8 days
99
3+
Saigon
Vietnam runs nearly 1,650 km from top to bottom and feels like three different countries along the way. This eight-day trip takes all three. You start in Saigon in the hot, fast south, move to the central coast for beaches and the old trading town of Hoi An, then fly north to Hanoi, which is cooler, older and slower. Two internal flights are included so you are not losing days to travel.
Along the way you get the Mekong Delta by hand-rowed boat, the Golden Bridge and cable car at Ba Na Hills, basket boats at Hoi An and lantern-lit lanes in the evening, Train Street and Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi, and a full day cruising Halong Bay with kayaking and a cave walk. Return international and domestic flights are covered up to INR 32,000, and every sightseeing ticket listed is already paid for.
It suits first-time travellers to South East Asia, groups of friends and couples. It is a busy eight days with a few early starts, so if you want it slower we can drop a city and add nights.
Send us your travel dates and group size and we will confirm flights and hotels, and send a day-by-day plan with timings. Call or WhatsApp +91 62000 39989.
You land at Tan Son Nhat and the heat hits you at the door. The drive into District 1 is your first look at Vietnamese traffic — thousands of scooters moving together like water, and you learn quickly that you cross the road slowly and steadily and they flow around you. After checking in you head out for a short city loop, then to Bui Vien in the evening, where plastic stools spill onto the road, the beer is cold and cheap, and the street stays awake long after you give up.
Ho Chi Minh City — everyone here still calls it Saigon. The official name changed in 1976 after reunification, but the old one never left daily speech.
The Central Post Office — built by the French in the 1880s and still a working post office. The ironwork inside was designed in the same era that gave Paris its railway stations.
An early drive south takes you out of the city and into the delta, where the land flattens and everything runs on water. You board a wooden boat and turn off the main river into narrow canals shaded by coconut palms, so tight that the person rowing has to duck. Along the way you stop at a family workshop where coconut candy is pulled by hand and cut still warm, taste honey tea, and eat lunch of river fish with rice. It is slow, hot, green, and completely different from yesterday.
The Mekong Delta — Vietnam's rice bowl, growing more than half the country's rice on land built entirely from river silt. Families here live on the water rather than beside it.
The Mekong itself — nearly 4,900 km long, running through six countries before it fans out here and empties into the sea.
A short morning flight carries you to the central coast. Da Nang is a different Vietnam again — wide clean roads, a long beach, and none of Saigon's noise. The afternoon is yours at My Khe, where the sand runs for kilometres and the water is warm enough to stay in for hours. In the evening the city's café culture takes over. Rooftop places along the river look across at the Dragon Bridge, which on weekend nights breathes actual fire and then sprays water over the crowd below.
My Khe — American soldiers called this stretch China Beach and used it for rest during the war. It is now one of the most popular beaches in the country and completely rebuilt.
Dragon Bridge — opened in 2013 on the anniversary of the city's liberation, and designed from the start to shoot fire and water on weekends.
You go up into the hills west of the city by cable car, and the ride itself is the first surprise — it climbs for close to twenty minutes over forest and waterfalls, and the valley drops further and further below you. At the top is the Golden Bridge, a curving walkway held up by two enormous stone hands that look like they have pushed through the mountainside. Above that sits a whole French village rebuilt in stone, with a square, a church and Fantasy Park. The air is ten degrees cooler than the beach and often full of cloud, which is why people call it the place above the clouds.
Ba Na Hills — started as a French hill station in 1919, built so colonial officials could escape the coastal heat. The village at the top copies that period rather than inventing something new.
The Golden Bridge — opened in 2018 and photographed so widely that it changed Da Nang's tourism overnight. The hands are steel frames covered in moulded fibreglass, aged deliberately to look like weathered stone.
A slow morning by the sea, then a short drive down to Hoi An. On the way you stop at the coconut palm water village and climb into a thung chai — a round bamboo basket boat that spins in circles until you get used to it. The rowers show off by whirling them on the spot while music plays. In the evening you walk into the old town, and this is the part people remember. Silk lanterns hang across every lane in yellow, red and orange, the light doubles in the river, and children sell paper candles to float on the water.
Hoi An — a working trading port from the 15th to the 19th century, where Japanese, Chinese, Indian and Dutch merchants all did business. It survived because the river silted up and trade moved to Da Nang, leaving the old town untouched.
The basket boats — local story says they appeared when the French taxed boats, so fishermen built round bamboo ones and called them baskets. They are still used for real fishing today.
You fly north to Hanoi and the weather changes with you — cooler, greyer, and older-feeling. The Old Quarter is a maze of narrow streets where each lane historically sold one thing, and many still do. In the afternoon you walk to Train Street, a lane so tight that cafés put stools right against the rails and pull them in minutes before a train squeezes past. The evening ends at Hoan Kiem Lake, where families walk laps, old men play chess on the pavement, and a red bridge leads to a small temple on an island.
The Old Quarter — laid out over 600 years ago with each street given to one guild, which is why you still find a silk street, a tin street and a paper street. The names never changed.
Hoan Kiem Lake — the name means Lake of the Returned Sword, from the legend of a king who received a magic sword to drive out invaders and gave it back to a turtle in these waters.
The drive out to the coast takes around two and a half hours, and then you board the cruise. Halong Bay does not really look real when you first see it — grey limestone towers rising straight out of green water, hundreds of them, going on past the horizon. You sail between them for the day, stop to kayak into a lagoon reachable only through a low rock arch, and climb up into a cave whose chambers open out far bigger than the entrance suggests. Lunch is served on board while the boat keeps moving.
Halong Bay — made a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1994, with roughly 1,600 limestone islands formed over 500 million years. The name means descending dragon, from a legend of dragons sent to defend the coast.
The caves — carved out by water when sea levels were far lower. Some were used as hiding places and field hospitals during wartime.
Breakfast, check out, and a transfer to Noi Bai airport, about 45 minutes from the Old Quarter. If your flight is late, spend the last hours in the Old Quarter buying coffee to take home — the robusta here is strong and cheap, and a metal filter costs almost nothing. Weasel coffee, egg coffee sachets and lotus tea all travel well and cost a fraction of what they do in India.
Vietnamese coffee — the country is the world's second largest coffee producer and the largest grower of robusta. That is why the coffee here tastes stronger and more bitter than what you get at home.
Eight days covers the country end to end, which means two internal flights and some early mornings. If you would rather go slower and drop one city, or add Sapa or Phu Quoc, send us your dates and we will rebuild it.
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It is a 7N | 8D trip with a 9-day itinerary. The full day-by-day plan is in the Itinerary above, and we can shorten or extend it to fit your dates.
This package includes Return international and domestic flights up to INR 32,000, subject to availability, 2 nights in Ho Chi Minh City, 2 nights in Da Nang at a beachside property, 1 night in Hoi An at a resort, and more — see the full Inclusions list above. Flights and visas are quoted separately unless stated.
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