Small Group Journeys
Highlights
Tour Details
Itinerary
Day 1: Arrival to Saigon
Your flight lands in Ho Chi Minh City, known for years as Saigon. Someone from our team will meet you and drive you to the hotel; the afternoon that follows is unscheduled.
Day 2: Saigon
Today begins at the Cu Chi Tunnels, an underground maze hollowed out below the rice fields, and the account of how it served during the Vietnam War. A guide then leads you around Saigon on foot: Notre Dame Cathedral, the Reunification Palace, Dong Khoi Street and Ben Thanh Market.
Day 3: Saigon - Mekong Delta to Can Tho
The road drops southwards into the Mekong Delta, a day of palm-shaded channels, modest temples and crowded markets. Lunch is made with ingredients raised within sight of the kitchen. The drive continues to Can Tho.
Day 4: Can Tho to Chau Doc
You leave early for the Cai Rang floating market, where a small craft takes you among boats whose owners sell fruit and vegetables straight from the deck. In Chau Giang District there is a modest mosque serving the Cham, a people once Hindu who turned to Islam after medieval contact with Arab traders and seafarers. A handsome Khmer temple comes next, along with floating homes that double as catfish farms below the waterline.
Day 5: Chau Doc to Phnom Penh
A fast boat takes the group upriver to the Cambodian frontier and continues along the Mekong to Phnom Penh. In the late afternoon you sail again, out onto the Mekong and along the Tonle Sap, past floating fishing hamlets, with sunset settling behind the city skyline.
Day 6: Phnom Penh
The city is seen from a cyclo, Cambodia’s bicycle rickshaw. The morning covers the National Museum, Wat Phnom and the Silver Pagoda, together with the Royal Palace, still the residence of King Norodom Sihamoni. At the Central Market the aisles run between stalls stacked with silk, jewellery, handicrafts, CDs and DVDs. Tuol Sleng Museum comes last — a secondary school that the Khmer Rouge converted into a centre for interrogation and torture.
Day 7: Phnom Penh to Siem Reap
Two stops interrupt the road north to Siem Reap: Skun, whose Spider Market is famous, then Kampong Thom and its Naga Bridge.
Day 8: Siem Reap
You are up long before dawn and standing before Angkor Wat as daylight arrives; a full breakfast follows at a restaurant close by. The route then passes through the south gate of Angkor Thom, the ‘Great City’, watched over by carved faces 23m (75-foot) high that filmgoers will recognise from Tomb Raider. Bayon occupies the centre — the state temple built in the 12th century, its towers bearing hundreds more of those outsized faces. At a pagoda nearby a monk offers a blessing, a piece of ordinary life that nobody has arranged for visitors. Ta Prohm is saved for last: huge trees whose roots have taken hold of the walls.
Day 9: Siem Reap
A drive brings you to Kampong Kleang, then a boat threads between houses raised on poles above Tonle Sap, the biggest lake in all of Southeast Asia. Banteay Srei fills the afternoon: consecrated in 967 A.D. and worked in red sandstone, its wall reliefs remain sharp enough to follow figure by figure. Banteay Samre is visited on the way back.
Day 10: Siem Reap to Bangkok
This leg is flown: Siem Reap–Bangkok takes about an hour, direct and daily. A guide meets you and drives you to your hotel.
Day 11: Bangkok
The day opens at the Grand Palace and Wat Phra Kaew, which houses the Emerald Buddha, the most revered image in Thailand. Wat Pho follows — one of the city’s largest and longest-standing temples, built around a colossal gilded Reclining Buddha. The original city stood on Rattanakosin Island, the ground chosen when the capital was established over 200 years ago. The afternoon ends on a longtail boat, running the klongs off the Chao Phraya River and stopping at Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn.
Day 12: Bangkok
Nothing is scheduled today. You might fit in a final round of shopping, since Bangkok is hardly short of malls, or simply stay at the hotel, sit beside the pool and book yourself a spa treatment.
Day 13: Departure from Bangkok
Time to leave. The journey closes today, but what you have collected goes back with you and will keep being retold long after. A vehicle runs you to the airport with time to spare before your flights.
What´s included
- 12 nights in described hotels or similar
- Daily Breakfast and 4 Lunches for 2 Persons
- Air-conditioned vehicles throughout, apart from touring by Tuk Tuk
- Sightseeing in a group capped at sixteen
- Every entrance fee named in the itinerary
- An English-speaking tour leader throughout
- Tipping for guides, drivers and hotel staff, settled by us
- Transfers on arrival and on the day you fly home
Excluded
- Anything personal you spend along the way
- Entry requirements and any visa costs
- Porterage at hotels and airports
- Insurance, plus personal costs including laundry, mini-bar, telephone calls and drinks
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