Vietnam for two, twelve days

Arrive in Hanoi, and do nothing else

Your driver meets you inside the arrivals hall at Noi Bai with a name board, not outside the barrier among the taxi touts. The transfer is 45 minutes and 25 km. There is no guide on this day and no programme, because the first afternoon after a long-haul flight is not a touring afternoon and pretending otherwise is how people arrive at Day 3 already tired.

Rooms are held from midday. If you land at 06:00 we book the previous night so the room is yours when you walk in — it costs what a night costs, we show it as its own line, and it is the single best thing you can spend money on at the start of this trip. You get a marked map, a phone number that a person answers in Vietnam, and an evening entirely to yourselves. Hoan Kiem lake is a ten-minute walk from either of the districts we use, and it takes about forty minutes to go round.

Hanoi at your own hour

The guide arrives at 09:00. That is deliberately late, and it costs you something: the coaches reach the Temple of Literature at about half past nine, so you see the courtyard of the stelae with a hundred other people in it rather than with nine. We think a 07:30 start on the second morning of a honeymoon is a bad trade, and we would rather tell you the trade exists than quietly make it for you. If you want the empty courtyard, say so and we start at 07:45.

The morning runs west of the Old Quarter — the temple, then Quan Thanh and the causeway between West Lake and Truc Bach, which is where Hanoi keeps its water and its trees. Lunch is northern and light. The afternoon is the thirty-six streets, still named for the guilds that worked them, with a stop at a lacquer workshop where the layers are sanded back in front of you, and egg coffee somewhere that is not on the coach circuit. Dinner is booked for 19:30 at a table by a window if you want one, or not booked at all if you would rather wander.

To the coast, and aboard in Lan Ha

Leave at 08:30. The road to the coast is expressway nearly all the way: 170 km, 2 hours 30 to 3 hours, with one stop at a place chosen for clean lavatories rather than for the commission it pays on jade. Boarding is around 12:30 and lunch is served as the boat clears the harbour. The bay fee in Lan Ha is 30,000 VND a head, which we pay; it is a trivial sum and it is also the clearest signal of how much less traffic this end of the system carries than the main Ha Long channel.

Your cabin is booked by number, on a boat with twenty cabins at the outside and often eight. Balcony, a door that locks, and a bathroom with hot water that does not run out at nine — those three things are what separates a good bay night from the story people tell afterwards. If you want the whole boat, that option is on this page and it costs what it costs; on an eight-cabin boat it is the difference between a private dinner and a shared one.

The afternoon is a kayak at about 15:30, in a cove the boat can anchor in, after the day boats have turned for home. Swimming if the water is above 24 degrees. Dinner is a set seafood menu, and if you have an allergy we pass it to the galley in writing rather than mentioning it to a waiter.

Off the water and south to the sea — the long day

This is the longest day of the trip and there is no way to shorten it that does not cost you a night somewhere better. Tai chi on the sun deck at 06:15 for anyone who wants it; nobody knocks on your door. The morning visit is a cave or a floating settlement depending on the route the bay authority has assigned that week, and we confirm which the evening before rather than promising one now.

Disembark at about 11:00. The drive to Noi Bai is 3 hours 30 and 190 km. The flight to Da Nang is 1 hour 20, and with two hours at the airport at the front and the transfer at the back it eats the whole afternoon. Da Nang to the beach south of the city is 30 km and 45 minutes. Door to door, about eleven hours. What you get for it is three nights in one room by the sea instead of two, and no backtracking to Hanoi.

One administrative note that most sites still have wrong: since July 2025, Hoi An and My Son are part of Da Nang city, not of a separate Quang Nam province. The places have not moved. The address on your booking has.

Hoi An: the beach first, the old town at half past four

Nothing is booked before 16:00. The point of arriving at the coast on a long day is that the next one belongs to you: a pool, the sea, and breakfast at whatever hour you come down for it. The beach here is open ocean rather than a bay, so the water has surf; from about October it can be genuinely rough and the flags mean what they say.

The old town is a fifteen-minute drive, about 5 km. We go in at 16:30 and not before, because between eleven and four it is a shopping street with a heat problem, and after six it is a lantern crowd two people wide on the bridge. The window in between is the one worth having: the merchant houses still lit by their own courtyards, the assembly halls open, and the riverfront before the boats start selling candles. A guide walks it with you for two hours and then leaves you to dinner.

My Son early, or the pool — decided the night before

The choice is real and we ask for it at dinner on Day 5. My Son is a Cham temple complex about an hour inland, a group of brick towers built between roughly the fourth and thirteenth centuries and bombed heavily in 1969. It is worth the early start because the site holds heat like an oven by nine and the first hour is the only cool one. If you choose it, the car leaves at 06:00.

If you choose the pool instead, we cancel the guide and the car at no cost to you and the day stays empty. Either way the late afternoon is free, with two things you can add: the herb beds at Tra Que, which are worked with lake weed and no chemical fertiliser and take about an hour, or a round-boat paddle in the water-coconut palms at Cam Thanh. Be warned about the second one — the main channel has turned into a loud circuit of spinning boats and speakers. We go at 15:30 to the far end and we do not do the spinning.

Up to Da Lat, by way of two airports

There is no direct flight, and any itinerary that implies otherwise is guessing. Da Nang to Ho Chi Minh City is 1 hour 20; Ho Chi Minh City to Da Lat is 50 minutes; the connection sits in between. Door to door it is about seven hours. We put it in the middle of the day rather than at dawn: the car leaves the coast at 09:30 and you are in the hills by late afternoon.

Da Lat sits at about 1,500 metres and that altitude is the whole point of it. Daytime runs in the high teens and low twenties all year, which is why the French built here and why Vietnamese couples come up from the delta in August. Bring a jacket — evenings drop into the low teens and a lot of the older hotels have no heating beyond a blanket. Since July 2025 the town is the centre of an enlarged Lam Dong province, which now also contains Mui Ne on the coast; if you want the sea instead of the pines, that swap is four hours by road and we can make it.

Da Lat, slowly

A day at 1,500 metres with a car that never runs more than forty minutes at a stretch. The morning is the coffee terraces east of town, where arabica actually ripens because of the altitude, and where you can watch cherries being pulped and dried rather than being handed a cup and a story. Then pine forest, a lake, and the flower farms that supply most of southern Vietnam.

The afternoon is the old railway station and the short heritage line to Trai Mat, which takes about half an hour each way behind a diesel and is the only surviving fragment of the rack line that once climbed the escarpment. What we route around, deliberately, is the ring of built attractions around the town centre — the tunnels, the mazes, the painted photo-frames. They exist for domestic weekend traffic, they are crowded on Saturdays, and they have nothing to do with why this town is here.

Down to Phu Quoc

The car leaves at 09:00. Da Lat to Ho Chi Minh City is 50 minutes in the air, Ho Chi Minh City to Phu Quoc is an hour, and you are on the island by mid-afternoon. Phu Quoc has belonged to An Giang province since the July 2025 mergers, not to Kien Giang; again, only the paperwork moved.

This is where the room matters most, because you are about to spend three nights in it and two of those days have nothing in them. What we ask for, in writing, and what we get confirmed before you pay the balance: a ground-floor room only if its pool is walled and not overlooked from a walkway, or an upper floor with a sea view and no public path under the window. Not a room number picked by the front desk on the day. That single request is the difference between the trip you booked and a photograph of someone else’s balcony.

A boat day, if the sea allows it

The reef islands of the An Thoi group sit off the southern tip, about forty minutes by road to the harbour and then twenty to forty minutes on the water. Snorkelling is shallow and the visibility is variable rather than tropical-postcard. We book a small private boat rather than a seat on a thirty-person one with a speaker, because the difference in what the day feels like is much larger than the difference in what it costs.

The honest part: Phu Quoc’s wet season runs May to November and the swell closes the island-hopping boats on some days within it. We check the harbour at 07:00 and tell you by 08:00, and if it is closed the alternative is the north of the island — pepper smallholdings, the national park, the fish-sauce warehouses at Duong Dong, which smell exactly as strongly as you are imagining, and a beach at Ganh Dau that faces west into the sunset. It is a good day. It is just not the day you had in mind, and you should know before you book that it is a real possibility.

The day with nothing in it

No guide, no car, no time at which anything happens. This day is on the itinerary because a twelve-day trip that ends in a scramble is a worse trip than one that ends with a day you did not plan, and because the second empty day is the one people actually use — the first still gets filled with unpacking and swimming and finding where the coffee is.

Things you can add on the morning, with a few hours’ notice: a cooking session that starts at the market in Duong Dong, a massage, a bicycle, a sunset boat that does nothing but go out and come back. The operations number stays live all day, which is the only part of this day we schedule.

Phu Quoc, and out

Late checkout to 14:00 where the property will give it, and we ask on every booking rather than on the morning. The airport is 20 to 30 minutes from the west-coast resorts. Phu Quoc to Ho Chi Minh City is an hour in the air.

The arithmetic for your flight home, because people get this wrong: one hour in the air, plus two hours at Phu Quoc, plus a minimum of three hours to be safe on an international connection at Tan Son Nhat, where the domestic and international terminals are separate buildings. An international departure before 16:00 out of Ho Chi Minh City means an uncomfortable morning. Send us the flight before you buy it and we will tell you honestly whether it works.