How Many Days

Seven days works if you pick one country and resist the urge to see all of it. Thailand: Bangkok, Ayutthaya and Chiang Mai, with the sleeper train in between. Vietnam: Hanoi, an overnight on Halong Bay and a day in Ninh Binh, or the central strip of Hue and Hoi An on its own. Cambodia: three nights at Angkor, two in Phnom Penh, and time to do both properly. Laos: Luang Prabang, the Nam Ou and nothing else, which is the best short trip in the region for anyone who wants to slow down rather than tick things off.

What does not work in a week is two countries with a flight between them, or Vietnam north to south. Both are technically possible and both produce the same result: four airports, three hotel breakfasts you were too rushed to eat, and no real sense of where you have been. If a week is genuinely all you have, we would rather build you something small and good.

This is the length at which a trip starts to breathe. One country in depth: Vietnam from Hanoi down to Hoi An with a proper stop in the middle, or Cambodia from Siem Reap through Phnom Penh to Kampot and the coast, or northern Thailand with time in the hills beyond Chiang Mai.

It is also the shortest sensible two-country trip, provided the two sit close together. Cambodia and southern Vietnam pair well: Siem Reap, Phnom Penh, then the boat or the road down into the Mekong delta and on to Ho Chi Minh City. Thailand and Laos work through the north — Bangkok, Chiang Mai, then the slow boat down to Luang Prabang.

What we would avoid at this length is three countries. It can be sold and it can be flown, but each border costs half a day of formalities and each new country costs an evening of orientation. Twelve days split three ways leaves under four nights in each, and two of those are travel days.

Fourteen to sixteen days is where most of our departures sit, because it is the point at which the classic routes fit without compression. Vietnam end to end — Hanoi, the bay, Hue, Hoi An, the delta and Saigon — needs about this. So does Cambodia and Vietnam together, or Thailand and Laos with the Mekong leg included.

At this length you can afford one deliberately unplanned day in the middle, and we build one in. It gets used for laundry, for a market somebody liked enough to go back to, or for nothing at all. Groups that have one arrive at the end in far better shape than groups that do not.

A fortnight also absorbs the things that go wrong: a delayed flight, a storm in the centre of Vietnam, a boat that does not sail. On a ten-day route those events remove a destination. On a fifteen-day route they remove an afternoon, and you get the destination anyway.

Three weeks is the length at which Laos stops being the country that gets cut. A twenty-one day route can run Hanoi to Hue and Hoi An, cross into Laos overland or by air, take Luang Prabang and the Mekong slowly, and finish in Cambodia at Angkor — or reverse the whole thing, depending on the season.

Beyond three weeks the shape changes again. Four weeks holds all four mainland countries at a pace that includes rest days, or a single river route from northern Thailand down to the delta. It is also long enough to justify Myanmar as a separate block, flown in and out of Yangon, with the rest of the trip either side of it.

The limit is not the map but stamina. Almost everyone hits a flat week somewhere around day sixteen. We plan for it: a beach, a lake, two nights in the same room with nothing scheduled. Trips that ignore this end with three destinations nobody can remember.

A useful test: count the hotel check-ins, not the countries. Under ten nights, four check-ins is comfortable and six is too many. Over a fortnight, eight is workable provided two of the stops are three nights or more.

Then count the long days — anything over four hours in a vehicle, on a boat, or in an airport. Two or three of those across a fortnight is normal here and part of what you came for. Five or six is a coach tour, whatever it is called on the website.

We also watch the direction of travel. Doubling back to catch a flight from a city you have already left costs a whole day and feels worse than it reads on paper. Where a route has to backtrack, we would usually change the route instead.

If you send us a wish list that will not fit, we will tell you which two things to remove and why, rather than fitting all of them in badly.

Most of our journeys have obvious extensions, and adding three or four nights to a fixed departure is usually easier than lengthening the group section. The common ones: the Andaman or Gulf islands after Thailand, depending on the month; Phu Quoc or Con Dao after Vietnam; Kep and Kampot after Cambodia; the Four Thousand Islands after southern Laos.

The other reason to extend is the flight schedule. Long-haul departures from Bangkok, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City tend to leave late at night, and a spare day in a city you already know is more useful than a day-room and an early check-out from a hotel.

We arrange the front end too. If you are crossing eight or more time zones, one night in your arrival city before the group departure is worth more than any single sight on the itinerary. You will sleep at the wrong hours regardless, but you will do it before the trip starts rather than during it.