Vietnam 2 Week Tour: 13 Days from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City

Your driver waits at Noi Bai International Airport and brings you into the city, about 45 minutes to the centre when the roads are clear. The rest of the day is unplanned, so you can settle in, sleep off the flight or head straight out into the Old Quarter, whose narrow streets still carry the names of the trades once sold in them.

For the evening there is a guided street food walk (optional, extra cost): six or seven dishes tasted on foot, pho, banh mi and bun cha among them, a cup of Vietnamese coffee, and a stop at the train street, where the rails pass within a metre of the house fronts. It starts in the early evening and takes two to three hours.

The guided morning begins at the Ho Chi Minh complex, where the mausoleum holds the embalmed body of the man who declared Vietnam independent in 1945; the line moves quickly, and the gardens of the presidential palace are in the same grounds. A few steps away is the One Pillar Pagoda, a small wooden shrine on a single stone column, dedicated to the goddess of mercy. The Museum of Ethnology follows, with rooms on the country's 54 ethnic groups and full-size houses in its garden. On Mondays, when it is closed, the Women's Museum takes its place.

The afternoon is a two-hour coffee workshop. After a short talk on how coffee came to Vietnam, you brew five drinks with the baristas: egg coffee, coconut coffee, the salted coffee of Hue, a classic brown with condensed milk and a pour-over, and you take a recipe book home. A massage at a spa in the city is the evening option (optional, extra cost).

You leave the city on the expressway that follows the Red River north-west to Lao Cai, then climb the switchbacks into the Hoang Lien Son range to Sapa, a hill station at about 1,500 metres that the French laid out in the early twentieth century. Allow five to six hours with stops.

Nothing is scheduled once you arrive, and that suits the place: the air is cooler, the cloud drifts through the streets, and the market and the stone church by the central square are a short walk from most of the town. Women from the Hmong and Red Dao villages in the valley come up to sell indigo cloth and embroidery. Our guides suggest an early night, as tomorrow is the longest walk of the tour.

This is the main walking day. A short drive takes you to Y Linh Ho, where the trail leaves the road and follows the Muong Hoa stream along the valley floor, with rice terraces stepped up both flanks and Fansipan, the highest mountain in Vietnam, somewhere in the cloud above. The route is about nine kilometres and takes roughly three and a half hours at an easy pace.

You pass through Lao Chai, a Black Hmong village where the women wear hemp dyed almost black with indigo, and finish at Ta Van, home to the Giay people, whose houses stand closer to the river. The paths are earth and stone and get slippery after rain, so shoes with grip matter more than fitness. A car waits at the Ta Van bridge to bring you back up to town.

A second, shorter walk fills the morning: about four kilometres and two hours from the trailhead, first across rice paddies and then through a stretch of bamboo forest to Giang Ta Chai, a Red Dao village where the women wear red headscarves and heavy silver. There is time for photographs in the village and a rest before you meet the car at the Giang Ta Chai bridge for the drive back up to Sapa.

From there you start the long run south to Hanoi, around six hours including two stops, so the mountains fade into the delta flatlands by the afternoon and you reach the capital in the evening with nothing else on the programme.

A full day south of Hanoi in the limestone country of Ninh Binh. A shuttle bus leaves the city for the two-hour run to Hoa Lu, the seat of Vietnam's kings in the tenth century, and you cover the last stretch on a bicycle, a flat twenty-minute ride between the paddies (or by bus, if you tell the guide beforehand). Inside the old citadel you walk to the temples of King Dinh and King Le, the first rulers of an independent Vietnam, and a second half-hour ride takes you through the lanes of a farming village.

In the afternoon you choose a boat: a rowed sampan through the rice fields and low caves of Tam Coc, or the longer trip through the tunnel caves of Trang An, a UNESCO World Heritage landscape. The day ends with the climb of around 500 steps to the top of Mua Cave for the view down the Tam Coc valley, then the bus back to Hanoi.

A shuttle bus collects you in Hanoi for the drive east to the harbour, where you board Cozy Bay Cruise or a boat of the same class and head out among the islands; there are close to 2,000 of them, which is why the bay is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The afternoon stops are Surprise Cave, a large chamber lit to show its stalactites and stalagmites, and Luon Cave, a low arch you pass through either by kayak or in a rowed bamboo boat into the lagoon on the far side.

On Titop Island there are steps up to a summit viewpoint, or you can stay on the small beach and swim when the season allows. Back on board the crew lays on a sunset gathering on the top deck with wine, tea, cakes and fruit, and the boat anchors for the night in a sheltered corner of the bay.

You wake on the water and the boat cruises back towards the harbour through the morning light, with time for a coffee on deck before the islands give way to the shoreline. From the pier the shuttle returns you towards Hanoi and on to Noi Bai, where you board the Da Nang flight, roughly 80 minutes gate to gate. A car then runs the half hour south along the coast into Hoi An.

The old town, a trading port from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and a UNESCO World Heritage site, is closed to cars in the evening, and the lanterns come on along the Thu Bon river after dark. It is a short walk from most central addresses, so you can wander down for a first look before you sleep.

No fixed programme, so the day is yours in Hoi An. The old town is small enough to cover on foot or by bicycle (hire optional, extra cost), with the merchant houses, the assembly halls and the riverside market packed into a few streets. Hoi An's tailors can cut a suit, a dress or a pair of shoes to measure and have it ready the next day (optional, extra cost), a lantern-making workshop teaches the silk-and-bamboo craft the town is known for (optional, extra cost), and the beach is a short ride away for a swim.

In the evening a car takes you to Ngon Pho Hoi, a restaurant in a traditional building on La Hoi street, for a meal of central Vietnamese dishes.

A car runs you north again to the airport at Da Nang for the flight south, around an hour and a half to Tan Son Nhat. On arrival your driver brings you into the centre of Ho Chi Minh City, which most people here still call Saigon, and the rest of the day is free.

District 1 holds the main sights within walking distance of each other: the red-brick basilica, the central post office from the French period, the Opera House and Ben Thanh market. The pavement cafes and the beer corners fill up as the heat drops in the evening, and it is an easy city to walk around at night.

A van or bus collects you from the centre for the ride of about an hour and a half out to Cu Chi, where the Viet Cong dug more than 200 kilometres of tunnels during the war with the United States. A short film explains how the network was built and how people lived in it. You then go underground into the surviving sections: living quarters, kitchens with smoke vents hidden metres away, meeting rooms, and the trapdoors and traps around them. Some tunnels have been widened for visitors, but they are still low and warm, and you can skip any section.

Tea and boiled cassava, the staple of the fighters, are served before the drive back. There is a shooting range on the site for anyone who wants to try it (optional, extra cost). The afternoon in Saigon is free.

A bus takes you south-west for about two hours to My Tho on the northern arm of the Mekong, which reaches the sea here after more than 4,000 kilometres from the Tibetan plateau. The first stop is Vinh Trang Pagoda, a nineteenth-century temple with giant Buddha statues in its gardens. You then board a motor boat and cruise past the four river islands, each named after a sacred animal: dragon, unicorn, phoenix and tortoise.

Ashore on Unicorn Island you follow the lanes between the orchards, taste the fruit in season, see the hives at a honey farm and watch coconut candy being boiled, cut and wrapped by hand. The quietest part is a hand-rowed sampan along the narrow Thoi Son canal under the water palms. Later you choose between a bike ride around Tan Thach village and a rest in a hammock before the bus returns to Ho Chi Minh City.

The tour ends with the transfer to Tan Son Nhat International Airport, timed to your departure. If you fly in the afternoon or evening, the morning is free for a last walk around the centre, an iced coffee with condensed milk at a pavement cafe or some final shopping for gifts.

Tell us your flight time when you book and we set the pickup to match. Extra nights in the city, or a few days at the coast, can be added at the end of the tour, and we can also arrange a later pickup if your flight leaves at night.