Vietnam in depth, twenty-one days
Eleven bases in three weeks, from the limestone plateau on the Chinese frontier to a stilt house on a Ben Tre canal. One party, one guide from Hanoi to the delta, three rest days built in on purpose, and a written route that names the hard drives instead of hiding them.
At a glance
- Duration
- 21 days, 20 nights
- Party size
- 2 to 8, private
- Starts
- Hanoi, Noi Bai airport
- Ends
- Ho Chi Minh City, Tan Son Nhat
- Effort
- Moderate — 500 steps at Hang Mua, one nine-hour drive
- From
- USD 5,490 per person
Who this is for
Three weeks is the point at which Vietnam stops being a sequence of sights and starts making sense as a country. The stone plateau north of Ha Giang and a Ben Tre canal are 1,700 km apart and belong to different climates, different crops, different languages in the market. Ten days lets you look at two or three of those worlds through a car window. Twenty-one lets you sleep in each of them long enough to notice the difference between them, which is a different thing entirely.
The people who book this trip are usually travelling once rather than often. They have saved the leave, they are not coming back next year, and they would rather pay for a guide who stays with them from Hanoi to the delta than for four separate local guides who each hand over a clipboard. That continuity is the single biggest structural choice in the itinerary: the person who watched you struggle with the plateau cold on Day 5 is the person deciding how hard to push you on Day 16.
It is also a trip with real physical demands, and they are front-loaded. Days 3 to 8 include two of the longest road days we sell anywhere, and the plateau nights are cold from November to February. Anyone who wants the same geographic sweep with softer driving should look at the fifteen-day version, which drops Ha Giang and Phong Nha and flies the long legs. Anyone who wants the far north alone, in a week, should read the five-day Ha Giang loop.
Day by day
Arrive in Hanoi
Your guide and driver meet you inside the arrivals hall at Noi Bai with a name board. The transfer into the Old Quarter is 45 minutes and 25 km over the Nhat Tan bridge. Rooms are held from midday for this trip regardless of your landing time, because a twenty-one-day itinerary that begins with four hours in a lobby has started badly.
The rest of Day 1 is deliberately empty. If you have landed with energy, your guide walks you round Hoan Kiem lake and into the streets north of it for ninety minutes at dusk, mostly so you learn how to cross a road here before it matters. Dinner is your own. Over that first hour we also collect the passports for the Ha Giang border permit if we have not already filed it from your scans.
Hanoi on foot, and the briefing that sets up the next three weeks
An 08:00 start at the Temple of Literature, which is a different place before the coaches reach it at half past nine. The morning covers the temple, the mausoleum complex from the outside, and the One Pillar Pagoda. The mausoleum itself keeps its own hours and closes for roughly two months a year for maintenance; we tell you which months apply to your dates when you book, not on the morning.
The afternoon belongs to the Old Quarter — thirty-six streets still named for the guild that worked them, the rail line where it runs between houses, and Long Bien bridge from the riverbank. Somewhere in the middle of it your guide sits down with you and goes through the whole trip on paper: which mornings start at 06:00, where the laundry stops are, what happens on Day 6 and Day 8, and what altitude and cold to expect on the plateau. Almost every problem on a three-week trip is a problem someone did not know was coming.
North to Ha Giang city
Leave at 07:30 for 300 km and about six hours to Ha Giang city, expressway for the first half and two-lane road for the second. We stop twice, at places chosen for clean lavatories and decent tea rather than for the commission a jade showroom pays. Lunch is in Tuyen Quang, roughly at the halfway mark.
You arrive mid-afternoon with the town still working. If the border permit has been filed in advance, the only job here is collecting it; if not, this afternoon is spent in the immigration office instead of on the riverbank, which is why we ask for passport scans early. Ha Giang city is not a sight and we do not pretend otherwise — it is a staging post at the bottom of the climb, with a good market and an early night.
The plateau: Quan Ba, Yen Minh, Dong Van
This is the day the landscape changes character. About 150 km and five hours of driving with the stops, on a road that climbs through the Quan Ba gate and then runs along the tops. The rock here is karst that has been weathered into fields of grey blades, and the maize is planted in the pockets of soil between them, one plant to a crevice. That single fact explains more about the economy of the plateau than any museum on the route.
We stop where the road earns it rather than on a fixed schedule, and we do not book staged village performances or take you to a shop that pays us to bring you. If a market is running on your day — Dong Van on Sunday morning is the main one — we build the morning around it and you buy from whoever you want to. The night is in Dong Van, at about 1,000 m, in an old quarter of clay and timber houses. From November to February it drops to 5–10°C after dark and the rooms are heated poorly or not at all.
Ma Pi Leng, the Nho Que river and Meo Vac
A short driving day and the best one in the north. The Ma Pi Leng pass runs 20 km along a shoulder cut into the cliff above the Nho Que, which sits some 800 m below in a gorge narrow enough to be in shadow most of the day. We walk a section of it rather than driving the whole thing, then go down to the water for an hour on a boat through the Tu San gorge.
The afternoon is Meo Vac and the country immediately around it. If your dates catch the Sunday market we start at 06:30, because by nine it is a different and much quieter event. Meo Vac is also where we build in the first slack of the trip: if the weather has been against you, there is room here to repeat the pass in better light rather than push on.
Meo Vac to Sa Pa — the long one
We will state this plainly because it is the hardest day on the itinerary. Leaving Meo Vac at 07:00, it is about 150 km and four and a half hours back down to Ha Giang city, then roughly another 220 km and four and a half hours west through Bac Quang and the Bac Ha hills to Sa Pa. Call it 370 km and nine hours of driving with two proper stops, arriving between 18:00 and 19:00.
There is no shortcut. The two highland areas are joined by one indirect road, and the alternative — dropping back to Hanoi and going up again on the expressway — is six hours plus six hours and costs you a night. We break the day with a long lunch, we do not schedule anything in Sa Pa that evening, and Day 7 starts late on purpose. If a Sunday falls here, the Bac Ha market sits directly on the route and turns the drive into something with a middle.
The Muong Hoa valley on foot
A late breakfast and a 09:00 start, because you have earned it. The walk drops out of Sa Pa town into the Muong Hoa valley and follows irrigation channels and field edges for 10 to 12 km, ending at a road where the car meets you. It is not technical, but it is mud in the wet months and stone underfoot in the dry ones, and boots matter more here than anywhere else on the trip.
The valley is farmed by Hmong and Dao families and it is worked, not preserved. We take you through it with a local walking guide, we eat lunch in a house that is paid directly and properly for cooking it, and we do not arrange dancing, costume, or a weaving demonstration that ends at a till. If you want to buy indigo cloth, we will tell you what it should cost and then stand out of the way. Note for the record that Sa Pa sits in Lao Cai province, which absorbed Yen Bai in the July 2025 mergers.
Sa Pa down to the coast, and aboard in Lan Ha Bay
The second long transfer, and the reason we charter the boat rather than buying cabins on a scheduled one. Leaving Sa Pa at 06:15, the run down the Noi Bai–Lao Cai expressway to Hanoi is 315 km and five and a half to six hours; skirting the city and taking the Hai Phong expressway adds 170 km and two and a half to three hours. About 400 km and eight hours in all, at the pier between 14:30 and 15:00.
A scheduled boat has sailed by then. A chartered one waits, which is the whole argument for the upgrade on this particular itinerary, and it means lunch is eaten on board as you clear the harbour rather than at a roadside stop under a strip light. Lan Ha holds around four hundred islands at the southern end of the same limestone system as Ha Long, reached from Hai Phong, and carries a small fraction of the day-boat traffic of the central channel. Bay entry for Lan Ha is 30,000 VND a head. If you would rather not drive it at all, we can put you on the night train from Lao Cai the evening of Day 7 and give you the morning at the coast instead — you lose the second Sa Pa night and gain a bed that moves while you sleep.
A full day on the water
The reason the itinerary spends two nights aboard instead of one. A single-night bay cruise is really an afternoon and a rushed breakfast; the second night buys you a whole day in which the boat can move somewhere the day traffic does not reach. Tai chi on the sun deck at 06:15 for anyone who wants it, then a morning of kayaking through a cove and around the edge of a floating fishing settlement, which in Lan Ha is still inhabited rather than staged.
The afternoon is swimming if the water is over 24°C, a beach on one of the Cat Ba outliers, and several hours of nothing in particular. This is the first of the three built-in rest days and it is placed here on purpose, immediately after the two hardest drives. Bay routes are assigned by the authority and do change; we name the cave or settlement we expect to visit and confirm it the evening before rather than printing a promise we cannot keep.
Ashore, and south to Ninh Binh
Breakfast aboard, a last hour on deck, and disembarkation around 11:00. The drive south to Ninh Binh is about 130 km and two and a half hours on the coastal expressway system, so you are checked in and out again by mid-afternoon.
The afternoon is Hang Mua, which is roughly 500 stone steps up a limestone spur behind the valley. There is no way to soften that number: it is steep, the treads are uneven, and the handrail is decorative. What it buys is the one view that explains Ninh Binh — the Ngo Dong river winding through flooded rice between towers, with the Trang An massif behind. Anyone who does not want the steps waits at the foot with cold water and a fan, and nobody makes a thing of it. Ninh Binh province absorbed Nam Dinh and Ha Nam in July 2025 and is administered from Hoa Lu, which is why some signage has changed.
Trang An at opening, then a flight to the caves
Ticket counters at Trang An open at 07:00 and sell strictly in the order people arrive, so we are there at 07:15. A sampan takes four passengers and one rower and costs 250,000 VND a head, or 1,000,000 VND for the whole boat, which for a party of two is worth paying so that you are not sharing with strangers for two hours. We take route 2 — four caves, four temples, two to two and a half hours — because it leaves in time for the flight and because the rowers on it are less rushed.
Out of the water by 10:00, then 120 km and about two and a half hours to Noi Bai for the early-afternoon flight to Dong Hoi, which is 1 hour 30 in the air. Dong Hoi to Phong Nha is 45 km and 50 minutes through country that was bombed flat and has grown back as rubber and acacia. You are in the village by early evening with the river outside the window. Bring cash: the national park counters do not take cards, and the nearest ATMs are in Phong Nha village rather than inside the park.
Two caves, two entirely different things
Thien Duong cave first, at 08:00, because it is 250,000 VND, roughly 500 m of walkway inside a chamber that runs for kilometres, and it fills by ten. The approach is a climb of about 500 steps from the car park, or 60,000 VND for the electric buggy to the foot of them. Signs and tickets sometimes carry the English name instead. Inside it is dry, cool and lit, and the scale is the point: the roof is 70 m up in places and the formations are the size of buildings.
Phong Nha cave in the afternoon is the opposite experience — you reach it by boat, 150,000 VND for the ticket plus 55,000 VND for the river crossing, and the engine is cut at the mouth so the last stretch is rowed in near silence. Two caves in one day sounds like too many and is not, because one is walked and one is floated. Parties who want the serious version can swap this day for the two-day Hang En trek at USD 128 a head, camping on the sand beach inside the cave mouth; that changes the following day as well and has to be decided at booking, not on arrival.
South through the DMZ to Hue
About 220 km and four hours of driving, broken by the one stop that makes the day worth doing by road rather than by air. The Vinh Moc tunnels are 2 km of galleries dug on three levels into a coastal bluff, in which around ninety families lived through years of bombardment; seventeen children were born underground. The tunnels are walkable, humid, and low in places, and they take about an hour.
From there it is another hour and three quarters to Hue across the Ben Hai river, which was the demarcation line between 1954 and 1975 and is now an unremarkable bridge with a very remarkable amount of history attached. You reach Hue in the late afternoon with the evening free. The city sits on the Perfume River and is at its best in the hour before dark, when the heat goes out of the stone.
The citadel, two tombs, and the river
The Imperial Citadel opens at 07:00 and we are through the Ngo Mon gate shortly after; entry is 200,000 VND, and the four-site combination covering the citadel and the main tombs is 530,000 VND, which we buy on your behalf. The enclosure is enormous and much of it was destroyed in 1968 and is still being rebuilt, so the honest experience is half restored palace and half foundation lines in the grass. That halfness is more interesting than a complete reconstruction would be.
Two tombs in the afternoon, not four, because they are 150,000 VND each and after two the returns fall off sharply. Minh Mang is the formal one, laid out along an axis in a pine wood; Khai Dinh is concrete, blackened, and covered inside with porcelain and glass mosaic that looks like nothing else in the country. Between them we go by boat on the Perfume River rather than by road. Everything closes at 17:30 and the last admission is earlier than people expect.
Over the Hai Van pass to Hoi An
Hue to Da Nang is 120 km and two and a half hours over the Hai Van pass, and we take the pass rather than the tunnel underneath it. The road climbs to about 500 m on the spur where the Truong Son range meets the sea, and it is also a real weather boundary: the north side is frequently in cloud when the south side is clear, which is why Hue and Da Nang have noticeably different climates thirty minutes apart.
We stop at Lang Co lagoon and at the pass gate, then drop into Da Nang and continue 30 km and 45 minutes to Hoi An. Arrival is early afternoon. The old town is closed to cars, so the last stretch is on foot or by electric cart, and the first evening is yours — the lanterns come on around six and the streets between the market and the Japanese bridge are best walked without a guide talking. Hoi An has been part of Da Nang city since the July 2025 mergers; Quang Nam province no longer exists.
My Son at opening, Hoi An after dark
A 05:30 departure for My Son, which is an hour away and opens early. The site is a group of brick sanctuaries built by the Cham between the fourth and thirteenth centuries in a bowl of hills, and it was badly damaged by bombing in 1969 — several groups are rubble held together by scaffolding. Getting there first matters more here than almost anywhere: the site is small, the light through the trees is best before eight, and by ten it is hot and full.
Back in Hoi An by late morning for a long lunch and the hottest part of the day indoors. The old town in the late afternoon covers the merchant houses, the assembly halls of the Chinese congregations, and the covered bridge, all of which are on a single ticket. Hoi An is heavily commercialised and we will not pretend otherwise — the ground floor of most of those old houses is a shop. It is still one of the few intact eighteenth-century trading towns in Southeast Asia, and at 06:30 in the morning it belongs to the people who live there.
A day with nothing in it
The second built-in rest day, at the two-thirds mark, and the one people are most grateful for afterwards. Nothing is scheduled. The car and the guide are on call from 08:00 if you want them and stood down if you do not, and the laundry we sent on the evening of Day 15 comes back this morning.
What people usually do with it: the beach at An Bang, four kilometres from the old town; the herb gardens at Tra Que and the basket boats in the water coconut at Cam Thanh; a bicycle out through the rice to the river; or a cooking class that starts at the market. Any of those we arrange the evening before. Doing none of them is also a legitimate use of the day, and on a twenty-one-day trip it is often the right one.
Up to the highlands: Da Lat
A slow morning in Hoi An, then 30 km and 45 minutes to Da Nang airport for the flight to Da Lat, which is a little over an hour in the air on the direct service. That service does not run every day; where it does not fall on your date we route via Ho Chi Minh City instead, which is 1 hour 20 plus 50 minutes with a connection in between, and we tell you which of the two you are getting when we confirm the flights rather than at check-in.
Da Lat sits at about 1,500 m and the temperature drop is immediate and welcome — this is where the French built hill stations to escape the delta heat, and where most of the coffee, artichokes and cut flowers in the country are grown. The afternoon is the town itself: the lake, the covered market, and a working arabica farm on the outskirts where you can see the processing rather than a display of it. Da Lat is now the administrative centre of an enlarged Lam Dong province that also took in Dak Nong and Binh Thuan, which means Mui Ne and Da Lat share a province.
Da Lat in the morning, Ho Chi Minh City by night
The morning is pine forest and market gardens: the valley farms under plastic, a flower nursery, and either the Crémaillère station with its short surviving stretch of rack railway or a walk around the lake, depending on what you have had enough of by now. Da Lat is 20°C when Ho Chi Minh City is 33°C, and this is the last cool morning of the trip.
The flight down is 50 minutes and lands in the middle of the afternoon. Ho Chi Minh City gets one night on this itinerary and we use it for the parts that work after dark: District 1 on foot at dusk, the alleys behind the main streets where the food is, and Cho Lon, the Chinese quarter, which is a city inside the city with its own temples, medicine halls and market hours. If you would rather have the War Remnants Museum and the Cu Chi tunnels, we can restructure the tail of the trip at booking — it means dropping the delta night.
Down to the delta
Out of the city mid-morning: 80 km and about two hours to Ben Tre, over the bridges that replaced the ferries and made the whole province reachable in a morning. The delta is not scenery in the way the north is scenery. It is a working alluvial plain the size of a small country, laid out in canals, and what you come for is the engineering of daily life on it — the coconut trade, the brick kilns, the boats that act as shops.
The afternoon is spent on the water in something small enough to enter the side canals, where the palms close over the top. The night is in a garden lodge or a well-run homestay on the bank, with dinner cooked in the house. It is warm, it is loud with insects, and the electricity is real but the walls are thin. We are explicit about that because it is the one night on the trip where the standard of accommodation is set by the place rather than by your chosen class.
The delta at dawn, and the flight home
A floating market works between five and eight in the morning and is dead by nine, so if your flight allows it we are on the water at 06:00. It is a wholesale market — boats buying from boats, each hanging a sample of what it sells from a pole — and it is the last thing on this trip that has nothing to do with visitors.
Breakfast on the boat or at the lodge, then 80 km and two hours back to Tan Son Nhat. For an evening departure there is room for a shower room and a proper lunch in the city first; for anything before 14:00 we skip the market and leave at 08:00 instead, and we would rather tell you that when you book the flight than on the last morning.
What it costs
| Party size | Comfortable | Excellent | Exceptional |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 travellers | USD 7,140 | USD 9,140 | USD 10,350 |
| 3 – 4 | USD 6,190 | USD 7,920 | USD 8,980 |
| 5 – 6 | USD 5,690 | USD 7,280 | USD 8,250 |
| 7 – 8 | USD 5,490 | USD 7,030 | USD 7,960 |
The three columns buy different rooms, not a different trip. Guide, driver, vehicle, flights, tickets, permits and the route are identical in all three; what moves is where you sleep in Hanoi, Hue and Hoi An, and which boat you are on in Lan Ha. On a twenty-night itinerary that difference compounds, which is why the gap between the columns is wider here than on a four-day trip. It is also why the Comfortable column is genuinely usable rather than a decoy: on the plateau and in the delta there is very little above it to buy.
Party size is the bigger lever. Two people pay for a whole vehicle, a whole guide and twenty nights of both between them; eight people pay for exactly the same vehicle and guide, and the per-person figure falls by roughly a quarter. Nothing else on the quotation moves as far. Read what a Vietnam trip costs for the supplier-level breakdown, and how to book for deposit terms, permit lead times and the point at which flights become non-refundable.
Included and not included
What the price includes
- Twenty nights across eleven bases, including two aboard in Lan Ha Bay, in the class you choose
- Four domestic flights: Hanoi to Dong Hoi, Da Nang to Da Lat, Da Lat to Ho Chi Minh City, plus the connection if the direct Da Lat service does not run on your date
- Private vehicle and driver throughout, and one private guide from Day 1 to Day 21
- The Ha Giang border area permit for Quan Ba, Yen Minh, Dong Van and Meo Vac, filed in advance
- All entry tickets, including Trang An by private sampan, both Phong Nha caves and the four-site Hue combination at 530,000 VND
- Meals as listed: 20 breakfasts, 14 lunches and 7 dinners
- Two laundry services, in Hue and in Hoi An, and drinking water in the vehicle daily
- A 24-hour phone number answered by a person in Vietnam, not a call centre
What it does not include
- International flights, quoted separately at cost if you want us to book them
- Vietnam e-visa, USD 25 single entry or USD 50 multiple, applied for at evisa.gov.vn
- Travel insurance, which we require you to hold and will ask to see before departure
- Meals not listed — roughly 6 lunches and 13 dinners across three weeks
- The Hang En or Son Doong cave treks if you take them as an upgrade
- Tips for guide and driver, which are customary, never included and never invoiced
Since June 2026 every foreign passport holder travelling in Quan Ba, Yen Minh, Dong Van and Meo Vac must carry a border area permit. It costs about 250,000 VND, roughly USD 10, it is included in your price, and we file it in advance from scans of your passport and visa. Police do check vehicles on the plateau road. Without the permit you face an administrative fine and, at worst, being sent back to Ha Giang city to apply — which on this itinerary would cost you the Ma Pi Leng pass. Send passport scans at least three weeks before departure. Note also that since 1 July 2025 Ha Giang is part of Tuyen Quang province, so paperwork may name Tuyen Quang; that is correct, not an error. See Ha Giang and visas and entry.
Pictures from this route
Who this trip is not for
Three weeks and USD 5,490 upward is a serious commitment, and we would rather lose it than have you discover the problem on Day 6.
- Anyone who cannot sit in a car for nine hours on Day 6 and eight hours on Day 8. Those two days are structural — the roads that join the far north to the coast are what they are, and no amount of money removes them. If that is unacceptable, take the twelve-day north-to-south trip, which flies the long legs.
- Travellers who need reliable heating and consistent hot water every night. Dong Van and Meo Vac in December and January can sit at 5–10°C after dark in buildings that were not designed for it, and the Ben Tre night is a lodge on a canal rather than a hotel.
- Anyone travelling in October or November who cannot accept that the central section may be cancelled. The 2025 floods ran from mid-October to early December, killed at least 219 people, and did USD 129.7 million of damage in Hue alone. That is a real risk on Days 11 to 17, not a rainy afternoon.
- People who want a beach holiday somewhere in the middle. There is one unscheduled day, on Day 17, and the coast otherwise appears only in passing. The coast and islands trip is built the other way round.
- Anyone hoping for arranged encounters with hill communities — a performance, a costume, a weaving demonstration ending at a cash desk. We do not book any of it, and we do not take commission stops. You will walk through working valleys and buy from people directly or not at all.
How three weeks is paced
A twenty-one-day itinerary fails in predictable ways: too many one-night stops, no slack when something goes wrong, and a fortnight of clean clothes for a three-week trip. The structure below is the answer to those three problems and it is deliberate rather than accidental.
Three rest days, placed on purpose
Day 9 aboard in Lan Ha, immediately after the two long drives. Day 17 in Hoi An with nothing scheduled and the car on call. Day 5 at Meo Vac carries deliberate slack — a short driving day that can absorb bad weather without breaking the chain behind it.
Two laundry stops, both included
Bags go out on the evening of Day 13 in Hue and again on the evening of Day 15 in Hoi An, returning within 24 hours. That is what makes a twelve-kilogram bag enough for three weeks. Hotels on the plateau will wash things, but slowly and by hand, and nothing dries in Dong Van in January.
Eleven bases, not twenty
Five of the eleven get two nights or more and three of them get three. Only Ninh Binh, Da Lat, Ho Chi Minh City and Ben Tre are single nights, and each of those is a place where one night genuinely does the job. Packing and unpacking every day is the fastest way to make three weeks feel like a chore.
The other question people ask before booking is what happens if someone falls ill in the middle. Honestly: it depends where. From Hanoi, Hue, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City you are within an hour of a hospital with English-speaking doctors and an international standard of care, and your insurer can be dealt with by telephone. From the Dong Van plateau you are four and a half hours from the provincial hospital in Ha Giang city and considerably further from anything better, which is the single strongest argument for travelling this route with a guide and a driver rather than on a rented motorbike.
Operationally, what we do is this. The trip does not have to be abandoned to be paused: a party can stop for two or three days in Hue or Hoi An, where the hotels are used to it, while the rest of the itinerary is rebuilt around the flights that can be changed and the ones that cannot. One traveller can stay put with a companion while the others continue, and rejoin further south. Domestic flights on this route are cheap enough to rebook that this is usually a matter of a few hundred dollars rather than a lost trip. What we cannot do is refund nights already run, which is why we require insurance and ask to see it — read how to book for what our terms cover and what they do not.
One last point on timing. There is no month that is good for the whole country at once: the north is dry from November to April and cold in the middle of it, the centre floods from September to December, and the south is wet from May to November in short afternoon bursts. For a trip that visits all three in one line, March, April and December are the months that work, and when to go sets out the trade-offs month by month.
Three weeks, and a month in mind?
Send your dates, the size of your party and a scan of each passport. We come back with the flights we would hold, the boat we would charter, the permit lead time and a firm price, usually inside one working day.
Questions travellers ask most
Is twenty-one days too long for Vietnam?
No, but it is long enough that the shape of the itinerary matters more than the list of places on it. The country runs 1,650 km and has three climates. Three weeks is roughly what it takes to see the far north, the central heritage belt and the delta without spending every third day in transit.
What makes people tired on a trip this length is not distance, it is one-night stops. This route has four of them out of eleven bases, and three unscheduled or deliberately light days. If your ceiling is a fortnight, the fifteen-day trip covers the same spine without Ha Giang and Phong Nha.
When should we go, given the trip covers the whole country?
March, April and December. Those are the three months in which the northern highlands are dry and passable, the centre is out of flood season, and the south is either dry or only briefly wet in the afternoons.
October and November carry real risk on the central section. The 2025 floods ran from 16 October to 6 December, Bach Ma recorded 1,739.6 mm of rain in twenty-four hours, and Hue and Da Nang took the worst of it. We will still run the trip in those months if you ask, with the caveat written into the confirmation, but we will not tell you it is a mild rainy season.
Do we really need the Ha Giang border permit, and can you arrange it?
Yes to both. Since June 2026 it has been compulsory for all foreign passport holders in the districts of Quan Ba, Yen Minh, Dong Van and Meo Vac — which is every night of the Ha Giang section except the first. It costs about 250,000 VND, around USD 10, and the cost is inside your trip price.
We file it in advance from scans of the passport page and the visa or e-visa of each traveller, which is why we ask for those documents three weeks out. Filed late, it becomes an errand in a government office on the afternoon of Day 3. Carry it with your passport for Days 4, 5 and 6; the checkpoints are real and the guide cannot hold it for you.
What is actually included in the price, and what will we still spend?
Included: twenty nights, four domestic flights, the vehicle and driver for twenty-one days, one guide throughout, the border permit, every entry ticket on the route, and 20 breakfasts, 14 lunches and 7 dinners.
Not included: international flights, the e-visa at USD 25, insurance, the meals not listed, drinks, and tips. Realistically a couple spends a further USD 40 to USD 80 a day between them on the meals we have left free and on drinks, and rather less than that in the delta and on the plateau, where a full meal is a fraction of what it costs in Hoi An. Bring cash for the Phong Nha counters — they do not take cards.
Read next
Tell us about the trip you have in mind
Dates, party size and the places you care about are enough to start. You get a draft route and an indicative price, not a brochure.