Conical Hats & Basket Boats: 10 Days Saigon to Hanoi

Your driver meets you in the arrivals hall at Tan Son Nhat and takes you into the city. The rest of the day is yours: sleep off the flight or head out for a first look around (optional).

Saigon runs on motorbikes, so cross the road at a slow, steady walk and let the riders steer around you. By evening the pavements fill with plastic stools and street kitchens, and a short stroll round the block is the easiest way to meet the city.

The day is yours. If you would like a guide, two optional tours can be added at extra cost.

The city tour links three sights a short walk apart: Independence Palace, barely changed since a tank broke through its gates on 30 April 1975; Notre Dame Cathedral, built from red bricks shipped from Toulouse (scaffolding may hide part of it during its restoration); and the War Remnants Museum, which tells the war from the Vietnamese side.

The other option is the Cu Chi Tunnels, northwest of the city, where fighters sheltered underground during the war and you taste the plain cassava and tea they lived on.

Your English-speaking guide collects you at the hotel, and with the rest of your small group you drive 90 minutes to two hours to My Tho on the Tien River, the northern arm of the Mekong. After Vinh Trang Pagoda and its large Buddha statues, you step into a sampan, the low wooden boat of the delta, and slip out between the river islands.

There you taste orchard fruit while a small band plays don ca tai tu, the folk music of the south listed by UNESCO in 2013, watch coconut candy being made, visit a honeybee farm and stop for lunch. In the afternoon you can ride a bicycle around Tan Thanh village or rest in a hammock (both included), and you are back in Saigon around 5:30 PM.

Breakfast is at the hotel and the morning is free; check out by 12:00 noon. A transfer to Tan Son Nhat and a flight of about 1 hour 20 minutes take you north to Da Nang, and from there a driver covers the 40 minutes by road to Hoi An. The rest of the day is free.

For four centuries Hoi An lived from sea trade, and its wooden merchant houses, temples and assembly halls earned the Ancient Town its UNESCO listing in 1999. Go out after dark, when silk lanterns light up the lanes and the river, and explore on foot (optional).

Your guide collects you at around 8:20 AM for a morning in the countryside with a small group of up to 12. You start at a local market, where the guide explains the herbs and vegetables of Vietnamese cooking. Then you head to Cam Thanh, where creeks lined with water coconut palms run towards the coast. Here you climb into a thung chai, a round boat woven from bamboo, and learn to paddle it (it takes a few tries), while local fishermen show you how they cast their nets and you try catching crabs from the boat.

Back on land, a hands-on class teaches you five Vietnamese dishes, and you sit down to eat what you cooked. You are back at the hotel around 12:20 PM, and the afternoon is free.

Check out by 12:00 noon. A transfer to Da Nang airport, about 40 minutes from Hoi An, and a flight of about 1 hour 20 minutes bring you to Hanoi, and your driver covers the 45 minutes from Noi Bai into the city, close to the Old Quarter. The evening is yours (optional).

Each lane of the Old Quarter grew up around a single craft, which is why so many street names start with Hang, meaning goods. Make your first stop a bowl of pho: in Hanoi it is all about the clear, beefy broth over flat rice noodles, with lime and fresh chilli on the side.

After breakfast your English-speaking guide and driver collect you for a private day at Moc village in Ba Vi, farmland at the foot of the Ba Vi mountains on Hanoi's western edge. Your host, a Vietnam War veteran turned tea farmer, shows you how to pick young leaves from bushes he planted thirty years ago.

A local family then gives you a cooking lesson, and you eat lunch together. You watch tofu being pressed and conical hats stitched from dried leaves, cycle out through the rice fields and end the day with a herbal foot soak made to a recipe of the Muong people of the hills, before the drive back to Hanoi in the late afternoon.

A shared limousine bus collects you in the Old Quarter between 7:30 and 8:45 AM, and the expressway takes you to the coast in about 2.5 hours. You board Le Journey Premium Cruise at the harbour, and lunch is served as the boat heads out among the limestone islets of Ha Long Bay, some 1,600 of them and a UNESCO site since 1994.

In the afternoon the boat stops at a cave on its route and you can go out in a kayak (included). Later there is tea on deck and a cooking class with the crew, then dinner on board, and the evening is free as the sun goes down behind the karsts. Drinks are paid separately, and the route can change with the weather.

Start the day with tai chi on the sundeck while the bay is still quiet, then breakfast as the boat sails back towards the harbour, with an early lunch before you leave your cabin.

The limousine bus takes you back to your hotel in Hanoi, arriving around 3:00 to 3:30 PM. The rest of the day is free (optional): walk around Hoan Kiem Lake, pick up last souvenirs or sit over an egg coffee, strong coffee topped with egg yolk whipped with sugar until it turns to cream.

The morning is yours until your airport transfer; check-out is at 12:00 noon. For souvenirs, try Dong Xuan, the big covered market on the northern edge of the Old Quarter, which sells almost everything from dried fruit and tea to fabric (optional). Then it is the drive of about 45 minutes to Noi Bai and your flight home.