Hanoi, Lan Ha Bay and Ho Chi Minh City, six days
Two nights in the Old Quarter, one aboard a small boat in Lan Ha Bay, then a flight of two hours and ten minutes to a city that runs on a completely different rhythm. Six days is enough for the two ends of Vietnam and not enough for its middle, and this page says so plainly.
At a glance
- Duration
- 6 days, 5 nights
- Party size
- 2 to 8, private
- Starts
- Hanoi, Noi Bai airport
- Ends
- Ho Chi Minh City, Tan Son Nhat airport
- Effort
- Easy — one ladder transfer to a kayak, and one long travel day
- From
- USD 1,490 per person
Who this is for
Six days, two cities at opposite ends of a country 1,650 km long, and one night on the water between them. This route exists for a specific traveller: someone with a week at most, often on the back of a business trip or a longer Asian itinerary, who wants to understand why Vietnamese people talk about the north and the south as though they were two countries. Hanoi is 1,000 years old, planned around lakes, and cold enough in January to want a coat. Ho Chi Minh City is a commercial port city that has doubled in living memory and sits at 32 degrees most of the year. The gap between them is the point of the trip.
The honest limitation is written into the title. This itinerary skips the middle of the country completely — no Hue, no Hoi An, no My Son, no Phong Nha, no Ninh Binh, no Sapa. Those places are not omitted because they are second-rate. They are omitted because each one adds a flight or a long drive, and six days will not absorb another. What you get instead is two cities you have time to walk in and one night among limestone, rather than five stops photographed from a moving vehicle.
Anybody who wants Hoi An should take a different trip, and we would rather say that on this page than in an email after you have booked. With seven days, Hanoi, Lan Ha and Hoi An swaps the southern city for three nights in the centre. With eight, Hue and Da Nang adds the imperial city and the Hai Van pass. With ten, the ten-day route covers north, centre and south without either end feeling clipped. If you cannot extend, this trip is a good six days — as long as you book it knowing what is not in it.
Day by day
Arrive in Hanoi
Meeting point is inside the arrivals hall at Noi Bai, name board in hand, rather than out beyond the barrier where the freelance taxi drivers work. From there it is 25 km and about 45 minutes over the Nhat Tan bridge into the city. Your room is held from midday; on a dawn landing we book the previous night instead of leaving you to sit out five hours in a lobby.
If you are in before 15:00 the rest of the day goes on foot: Hoan Kiem lake, Ngoc Son temple on its island, and the ninety minutes either side of sunset when the Old Quarter changes from a traffic problem into a place where several thousand people are having dinner on the pavement. Dinner is your own, with a shortlist from us at three price levels.
Hanoi, the whole day
An 08:00 start, because the Temple of Literature is a different building before the coaches arrive around half past nine: eleventh-century foundations, the stelae of the doctors carried on stone tortoises, and courtyards you can hear yourself think in. The morning continues to the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum complex, seen from the outside, and the One Pillar Pagoda. The mausoleum keeps its own hours and closes for around two months a year for maintenance; we tell you which weeks before you book, not on the morning.
The afternoon is the Old Quarter at street level: a grid of thirty-six lanes, each still carrying the name of the trade that once held it, the Long Bien bridge seen from the mud bank underneath, and egg coffee somewhere the coaches do not stop. The water puppet theatre is optional: it runs 50 minutes, the form is genuinely old, and the show is also thoroughly aimed at visitors. That is a fair description rather than a highlight, and you can decide on the day.
To the coast and aboard in Lan Ha Bay
Departure at 08:00 for the coast: 170 km, two and a half to three hours, expressway for most of it, with one stop chosen for clean lavatories rather than for the commission a jade showroom pays. Boarding is around midday and lunch is served as the boat clears the harbour.
Lan Ha is the southern end of the same limestone system as Ha Long, reached from Hai Phong rather than from Bai Chay, and it carries a small fraction of the day-boat traffic. There are around four hundred islands and a fishing population still living on the water. An hour of kayaking goes into a cove the boat can lie in, with a swim if the sea is above 24 degrees, and you are back on deck before the light goes. Dinner is a set seafood menu; send allergies in advance and we pass them to the galley in writing.
Off the boat, across the country
This is a travel day and we will not dress it up as anything else. Tai chi on the sun deck at 06:15 for whoever wants it, then a morning visit — a cave or a floating settlement, depending on the route the bay authority assigns that week — and disembarkation around 11:00. The drive from the pier to Noi Bai is 190 km and three and a half hours.
The flight to Ho Chi Minh City takes two hours and ten minutes in the air. Add two hours of airport at the Hanoi end and thirty to forty-five minutes into District 1 at the other, and the honest figure for the whole day is about ten hours from the boat to the hotel: a mid-afternoon or early-evening departure and dinner in the city around nine. A domestic flight is not a touring day with a plane in the middle of it. We build the fourth day around getting you there in one piece, and the first real look at the south is the walk to dinner.
Ho Chi Minh City on foot and across the river
From 08:00: the War Remnants Museum, which opens at 07:30 and is at its quietest in the first hour. It is a hard building — the photojournalism floor and the room on chemical defoliants particularly — and you should go in expecting that. Then the Reunification Palace, a presidential residence preserved much as it stood in April 1975, basement command rooms, map boards and all, which is the single most useful hour in the city for understanding what you saw in the museum.
The afternoon goes to Cho Lon, the Chinese quarter, twenty minutes west of the centre: incense coils hanging from the roof beams at the Thien Hau temple, Binh Tay market working as a wholesale operation rather than a souvenir hall, and herbalists on the surrounding streets whose shelves have not changed in fifty years. Come back through District 1 around 17:30, when the motorbike traffic peaks and an intersection becomes the most watchable thing in Vietnam.
A last morning, and out
Tan Son Nhat is about 7 km from District 1 and the transfer runs 30 to 45 minutes, longer in the evening peak. That closeness is the quiet advantage of finishing here rather than in Hanoi, where the airport is 25 km and 45 minutes out: a late-morning departure is comfortable and a midday one is workable.
If your flight is in the evening, the morning is genuinely usable. Options we can set up: the Ben Thanh area and the streets behind it, a coffee circuit through the apartment blocks on Nguyen Hue, or the Fine Arts Museum in a 1930s merchant house that is worth the entry for the building alone. Late check-out is usually available and we ask for it as a matter of course rather than as a favour.
What it costs
| Party size | Comfortable | Excellent | Exceptional |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 travellers | USD 1,940 | USD 2,480 | USD 2,810 |
| 3 – 4 | USD 1,760 | USD 2,250 | USD 2,550 |
| 5 – 6 | USD 1,600 | USD 2,050 | USD 2,320 |
| 7 – 8 | USD 1,490 | USD 1,910 | USD 2,160 |
The domestic flight is inside every figure in this table, booked in economy on a full-service carrier with hold baggage rather than on the cheapest fare that charges for a suitcase. Two hours and ten minutes in the air is the only practical way to cross the country inside six days: the train takes well over thirty hours and the road is two days of driving, and either would eat the trip.
Everything else in the table follows party size. Two people carry a whole vehicle, a whole guide and a whole driver in each city; seven or eight carry the same three things and the per-person figure drops by roughly a quarter. Across the columns the itinerary is identical — same guide, same boat programme, same museums — and what changes is the hotel in each city and the cabin in the bay, where a twenty-cabin steel boat and a six-cabin wooden one are simply different products. What a Vietnam trip costs breaks down the supplier side, and how to book covers deposits and cancellation terms.
Included and not included
What the price includes
- Five nights: two in Hanoi, one aboard in Lan Ha Bay, two in Ho Chi Minh City
- The Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City flight on Day 4, economy, hold baggage included
- Private air-conditioned vehicle and driver in both cities and for both airport runs
- A private English-speaking guide on Days 2, 3, 4 and 5 — a different guide in each city, because a Hanoi guide is not a Saigon guide
- All meals shown day by day: 5 breakfasts, 3 lunches, 1 dinner aboard
- Bay entry and route fees, kayak hire and cave tickets in Lan Ha
- Entries: Temple of Literature, War Remnants Museum, Reunification Palace, Thien Hau
- Airport meet inside arrivals with a name board, and a 24-hour number answered by a person in Vietnam
What it does not include
- International flights — quoted at cost on request, never marked up
- Vietnam e-visa, USD 25 single entry, applied for at evisa.gov.vn
- Travel insurance, which we require you to hold and will ask to see
- Meals not listed: 2 lunches and 4 dinners across the six days
- Drinks with meals, and everything aboard the boat except water and tea
- Tips for guide and driver — customary, never included, never invoiced
The north is dry and cool from November to April, and December to February in Hanoi is genuinely cold, often under 15 degrees with damp air. The south is dry from December to April and warm all year, rarely under 25 degrees. That means one suitcase covering a jumper in Hanoi and a linen shirt in Ho Chi Minh City. March, April and December are the best compromise months for a trip that touches both ends; see when to go for the full month-by-month table.
Pictures from this route
Who this trip is not for
This is a short trip across a long country, and the compromises are specific.
- Anyone who wants Hoi An, Hue or My Son. The centre is not in this itinerary at all, and it cannot be added to six days without cutting either the bay night or a city. Take seven days with Hoi An or eight with Hue as well.
- Travellers who dislike airports. Day 4 is a boat, a three-and-a-half-hour drive, an airport and a flight, and it ends around nine in the evening. There is no version of this route that avoids that day.
- Anyone unable to manage a ladder transfer from the boat down to the kayak tender. There is no lift and no alternative on the water; a bamboo boat with a rower can be substituted if you tell us before booking rather than on the day.
- People travelling between June and September who cannot accept that a tropical storm can close the bay at 12 to 24 hours notice. It happens two or three times a season. We move you ashore and refund the boat night, but the night itself is gone.
- Parties with children under six. Day 4 alone is about ten hours of movement, and the boat has open decks and low rails. The twelve-day family route is built with rest days between the moves for exactly this reason.
How the travel day actually runs
Day 4, counted honestly
Disembark at 11:00, three and a half hours to Noi Bai, two hours in the airport, two hours ten in the air, forty minutes into District 1. That is the day, and pretending otherwise is how people end up angry at a schedule rather than tired by one.
Two guides, not one
Your Hanoi guide hands over at the airport and a Saigon guide meets the flight. Somebody who has spent thirty years in one of these cities is worth more than somebody who has flown down with you.
Why there is no train on this page
The Reunification Express covers Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City in well over thirty hours. It is a fine thing to do with a fortnight and an impossible thing to do with six days.
Six days, and a month you are holding?
Send the month and the party size. You will get the boat we would put you on, the hotels in both cities, and a firm price — usually inside one working day.
Questions travellers ask most
Is six days really enough for Vietnam?
It is enough for two cities and one night on the water, done at walking pace. It is not enough for the country, and we will not tell you otherwise. Vietnam is 1,650 km from top to bottom and the interesting parts are spread along the whole of it.
What six days does buy is the contrast between the north and the south, which is the single thing visitors most often say they had not expected: different food, different accent, different architecture, twenty degrees of temperature difference in January. If you want the middle as well, add days rather than stops.
Why fly on Day 4 rather than fly on Day 5 and keep a full day?
Because the boat disembarks at 11:00 and the pier is three and a half hours from Noi Bai. Flying on Day 5 would mean an extra night back in Hanoi, which uses the same day and costs more.
The alternative worth considering is the reverse direction — start in Ho Chi Minh City, fly north on Day 3, and finish with the bay. It works, and it puts the long travel day earlier when you are fresher. The reason we show it this way round is that Tan Son Nhat is 7 km from the hotel and Noi Bai is 25, which makes the last morning easier. Tell us your international flights and we will pick the better direction.
Why Lan Ha Bay rather than Ha Long Bay itself?
They are one limestone system split by an administrative line rather than a geological one. Lan Ha is the southern end, reached from Hai Phong, and takes a small fraction of the traffic that runs through the central Ha Long channel.
The practical difference shows at four in the afternoon: in Lan Ha, a few boats and a working fishing village; in the main channel, a queue. The caves are slightly less dramatic. We think that is a good trade on a trip where the bay gets one night, and we would rather explain the trade than pretend the caves do not matter.
Can we add the Mekong Delta to the Ho Chi Minh City end?
Yes, but only with a seventh day. My Tho and Ben Tre are 80 km and two hours from the city, and a delta day squeezed into Day 5 would cost you Cho Lon and the museums, which are the better half of the city.
With one extra night we run a full delta day: out at 07:30, a river crossing by small boat, a canal in a rowing sampan, and back by six. If the delta is a priority rather than an extra, look instead at Saigon, Cu Chi and the Mekong, which gives it two nights on the water instead of an afternoon.
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