Classic North Vietnam 5 Days

Arriving at Noi Bai airport in Hanoi at 07:30 am, you’ll be met and driven to city centre.

The guide will take you to a well-known “Pho” restaurant for your breakfast (your own expenses).

You’ll explore Vietnam’s capital city. Your guide will take you to the Temple of Literature, the first university in Vietnam dating back to the 11th century. The excellent Ethnology Museum gives you an overview of Vietnam’s 54 distinct ethnic groups, their life, culture and traditional costumes.

After lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant, you will check in the hotel. Continue to the Hoa Lo Prison – better known by captured US pilots as the ‘Hanoi Hilton’. Late afternoon, you explore the train tracks on Phung Hung Street. You can see how the locals people live and earn living just a few centimeters from the railway tracks, in tall and narrow houses.

Evening free for relaxing and leisure - you may stroll around the Old Quarter, a maze of shopping streets and a hotchpotch of architecture - traditional tube houses, religious buildings, artisans’ workshops and cottages, colonial houses and modern concrete edifices. Overnight in Hanoi.

After an early breakfast, you’ll leave for Ha Long Bay, one of the most spectacular UNESCO World Heritage Areas and the world’s largest marine limestone ‘karst’ landscape. There you’ll board a traditional-style boat for four-hour cruise on the bay to visit some of the popular grottoes and caves. You’ll be served a seafood lunch on the boat. In the late afternoon, you’ll return to Hanoi for your overnight accommodation.

After an early breakfast, you’ll be driven to Sapa on the new highway through Yen Bai and Lao Cai provinces in 5.5 hours. The highway takes you up the Red River Delta to where the river enters Vietnam at Lao Cai City on the border with China. After break en-route, you will reach Sapa, a small town perched on the mountainside opposite Mt. Fan Si Pan, Vietnam’s highest peak.

You will have lunch and check in your hotel, then you’ll be transferred to Muong Hoa Valley cable car station to start an amazing journey to the top of Fansipan, the rooftop of Indochina. You have the whole afternoon on Fansipan Mountain and experience the funicular up to the peak of Fansipan. The route of this funicular is sinuous in arch shape and passes a tunnel near the Great Buddha Statue, which thus engenders some anxiety offset with excitement over height differences and utmost delight in the panoramic view of the scenery of the Fansipan.

Later, you take the cable car again back to central Sapa. Overnight in Sapa.

During November 7th to December 5th, the cable car Fansipan and funicular train up to Fansipan peak (by SunWorld group) will be suspended for warranty and maintenance. So we replace Fansipan by hiking villages in Sapa or Infinity Garden

You’ll walk to Ham Rong and climb the Ham Rong mountain. Located right behind the Sapa Church, the mountain has a shape like a dragon holding its head up towards the sky and is fine combination of man-made and natural landscape. Ham Rong Flower Garden is a worthy visit with bright-colored flowers in the foggy air and sweet fragrances.

Alternative for morning: You’ll walk to Cat Cat, an H’mong ethnic village in a scenic valley. You will see the beautiful sceneries and local life in the village, with a change to enjoy a local dance and folk song while you are in the village.

Return to your hotel and check out then lunch in local restaurant.

You leave Sapa and drive again on the highway, back to Hanoi for overnight stay. Arrive Hanoi after 07:00 PM, free on your own.

At 05:15 am, you take the take-away breakfast box from the hotel and hop the vehicle to Noi Bai airport for your international departure flight.

Check-in time at hotel: 14.00 // Check-out time: 12.00