Haiphong is a working city rather than a tourist destination, but it rewards a couple of slow days. The French colonial core around the Opera House is the most rewarding area to walk: pastel-coloured villas, café-lined boulevards, and the early-twentieth-century commercial buildings of the old port. A few classical Vietnamese temples and pagodas survive in pockets across the city, and the riverside markets give a sense of the trading life that built the place.