Vietnam
About Vietnam
Vietnam is a long, thin country that takes some time to get a read on. The north feels nothing like the south. The coast is different from the mountains, which are different again from the delta. It has been through things that would have broken other places and has come out the other side with its food, its architecture, its stubbornness and its sense of humor largely intact. That sounds like a cliche. Spend twelve days here and it stops sounding like one.
This trip runs the full length of the country, which is the only honest way to do it. Hanoi and the mountain mists of Sapa. Two nights on a junk in Halong Bay. Hoi An at dawn before anyone else is awake. Ho Chi Minh City – Saigon, as the locals mostly still call it, at full volume. And the Mekong Delta on the last day, because no trip to Vietnam should end in a city.
Places to Visit in Vietnam
Explore Vietnam’s top destinations, each offering unique experiences. Whether it’s breathtaking nature or rich culture, your perfect trip awaits.
Hanoi
Ho Chi Minh City
Halong Bay
Mekong Delta
Sample Itinerary for Your Vietnam Trip
Check out our sample itinerary for Vietnam and get inspired. Need something unique? We can create custom itineraries tailored to your interests and schedule.
The Indochine Expedition
Hanoi > Sapa > Halong Bay > Hoi An > Ho Chi Minh City > Mekong Delta
Trip Highlights
- Highlights of The Indochine Expedition: A 12-Day Vietnam Journey (Simplified)
- Start in Hanoi to explore the Old Quarter, enjoy local food, and then take an overnight train to the north.
- In Sapa, go trekking through the massive Muong Hoa Valley to see terraced rice fields and meet the local H’mong people.
- Spend two nights cruising Halong Bay, kayaking among the towering limestone islands, and seeing a floating fishing village.
- Travel south on the scenic Reunification Express train along the coast to central Vietnam.
- In Hoi An, explore the Ancient Town’s unique architecture, shop for custom-made clothes, and try local specialty dishes.
- Rent a bicycle to visit the Tra Que vegetable village for a cooking class, and stay to see the beautiful evening lantern display.
- End the trip in Ho Chi Minh City by visiting historical sites like the Cu Chi Tunnels and exploring the vast waterways of the Mekong Delta.
The Itinerary
Day 1 - Arrival on Hanoi - The City Of The Acending Dragon
The motorbikes hit you first – not dangerously, just constantly, a flow of traffic that operates by rules you’ll spend the first day trying to understand and the second day walking through without thinking about it. The Old Quarter smells of charcoal and star anise and diesel and temple incense, sometimes all at once. Check in, leave your bags, and walk. The thirty-six ancient guild streets – Silk Street, Tin Street, Paper Street – still more or less carry the trades that named them.
Find a plastic stool at a sidewalk pho stall before the evening is out. The bowl that arrives – clear broth, silken noodles, rare beef, a plate of fresh herbs to tear at the table – is what this city does better than anywhere. Walk Hoan Kiem Lake after dinner, where the red bridge leads to the Temple of the Jade Mountain and old men play chess under the lamps. Hanoi at night is worth staying up for.
Day 2 - Hanoi - History, Temples and The Old Quarter
The Temple of Literature was Vietnam’s first university, built in 1070 and dedicated to Confucius. Stone courtyards, turtle-borne steles, the particular quiet of a place that takes scholarship seriously. It is better than it sounds in a sentence. The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum complex is worth the visit not for the mausoleum itself – which is solemn and slightly strange – but for the adjacent Stilt House, where Ho Chi Minh chose to live rather than in the Presidential Palace next door. The gap between the two buildings says something.
The Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in the afternoon is genuinely one of the better museums in Southeast Asia – fifty-four ethnic groups, properly explained, with enough space to breathe. Then back to the Old Quarter for bun cha: grilled pork and noodles in a broth of vinegar and fish sauce, eaten at a pavement table with a glass of bia hoi, fresh-brewed beer dispensed from kegs for about thirty cents. Tonight you board the overnight train north toward the mountains.
Day 3 - Night Train To Sapa - Arrival In The Clouds
The train pulls into Lao Cai in the early morning, the light outside shifting from blue-black to mountain grey. A driver takes you the last hour up into the Hoang Lien Son range, the air getting sharper with each bend in the road. Sapa comes into view through the window as fog-wrapped rooftops above the sudden drop of the Muong Hoa Valley – a valley so large, terraced so deeply from floor to summit in rice paddies, that the first sight of it is genuinely disorienting.
Drink strong Vietnamese coffee at a cafe where clouds move through the open window and take stock. The afternoon market is where H’mong, Dao, Tay and Giay women trade textiles, vegetables and silver jewelry.
The silver has been their currency and their craft for generations. Watch for a while before buying anything. The mountain air smells of woodsmoke and something wild underneath it.
Day 4 -Sapa - Trekking The Muong Hoa Valley
Your guide is a Black H’mong woman who knows every path in these hills and every family along them. She leads you down from Sapa into the valley, through terraced rice fields that drop in steps down slopes so steep it’s not quite clear how they were built in the first place.
The trail passes through Lao Chai and Ta Van villages, where children appear in doorways and water buffalo stand in the paddies doing nothing in particular with great dignity.
Lunch in one family’s home: rice, pickled vegetables, river fish over a wood fire, smoke rising through the bamboo roof. Your guide shows you how she dyes fabric with wild indigo. She crushes leaves in her hands until they go deep blue-black, then holds them up so you can see what the valley has always made possible.
The walk back to Sapa at dusk, the mist filling the valleys below and Fansipan’s summit at 3,143 meters going dark against the first stars, is one of those hours that is hard to account for afterward.
Day 5 - Sapa To Hanoi - The Road Back East
Cat Cat village below Sapa town is worth the morning. The path descends past a waterfall and traditional weavers at their looms – the rhythmic clack of the shuttle is a sound that has been here longer than the road that now brings visitors. Buy something handmade if the mood takes you. The money goes directly to the person who made it.
Afternoon train back to Hanoi. Quick dinner of bun cha in the Old Quarter – you’ll want it again, and you should have it. Then a car east to the coast, two and a half hours, arriving in time to sleep well. Tomorrow morning the bay.
Day 6 - Halong Bay - Boarding The Junk and into The Karsts
The junk leaves its mooring at midday and within twenty minutes you’re among the karsts. Two thousand limestone towers rising from green water, their bases carved by centuries of tide into shapes that don’t quite look real from any angle.
Vietnamese legend says a dragon scattered pearls across this sea and the pearls became islands – a natural fortress against invasion. It’s the kind of legend that makes more sense once you’re actually in there.
This afternoon you kayak through a narrow sea cave into a hidden lagoon where the walls press close and the water goes jade-clear above white sand. Dinner on deck is Halong Bay seafood – squid, oysters from the bay’s own beds, prawns over charcoal – eaten as the limestone towers go amber then rose then dark. It is a very good evening.
Day 7 - Halong Bay - Caves, Fishing Villages and A Sky Full Of Stars
Get on the water before the other boats move. The bay at that hour is flat and still and the mist sits low between the karsts in a way that won’t last past nine o’clock. Breakfast is pho, made by the ship’s chef with herbs from a pot on the galley windowsill.
Sung Sot Cave this morning: the largest grotto in the bay, stalactites hanging in formations the Vietnamese have named over generations – a golden turtle, a rice-field map, a sleeping fairy. Make of that what you will, but the cave itself is genuinely impressive.
The floating fishing village visit is not a performance put on for tourists. Families here have lived on the water for generations – children born on boats, growing up between fish cages and cormorants.
The afternoon cooking class on deck covers spring rolls and nuoc cham dipping sauce, the balance of lime and fish sauce and chilli requiring more attention than it looks. That night, anchor in a hidden cove. The Milky Way in a sky this dark is worth setting an alarm for.
Day 8 - Halong Bay To Hoi An - The Reunification Express
Tai chi on the bow deck at sunrise while the karsts come back out of the mist. Then Hanoi, and the Reunification Express south. The train has been running this line connecting north and south since 1936.
Your sleeper cabin is not luxury but it is comfortable and the view is exceptional: the track runs along a ledge between the mountains and the South China Sea for hours, the light on the water changing through the afternoon.
Buy banh mi and local fruit at the station before you board. Eat it as the coast goes golden. Fall asleep somewhere in central Vietnam. You’ll wake in Hoi An’s world.
Day 9 - Hoi An - The Ancient Town
Hoi An before nine in the morning is genuinely one of the finer things in Southeast Asia. Yellow-ochre walls, dark timber shopfronts, the Thu Bon River reflecting the Japanese Covered Bridge that has been here since the seventeenth century.
Coffee vendors are lighting their burners as you walk. Vietnamese filter coffee dripping through a metal phin into condensed milk at a pavement table is enough to stop you entirely, and you should let it.
Hoi An was a major trading port for Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and Portuguese merchants across three centuries and the architectural mix of all of them is visible in every street. The Assembly Halls of the Cantonese and Fujian communities still operate as working temples, fragrant with incense.
Visit them. In the afternoon find a tailor – Hoi An’s craftspeople are among the best in the world and can produce hand-cut garments in twenty-four hours. Dinner: white rose dumplings and cao lau noodles, two dishes that exist in this form in this town and nowhere else.
Day 10 - Hoi An - Countryside, Cooking and Lantern Light
Hire a bicycle in the morning and ride into the rice paddies outside town. The roads are flat, shaded, and largely traffic-free in a way that’s increasingly unusual in Vietnam. Tra Que vegetable village grows herbs for the town’s restaurants using river water and seaweed fertilizer, the same method for generations.
A cooking class here means learning to make the dishes that made this town’s food reputation: white rose dumplings of translucent rice flour around prawn; cao lau noodles prepared with water from one specific ancient well; the banh xeo crispy pancake stuffed with bean sprouts, pork and prawn. These are not dishes that exist by accident.
Back in town as the lantern sellers set up for evening. The old quarter transforms at dusk – silk lanterns reflected in the black river, vendors paddling small boats, visitors releasing paper wish-lanterns into the current. It’s atmospheric in a way that could easily tip into kitsch and somehow doesn’t. Stay for it.
Day 11 - Hoi An To Ho Chi Minh City - Into The South
The overnight train drops you in Ho Chi Minh City at dawn and the city is already fully operational. Saigon, as most locals still call it, runs at a register that makes Hanoi feel measured. Nine million people and their motorbikes.
The War Remnants Museum is not an easy visit – the American War as experienced by the Vietnamese, told in photographs and testimony and hardware, without softening – but it is an important one. Take the time. The Reunification Palace in the afternoon has been frozen more or less in place since April 30 1975, which is an odd and affecting thing to walk through.
The French colonial boulevards of District 1 in the late afternoon, tamarind trees lining Haussmann-style streets, give you a different layer of the city’s history to sit alongside the others.
Dinner in District 3: clay pot caramelized fish, com tam broken rice with grilled pork and a fried egg. Southern Vietnamese food is sweeter, richer and more coconut-forward than the north. It takes about one meal to become a convert.
Day 12 - Cu Chi Tunnels And The Mekong Delta - Farewell To Vietnam
The Cu Chi Tunnels are sixty kilometers northwest of the city: 250 kilometers of underground passages hand-dug by Viet Cong fighters during the American War.
Some tunnels are no wider than a human shoulder. Entire communities lived underground here, operating field hospitals, making weapons, cooking over fires whose smoke was vented a kilometer away to avoid detection. You can crawl through a section of tunnel. Do it. Understanding something in your body is different from understanding it in your head, and this is the kind of history that deserves the difference.
The Mekong Delta in the afternoon is the landing you want after a morning like that. Nine arms of river, infinite green waterways, floating markets, stilted wooden houses, life moving entirely by boat.
Lunch on a small island: elephant ear fish fried crisp and wrapped in rice paper with herbs and fermented sauce. As the river catches the last of the afternoon sun and the sounds come up around you – frogs, roosters, a long-tail boat somewhere in the reeds – you get a clear sense of what this country actually runs on. It’s a good note to end on.
Start Planning Your Custom Itinerary
The trip highlights above are just a starting point. Whether you want more wildlife, cultural depth, or beach time, we’ll tailor every detail. Get in touch to begin crafting your personalized Vietnam experience.