Hanoi, and the three nights it actually holds

The short version

Region

Northern Vietnam

Nights

3

Airport

Noi Bai (HAN), 27 km

Transfer

40–50 min by road

Best months

October–November, March–April

Known for

The Old Quarter, the lakes, bun cha and cha ca

What this place actually is

Hanoi is a working city that happens to contain a thousand-year-old commercial district. The Old Quarter is thirty-six streets that were organised by guild — Hang Bac for silver, Hang Ma for paper goods, Hang Thiec for tin — and several of them still trade in roughly the thing they are named after. It is also, at street level, a continuous motorbike car park with hostels above it, and the pavements belong to parked bikes, cooking fires and plastic stools rather than to pedestrians. Walking here means walking in the road. That is the experience, and people who arrive expecting a preserved old town are describing a different city.

The part that has been overrun is small and easy to name. Ta Hien and the junction around it, marketed as beer corner, is now a block of identical bars with identical stools and identical playlists, and it is loud until it is closed. The souvenir streets at the eastern edge of the quarter sell the same lacquer trays and the same water-puppet figurines as every gift shop in the country. The railway-track cafés have been closed by the authorities and reopened more than once, and whether they are trading in the week you arrive is not something any operator can promise. None of this ruins the district; it just means the good hours are 06:00 to 09:00 and after 21:00, and the good streets are the ones nobody has written a listicle about.

The rest of the city is more interesting than the quarter. Hoan Kiem and West Lake give the place its geography, and the ring of French-colonial building around the Opera House and the old quarter of villas is dense and largely intact — ochre plaster, shutters, mature trees. The Temple of Literature, founded in 1070 as Vietnam’s first university, is the one monument in the city that repays a slow hour. The food is the strongest argument of all: bun cha is grilled pork in a bowl of sweet-sour broth with cold noodles alongside, cha ca is turmeric fish fried at your own table with dill, and both are eaten at addresses that do one dish and close when it runs out.

How many nights, and why fewer breaks it

Three nights. The arithmetic is unforgiving and it works like this.

• Night one is the arrival. Flights from Europe land in the late morning or the evening after eleven to twelve hours, and flights from Australia arrive via a connection. Whatever the timing, the first evening is a shower, a bowl of something and sleep. Nobody sightsees on day zero and the ones who try are useless on day one.
• Day one is the Old Quarter and the lake on foot in the morning, the French quarter and the Opera House in the afternoon, and dinner at a single-dish address. Six to eight kilometres of walking, most of it flat.
• Day two is the Temple of Literature, the Thang Long imperial citadel, the Ho Chi Minh complex and one museum. The mausoleum has short morning hours, closes two days a week, and shuts for maintenance for roughly two months most years, usually in the autumn — so this day gets built around it rather than the other way round.
• The morning of night three is either the drive to the coast for the bay, the overnight train north to Lao Cai, or the flight to Hue or Da Nang. It is a departure morning, not a touring day.

Cut to two nights and one of those two working days disappears — almost always the second one, which means the Temple of Literature, the citadel and the museums all go, and you have seen a shopping district and a lake. Cut to one night and you have seen an airport transfer. Hanoi is also the hinge for everything north: the bay is two and a half to three hours away by road, Sapa five and a half, Ninh Binh under two. Every one of those excursions is priced in half-days off the Hanoi total, which is another reason the three nights are not padding.

Four nights is defensible if the route has them, and the fourth day usually goes to Bat Trang and the ceramic kilns, to the Perfume Pagoda, or simply to nothing at all after a long flight. Beyond four the city starts repeating itself.

When to go

Northern Vietnam has four real seasons and only two of them are comfortable. The season that catches people out is winter, because most long-haul visitors arrive between December and February — the correct window for a four-country journey — and are then surprised by 12 °C and no sun.

How to get there

By air

• Noi Bai International (HAN) sits 27 km north of the centre. The transfer is 40 to 50 minutes on the Nhat Tan bridge road, and 60 to 75 minutes if you land into the 07:30–09:00 or 17:00–19:00 traffic.
• Direct long-haul runs from London, Paris, Frankfurt and several Gulf hubs, at eleven to twelve hours from western Europe.
• Inside the region: Luang Prabang 1 h 10 (Lao Airlines daily, Vietnam Airlines three times a week), Vientiane about 1 h, Siem Reap about 1 h 50, Bangkok about 1 h 50, Da Nang and Hue about 1 h 15, Ho Chi Minh City about 2 h 10.

By road

• Ha Long: 2 h 30 to 3 h on the Hai Phong–Ha Long expressway. Haiphong, for boarding into Lan Ha Bay, is about 2 h to 2 h 30.
• Ninh Binh: 1 h 45 to 2 h. Sapa: 5 h 30 door to door on the Noi Bai–Lao Cai expressway, about 320 km.
• We cap a driving day at five hours, which is why Sapa is a dedicated leg and not an add-on to another day.

By rail

• Hanoi to Lao Cai, for Sapa, is an overnight sleeper of about eight hours, then an hour up the road to the town.
• Hanoi to Hue is 13 to 14 hours; the whole Hanoi–Saigon line is 1,726 km and 30 to 34 hours end to end. We use rail in Vietnam for the scenic Hue–Da Nang leg and for the Lao Cai sleeper, and fly the rest.

What things cost here

Land prices in Hanoi, in the ranges we see when we book them. These are what the components cost, not what a journey costs — the journeys are priced on the pricing page.

Beer at a street stool is 20,000 to 30,000 VND and coffee is 25,000 to 60,000 VND depending on whether it comes with condensed milk or a laptop. The gap between the cheapest and the most expensive meal in this city is a factor of twenty, and the expensive one is not reliably better.

The city in photographs

When to skip it

• You have fewer than fourteen days and you want Angkor and a beach. In that case the route enters Vietnam in the south, takes Ho Chi Minh City and the delta, and leaves the north for a second trip. Half a Hanoi is worse than none.
• You are travelling in December or January, you have exactly one Vietnamese city in the plan, and grey damp cold would spoil it. Ho Chi Minh City is dry and 30 °C in those months. The north is the better city and the worse weather, and that trade is yours to make.
• You have already booked Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City and dense traffic cities exhaust you. Three big Asian capitals in one fortnight is a lot of the same kind of day.
• Your route runs south to north and exits overland into Laos or by air to Luang Prabang from Hanoi — in which case Hanoi is not skippable at all, and the question is only how many of its nights fall before the flight.

The journeys that come here

Hanoi opens or closes most of our routes. The four-country Grand Indochina, 28 days begins here and gives the city its full three nights before the bay, and Indochina Classic, 21 days does the same in a tighter frame. If Vietnam is the point of the trip, Vietnam In Depth, 20 days is the only route with the days to add Sapa on top of Hanoi, and Vietnam and Cambodia, 16 days is the shorter two-country version that still keeps three nights here.

For the crossings into the neighbours, Vietnam and Laos, 17 days uses the 1 h 10 flight from Hanoi to Luang Prabang, and Vietnam and Thailand, 15 days pairs the north with Bangkok and the Gulf. Two routes are built around who is travelling rather than where: the family journey, 18 days shortens the museum day and adds a cooking class and a cycling morning, and the honeymoon, 16 days puts the two Hanoi nights in a landmark hotel and skips the citadel entirely.

If none of the eight is quite right, the tailor-made page explains how a route gets redrawn, or write to us through contact with the month and the party size.

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