Met at Noi Bai and driven the thirty-odd kilometres into the city. Nothing else is fixed for the day. If you land early, the lanes around Hoan Kiem are the quickest way to shake off the flight, and the lake path is busy with walkers from five in the morning onwards. We gather in the evening for a briefing and the first dinner together, and your leader runs through the week ahead.

A day walking, with a cyclo for the tired stretch. Hoa Lo prison first, built by the French in 1896 and used later for captured American aircrew, then the Fine Arts Museum, which holds the lacquer and silk work the larger museums skip over. After lunch we cross the Long Bien bridge, put up between 1899 and 1902 by the Paris firm of Daydé and Pillé, and walk the market gardens on the sandbank below it.

Two and a half hours east on the Hai Phong expressway, then aboard a small wooden-hulled boat for Bai Tu Long. It is the same drowned limestone as Ha Long, with a fraction of the traffic, and the anchorages are quiet by late afternoon. Kayaks go out among the islets before dusk and you can swim if the water suits. Dinner and the night are spent aboard, at anchor.

Up early if you want the light on the water. Breakfast is served under way, with a last stop at a limestone cave or a floating fishing hamlet, and we disembark before noon and drive back to Hanoi. The afternoon is yours; a day room is held at the hotel for showers and luggage. Shortly after ten we board the northbound sleeper to Lao Cai, four berths to a compartment, bedding provided.

The train reaches Lao Cai around six. Breakfast, then the climb to Sapa, thirty-eight kilometres of switchbacks with the Hoang Lien range ahead of you. We leave the vehicle above Lao Chai and walk down through the terraces to Ta Van, three or four hours at an easy pace and almost none of it on tarmac. Black Hmong and Giay hamlets, working buffalo, and the Muong Hoa stream at the bottom.

North-east to Ta Phin, a Red Dao settlement in a side valley, where the roofless shell of a French seminary abandoned in 1945 still stands among the maize. We walk part of the way in and call on a household that dyes and embroiders indigo cloth for its own use rather than for the market. Back by lunch. The afternoon is open — the Fansipan cable car, or the mist and a book in town.

The long descent to Hanoi, about five and a half hours on the Noi Bai–Lao Cai expressway with a stop at Bao Ha. It is a driving day and we do not pretend otherwise, though the Red river valley opens out below the road for much of the way. Into the city by mid-afternoon. The evening is free: the water puppet theatre on Dinh Tien Hoang, or a chair on Ta Hien and a cold beer.

South-west into Thanh Hoa, four hours through Mai Chau and over the Thung Khe pass, where roadside stalls sell sticky rice steamed in bamboo. Pu Luong is a reserve of limestone ridges and stepped terraces farmed by White Thai and Muong households. We arrive with the afternoon left for a walk down to Ban Hieu and the bamboo waterwheels that lift river water up into the fields above the village.

An hour on foot through the terraces after breakfast, then two and a half hours east to Ninh Binh, which since the provincial mergers of July 2025 also takes in Ha Nam and Nam Dinh. In the afternoon a sampan through the flooded tunnels at Trang An, rowed the whole way and slow enough to look, and the steps at Hang Mua for the view down over the Ngo Dong. Farewell dinner in town.

A two-hour transfer to Noi Bai, timed to your flight. If you are leaving late there is room first for Bich Dong, a three-tier pagoda built into a cliff face above a lotus pond, or the Hoa Lu citadel where the tenth-century capital stood before it moved to Hanoi. We can add Cat Ba, the Ha Giang uplands or a run south to Hue for anyone with more days.