Central Vietnam heritage, seven days

Arrive in Hue, the Perfume River in the afternoon

Met at Phu Bai airport, 15 km and about 25 minutes from the centre, or at the railway station. Hanoi to Hue is 1 hour 15 in the air. If your schedule allows it, the train up from Da Nang along the coast takes roughly three hours and is the best short rail journey in Vietnam — it runs along the cliffs at the exact point where the road has to climb the pass.

The afternoon goes on the river. A boat chartered for your party alone runs upstream to the Thien Mu pagoda, whose seven-tier tower has stood on that bluff since 1844 and which is a working monastery rather than a monument. Back on foot through the Dong Ba market before it winds down, and dinner is your own — Hue has its own regional cuisine and most of the best of it is sold at lunch from a stall rather than at eight in a dining room.

The Citadel at seven, three tombs after lunch

At the Ngo Mon gate for 07:00, when the site opens. The heritage sites all run 07:00 to 17:30 and the day parties from Da Nang land between ten and eleven, so the first three hours are the whole reason to sleep in Hue rather than visit it. The Imperial City ticket is 200,000 VND; we buy the combined four-site pass at 530,000 VND because you will use every part of it. Two and a half hours covers the Thai Hoa palace, the Nine Dynastic Urns, the reading pavilion and the Forbidden Purple City, most of which was destroyed in 1968 and only partly rebuilt.

The tombs after lunch, ordered for the light rather than the map. Minh Mang, 12 km out, is one symmetrical axis of gates, courts and lakes and reads as a single designed idea. Tu Duc is a walled park the emperor used while alive. Khai Dinh, finished in 1931, is blackened concrete outside and glass-and-porcelain mosaic inside, up a long flight of steps, and looks like nothing else in the country. Each costs 150,000 VND bought singly, which is why the combined pass pays for itself before you reach the second one.

Over the Hai Van pass to Da Nang

Leave at 08:30 and drive south. Hue to Da Nang is 120 km and about 2 hours 30 over the top of the Hai Van pass, against a little under two hours through the tunnel underneath it. We take the pass every time. It climbs to the col on the old road, there is a French and then American fortification at the summit, and on a clear morning you see the coast running both ways from one place — Lang Co lagoon behind you and Da Nang bay ahead. On a cloudy one you see cloud, and we say so before you set out.

We stop at Lang Co for lunch on the lagoon, then drop into Da Nang by mid-afternoon. The Museum of Cham Sculpture takes the rest of the day: a purpose-built 1915 gallery holding the sandstone lifted from My Son and the other Cham sites, which is the sequence that works — you see the carving intact here on Day 3 and the buildings it came out of on Day 5.

The night is in Da Nang rather than Hoi An on purpose. It is a working city of bridges and a long beach, it eats late and well, and one night in it stops the trip reading as two old towns in a row.

Marble Mountains, then south to Hoi An

The Marble Mountains first thing: five limestone and marble outcrops standing out of flat sand south of the city, with Buddhist shrines and caves cut into the largest of them. There is a lift up one side and steps everywhere else, and the interior caves were used as a field hospital during the war. An hour and a half, early, before the stone gets hot.

Then 30 km and 45 minutes down the coast to Hoi An, arriving for lunch. The old town goes on foot at about 16:30, once the day parties have been driven back north: the Japanese covered bridge, one merchant house, one Chinese assembly hall, the riverfront. The old-town ticket that admits you to a set number of heritage buildings is in your price.

If you want clothes made, we take you to the tailor this evening. Three clear days left means a first fitting and a second, which is what separates a jacket that fits from one that was cut overnight by someone who never saw you stand up.

My Son at opening, and the herb village

Out at 06:00 for My Son, roughly 45 km inland and a little over an hour away, in a bowl of hills with a single road in. The temple groups are brick, raised between the fourth and thirteenth centuries by the Cham kingdoms, lettered by group; several were destroyed by bombing in 1969 and the restoration in the central groups is left visible so you can read which brick is old.

The early start does two jobs. The valley traps heat, so by half past ten you are on open brick in full sun, and that is also when the first coaches from Da Nang arrive. Allow two hours inside, mostly flat, with a shuttle between the car park and the ruins and one short climb between groups. Having seen the museum on Day 3, you will recognise what is missing from the plinths.

Back at the coast for lunch and an empty afternoon. At 16:00 we walk into Tra Que, three kilometres from the old town — around forty families working sandy plots fertilised with lagoon weed and nothing else, selling to the town’s kitchens. You will carry a watering can on a shoulder pole, which is heavier than it looks.

Basket boats at Cam Thanh, then nothing

A morning on the water five kilometres east of town, where the Thu Bon meets the sea and about a hundred hectares of nipa palm grow in the brackish edge. The palm was planted from the south during the war for cover and stayed as a crop. You go out in a round bamboo basket boat with one rower — two passengers and the rower, no more — through channels narrow enough that the fronds meet overhead, then throw a cast net and haul a lift net from a wooden boat. What comes up is lunch at a house on the bank.

We ask our boatmen not to perform the spinning-basket routine that the day crowd expects upstream. It is loud, it is done for tips, and it is not what the place is.

The afternoon is deliberately empty: a second fitting if you are having clothes made, a bicycle along the paddy lanes, the beach at An Bang, or a cooking class if you asked for one. Six days in, an afternoon with nothing in it is worth more than another monument.

Last morning and out through Da Nang

Breakfast at your own pace, and the market or the beach if there is time. Anything being tailored is collected this morning, which is why the measuring happened on Day 4.

Da Nang airport is 30 km and 45 minutes from Hoi An, so a flight from about 13:00 is comfortable. Da Nang to Ho Chi Minh City is 1 hour 20, and to Hanoi the same. If you are carrying on south, tell us and we will hold the room to a late checkout rather than leave you in a lobby.