying they were "uneducated".
