Vietnam's thousand-year-old capital and its most famous limestone bay in three days, including a night aboard a cruise boat moored out on Ha Long Bay.
Photo: Marina Lobato / Unsplash
Day 1
Your guide meets you at Noi Bai International Airport and transfers you to a hotel in the Old Quarter. The afternoon takes in the Temple of Literature, where 82 doctoral stelae still stand on the backs of stone tortoises, followed by a walk around Hoan Kiem Lake and across the red Huc Bridge to Ngoc Son Temple. In the evening you watch water puppetry at Thang Long Theatre, then eat where you like in the thirty-six streets of the Old Quarter.
Day 2
We leave early on the Hanoi–Hai Phong–Ha Long expressway, about two and a half hours. You board the cruise boat at the harbour and have lunch as it pulls away into a bay of some 1,600 limestone islands. The afternoon is spent in Sung Sot Cave on Bo Hon Island — the largest three-chamber cave in the bay, named Grotte des Surprises by the French in 1901 — and then climbing the 400 steps to the lookout on Ti Top Island for the late-afternoon view. The boat stays out overnight; after dinner you can try squid fishing from the deck.
Day 3
The day opens with tai chi on the sundeck at sunrise, then a bamboo rowing boat into Vung Vieng, a floating village where families still raise fish in pens between the cliffs. The boat returns to harbour and you have lunch on board before disembarking for the drive back to Hanoi. Depending on your flight, we transfer you to Noi Bai Airport or drop you at your hotel, where the programme ends.
This is the most basic route through northern Vietnam and the one we run most often for first-time visitors. Three days is enough to see two very different faces of the country: a Hanoi that is crowded, loud and constantly in motion, and then a bay so quiet at night that you can hear the water against the hull.
We always build this trip around a night on board rather than a Ha Long day trip. A day trip gives you roughly four hours on the water, at exactly the hour when the bay is busiest. Staying out means you get the late afternoon and the early morning when there is almost nobody else around. The difference in cost is modest; the difference in the experience is not.
The Hanoi to Ha Long leg runs on the expressway and takes about two and a half hours, rather than the half-day drive it used to be. The itinerary suits couples, families and small groups. Cabin grade on the boat and hotel category in Hanoi are agreed before the contract is signed.
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