If you ever decide to travel to Southeast Asia for a golfing vacation, consider Vietnam. Until recently, golf in communist Vietnam was considered a decadent capitalist pastime. No more. With a reforming economy that's growing nearly as fast as China’s, golf is the new status symbol in the Land of the Dragon.

Currently there are only nine golf courses in the country, but recently the government announced that a consortium of Japanese companies will invest $1.2 billion to build a “romantic town” with 30,000 villas, five-star hotels and, yes, a 36-hole golf course just a chip shot away from the city of Dalat. Groundbreaking is scheduled for June.

The beautiful city of Dalat in the Central Highlands has a year-round climate similar to summers in Denver, which is about as pleasant a climate as exists anywhere in the world. It's a favorite spot for Vietnamese honeymooners -- and dirt cheap. I stayed in a very commendable guest house for $10 per night.

The city already has one golf course – the 84-year-old Dalat Palace Golf Club. Built by the French colonialists to honor the last Vietnamese emperor, it fell into weedy disuse after the Americans' defeat in 1975 and for years it served mostly as a trysting spot for lovers. A decade ago it was renovated.

Golf's fortunes in Vietnam began to turn around when the Hanoi government joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, then Malaysia's foreign minister and now its prime minister, advised Communist leaders that participating fully in ASEAN meant entertaining visitors and doing business on the golf course.

Soon after, the Vietnamese politburo issued a proclamation that golf was not only condoned but encouraged – which everyone interpreted to mean that polishing your short game no longer made you a candidate for a re-education camp.

Before long, Nick Faldo was designing the Ocean Dunes Golf Club in Phan Thiet, 150 miles from Saigon. That course has a signature par-three that Golf Magazine named one of the 500 most beautiful holes in the world.

The average Vietnamese laborer earns $40 a month, a little more than half what a Chinese laborer makes. Vietnamese tend to be aggressive and hard-working. That's why Cisco System announced this week it's opening a plant in Vietnam. Others are sure to follow. Take a tip from me and go as soon as you can. This fascinating and exotic part of the world is changing fast.

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