Getting around: the numbers behind the route

The shape of the problem

Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are about as far apart as London and Naples, with a narrow waist in the middle where the country is barely 50 km wide. Everything you might want to see is strung along that line: the mountains at the top, the imperial cities and the beaches in the middle, the delta at the bottom. No route avoids covering ground, so the only real question is which tool you use for each leg.

The common mistake is treating the three as interchangeable and choosing by price. They are not interchangeable. A flight is the only sensible way to move between regions and the worst possible way to move 200 km. A train is excellent on two specific stretches and mediocre everywhere else. A private car is the only tool that stops when you want it to, and it stops being sensible somewhere past five hours in a day.

What follows is each of them with its real cost in hours, then the road table that sits behind every itinerary we write, then the administrative change from 2025 that has made most published Vietnam advice quietly wrong about where places are. Read it next to how many days you need, because transport time is the thing that turns a ten-day trip into eight days of Vietnam.

Domestic flights: an hour in the air, half a day of your life

The domestic network is dense, frequent and cheap by European or North American standards. Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City are the three hubs, and between them they connect to everything a visitor wants. Flying is what makes an eleven-day north-to-south trip possible at all — the alternative is four days of driving.

The honest part is the arithmetic on the ground. Add two hours at each airport for check-in, security and the walk to the gate, plus the transfer at each end, and a seventy-minute flight is a five-hour block with nothing else in it. That is why our itineraries put flights either first thing in the morning or after a full touring day, and why we resist adding a fourth region to a short trip: the region costs you a day before you have seen anything.

Two routes deserve a footnote. Dong Hoi is the airport for the caves, and the drive on to Phong Nha is 50 minutes and 45 km — see the Phong Nha page for what that buys you. Con Dao is 240 km off the southern coast, about an hour in the air from Ho Chi Minh City, and fares run roughly USD 47 to USD 130 depending on how far ahead you book; Vietnam Airlines carries most of the traffic and Bamboo Airways is the second option. If the flights are full there are ferries: Vung Tau to Ben Dam takes 3 to 3 hours 30 at roughly USD 28–55, and Tran De in Soc Trang to Con Dao takes 2 to 2 hours 30 at roughly USD 13–16, with the port about 30 km outside Soc Trang town.

The railway: very good at two things, poor at the rest

One main line runs the length of the country, Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, and the through services on it are known as the Reunification Express. It is a single-track line for much of its length, it is not fast, and the full run takes more than a day and a night. Nobody who values their time rides it end to end, and we have never suggested it to a client.

On two stretches, though, the train is genuinely the best tool available. The first is Hanoi to Lao Cai overnight, for Sa Pa: a soft-sleeper cabin leaves in the evening and arrives at dawn, converting a 5 hour 30 to 6 hour daytime drive into a night you were going to spend somewhere anyway. It works well for travellers who sleep on trains and badly for those who do not, and a tired first morning in the mountains costs more than the hours it saved. Our six-day northern route offers both.

The second is Hue to Da Nang over the Hai Van pass. The road takes 2 hours 30 for 120 km through the tunnel or over the top; the train takes roughly three hours and spends part of it on a ledge cut into the headland above the sea, which is a better hour than any of it seen from a car. It is a short, cheap, daylight ride with no sleeping involved, and it is the one train journey in Vietnam we recommend on its own merits.

Against that, the list of things the railway is poor at is long. Stations sit where the nineteenth century put them, not where your hotel is. Luggage is your own problem on and off. Soft-sleeper berths in the better carriages sell out weeks ahead in the high season and around Tet. Schedules are rebuilt after floods — the central section was cut in several places during the 2025 floods — and a cancelled train in Vietnam is not automatically rebooked onto another one. When a leg matters, we fly it.

Road distances and times we use on every itinerary

These are the figures behind every drive time on this site. They assume a private car with a driver, one comfort stop on anything over two hours, and normal traffic rather than a public holiday. Tet week and the first days of a national holiday can add half again to anything leaving a big city.

Read the third and fourth rows together, because they catch people out. The drive down to the bay piers is 2 hours 30 to 3 hours, but the drive from the pier back to the airport is 3 hours 30 and 190 km — a different road, taken after a boat disembarks around 11:00. A departure before 17:00 on that day does not work, and any itinerary that pretends otherwise has not been driven.

A car with a driver, and why we do not hand over the keys

Every trip on this site runs with a private vehicle and a driver who is not your guide. That is not a luxury detail, it is how the day gets built: the car waits while you walk through a market, meets you at the other end of a village, carries the bags between two hotels while you take the train over a pass. A driver who has done the road knows which of the two routes to Pu Luong is under repair this month, and that is worth more than any map.

Self-drive is a different question, and the answer is no. A foreign licence alone does not make you legal to drive in Vietnam, and the conversion is not something you complete inside a two-week holiday. Driving without a valid licence also voids most travel insurance policies at exactly the moment you need them. Rental firms will hand over a car anyway; that does not make the arrangement sound.

Motorbikes are the harder conversation, because so much of the marketing around northern Vietnam is built on them. We do not put clients on motorbikes, as riders or as pillion passengers, on any trip. The northern mountain roads are narrow, wet for much of the year, shared with trucks, and a long way from a hospital that can treat a serious fracture — Dong Van to a hospital that can operate is hours, not minutes. Almost every standard travel insurance policy excludes motorbike riding outright or requires a licence category the rider does not hold. Our five-day Ha Giang loop covers the same passes in a car with a driver, and you see more of them because you are not watching the road surface.

If two wheels are the point of the trip for you, we are the wrong company and will say so at the enquiry stage rather than after a deposit. The one thing we do offer on quieter ground is bicycles, with a support vehicle behind — that is the whole idea of the fourteen-day cycling route.

Night buses, and why they are not on any of our itineraries

Sleeper buses run everywhere in Vietnam and they are cheap. The berths are reclined pods in three rows, departures cluster around 21:00 to 22:00, and arrivals tend to land between 04:00 and 05:30 at a bus station on the edge of town. The saving is real: a night bus removes a hotel night and a daytime drive from a budget.

It removes a night of sleep as well, and it puts you on a mountain road in the dark, in a vehicle where the pods do not take a seatbelt in any useful way and your luggage is in a hold you cannot see. Arriving at 04:30 also means either paying for the previous night at your hotel so you can check in, or sitting in a lobby until midday — at which point the saving has mostly gone. Neither the safety case nor the arithmetic works for the kind of trip we sell, so we do not book them, and we will not put one into an itinerary on request.

Inside the cities

Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are both easier to move around than they look from a guidebook. Ride-hailing apps work properly — you set the destination in the app, so there is no negotiation and no language problem, and the fare is fixed before you get in. Metered taxis from the established companies are fine as well; the ones to be wary of are the unbranded cars idling outside tourist sites, which is a universal rule and not a Vietnamese one. Both cities have opened their first metro lines, useful on a small number of corridors and not yet a way to get around generally.

On your own two feet, the only technique that matters is crossing the road. Walk out at a slow, constant speed and do not stop, hesitate or run backwards; the scooters are reading your trajectory and steering around it, and the one thing that breaks the system is an unpredictable pedestrian. Your guide will walk the first few crossings with you and after an hour you will not think about it again.

Cyclos are worth one ride in the Hanoi Old Quarter and nowhere else. Agree the price and the duration before you sit down, in writing on a phone screen if there is any doubt. Where a cyclo appears on our itineraries it is arranged and paid for in advance, so the conversation never happens.

Putting it together

A workable Vietnam route follows one rule: fly between regions, drive inside them, and take the train only on the two legs where it earns its place. Each internal flight costs about half a day, so a trip with three flights has a day and a half of airports in it — which is the real reason we push back on itineraries that want the north, the centre, the south and an island inside ten days.

The other half of the decision is when you travel, because the same route in October and in March is not the same trip. When to go has the month-by-month table, and where to stay covers what you find at the other end of each drive.

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