Essential Vietnam - 12 Days

This journey is real. Yours will be your own version of it.

Twelve days, and the shape of the trip changes halfway through.

The first week runs out of Hanoi and back. A private food walk on the first evening, six to eight tastings through lanes that do not appear in guidebooks. An open jeep through the French Quarter and around West Lake to Tran Quoc, the oldest pagoda in the city, founded in the sixth century. Then the three great day journeys: overnight northwest to Sapa, where a cable car climbs 1,400 vertical metres to the highest point in mainland Southeast Asia; east to Ha Long Bay for a night at anchor and a kayak into a lagoon at seven in the morning; south to Ninh Binh, where limestone towers rise out of rice paddy and the boats are rowed by hand.

Then it moves. The central coast gives Hoi An, a fifteenth-century trading port small enough to walk end to end and at its best once the lanterns are lit, and the Golden Bridge above Da Nang. The south gives Saigon and the delta.