Timeless Charm
What follows is the country as a departure sees it. Where the group sleeps, which legs are flights and which are roads, and which months our dates cluster in — because in Vietnam the weather is regional and a single itinerary cannot be right in every month.
Local Flavours
Eat your way through Hanoi after dark, following a guide down lanes too narrow for cars, or have seafood lifted from the water and cooked on deck while the boat works across Halong Bay. Appetite makes a decent compass here.
Unique Experiences
No stop is quite like the last. Ride the coast railway purely because the window is worth it, turn discarded metal into a keepsake at the Spiral Foundation, or run south by speedboat into the Mekong Delta.
Local Encounters
Understanding comes at the table — a day with the minority villages in the hills above Sapa, or lunch cooked by a family in their own house in Hue.
Top Highlights
- At 1,500 metres in the northern hills, Sapa is home to several different ethnic minority groups.
- Ride a cyclo through Hanoi’s old quarter, where the lanes bend, narrow and turn back on themselves, shopfronts the whole way.
- Sleep on board a junk, drifting over Halong Bay on the green water of the Gulf of Tonkin.
- Walk through Hue, which UNESCO listed as World Cultural Heritage in 1993 — the country’s first.
- Take a sampan into the Mekong Delta, past houses standing on the water, quiet hamlets and rice fields.
- Go out by rowing boat along the waterways of Ninh Binh, what everyone calls the Dry Halong Bay.
- Take a room at a small resort in Danang, on one of Vietnam’s best tropical beaches.
Capital
Hanoi
Currency
Dong
Language
Vietnamese
Population
97 Million
Religion
Buddhism
Time
GMT+7
Journeys in Vietnam
Places we cover in depth, and every published departure that includes Vietnam. Sixteen travellers at most, and each one can be run privately on your own dates.
