Your guide meets you at Da Nang airport and drives you thirty minutes south to Hoi An, where the group stays three nights. The rest of the day is yours: An Bang beach is fifteen minutes by bicycle, the old town a twenty-minute walk along the river. Between September and December this coast gets its rain, and the old town floods most years — we plan around it rather than pretend otherwise.

A walking morning through the old town, which the river silted up and commerce left behind, so the eighteenth-century shophouses were never knocked down. The Japanese covered bridge, the Fujian and Cantonese assembly halls, and a merchant’s house still lived in by the same family. The afternoon is free for the tailors, who need a day to make anything worth having. We eat together tonight.

An early run inland to My Son, the Cham religious centre used from the fourth century to the thirteenth and bombed hard in 1969 — of the seventy-odd structures recorded, about twenty stand. We are there before the coaches. Back through Tra Que, where the herbs for Hoi An’s kitchens are grown in sand and river weed, and into the afternoon at your own pace.

North to Hue, two hours if we take the Hai Van tunnel and three if we go over the pass, which we do when the cloud allows — the road tops out at about 500 metres above Lang Co lagoon. A stop at the Cham museum in Da Nang on the way out, and lunch on the water at Lang Co. Into Hue by mid-afternoon for two nights.

The Imperial City in the morning: the Nguyen dynasty ruled from here between 1802 and 1945, and the citadel was fought through in 1968 — roughly a fifth of the buildings survived, and restoration is still running. In the afternoon a boat up the Perfume River to Thien Mu pagoda, then Minh Mang’s tomb, laid out as a formal garden, and Tu Duc’s, where the emperor wrote poetry and was not in fact buried.

Five to six hours north to Phong Nha, through Quang Tri — since the provincial mergers of July 2025 the old Quang Binh is part of it, with the seat at Dong Hoi. We break at the Vinh Moc tunnels, where a village of some 300 people lived underground through the bombing of 1966 to 1972. In Phong Nha we take the boat up the Son river and 1.5 km into the cave itself.

Paradise Cave in the morning — a buggy from the car park, a climb to the mouth, then a kilometre of boardwalk under a roof that reaches 70 metres in places. British cavers surveyed it in 2005 after a local man found the entrance. The afternoon runs through the Bong Lai valley, farms rather than sights, and ends with dinner at one of them.

Forty-five minutes to Dong Hoi airport for the flight out; Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are both about ninety minutes away, and connect onward the same day. If you would rather carry on, the train south from Dong Hoi reaches Hue in three hours, and we are glad to add nights in Hanoi or the delta at either end.