Two Weeks in Vietnam: Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, Hue & Hoi An

By Diego

Diego is an AI-generated character, and the photos in this post are AI-generated too. This trip is fictional, but the prices, routes, and logistics are modeled on how real budget travelers do Vietnam. For Ryan’s real trips, see Field Notes.

Prices below were accurate as of October 2026. Verify current details before booking, as these change.

Golden hour on the sundeck. The spreadsheet said no. The spreadsheet was wrong. (AI-generated image)

Hey. Diego here. Twenty-seven, Houston-born, currently living out of a backpack and trying to make “travel content creator” a job title my mom can explain to her friends. Update: she’s stopped saying “he’s on the YouTube” and upgraded to “my son, the journalist,” which is somehow worse. Progress is progress.

So. Bangkok was last week: temples, the 20-baht train, a rooftop pool I defended with my whole chest. This time: Vietnam. Two full weeks, north to central, and a plot twist I did not see coming, which is that I made friends. Real ones. Against my will, at first.

It started in seat 24B.

The middle seat

The flight from Bangkok to Hanoi was two hours, and I was in the middle seat between a sunburned Australian guy whose knees were in my personal space before we’d even pushed back, and a German girl reading a Murakami novel over my shoulder like the armrest was a suggestion.

By the time we landed, I knew everything. The Australian is Jack: 22, just graduated uni in Brisbane, doing the classic Southeast Asia loop before “real life starts,” a phrase he said with visible terror. The German is Lena: 24, from Berlin, a graphic designer on a three-month sabbatical, shooting the whole trip on a film camera, with the driest humor I’ve encountered since... me. Within ten minutes Jack had invited us both to his hostel. Within twenty, Lena had quietly corrected his pronunciation of “phở” twice. I was supposed to be a lone wolf this trip. The universe had other plans.

Here’s the thing about backpacking: you don’t find your people. Your people find you, usually in a hostel dorm, and then you can’t get rid of them. This is the story of two weeks with Jack and Lena, not every day, just the parts that mattered.

On this page

• Hanoi: the beautiful chaos

• Ha Long Bay: the splurge

• Ninh Binh: Ha Long Bay on land

• Hue: the quiet middle

• Hoi An: the pretty one

• What the trio taught me

• Diego’s Vietnam playbook

Hanoi: the beautiful chaos

Hanoi hits you like a wall of sound and exhaust and possibility. The Old Quarter is 36 streets of organized chaos, with motorbikes flowing like water around pedestrians who’ve learned the golden rule: walk slow, walk straight, never flinch. I taught Jack this in the first hour. He flinched for two days. (He’s fine now. Mostly.)

We all ended up at the same hostel off Tạ Hiện: dorm beds around eight bucks, rooftop bar, the kind of place where the staff learn your name by dinner. This is the backpacker gravity well: once you’re in the same dorm, you’re a unit. Resistance is futile.

The food. Hanoi is the best food city I’ve done on this whole Asia run, and I say that as someone who just spent six days in Bangkok. The hits:

• Bún chả at Hương Liên: yes, the Obama place, and yes, it’s touristy now, and no, I don’t care, because the pork patties over rice noodles with the dipping broth are perfect. About 60,000 dong. That’s roughly two-fifty.

• Phở on Bat Dan street at 7 a.m., eaten on a plastic stool the size of a coffee mug, broth so clear and rich it should be illegal. 50,000 dong.

• Egg coffee (cà phê trứng) at Giang Cafe, where it was invented: thick, sweet, drunk in a tiny alley cafe that feels like a secret. 30,000 dong. Lena, who “doesn’t drink coffee,” had two.

• Banh mi from a cart near Hoan Kiem Lake, 25,000 dong, eaten while watching old men play chess and teenagers do aerobics at dawn. Hanoi mornings are a whole thing: the lake at 6 a.m. is tai chi, badminton, and a hundred aunties power-walking in visors. Go once. Thank me later.

My Vietnamese lasted eleven seconds. Vietnamese has six tones, which means the same syllable can mean six different things depending on your pitch. I tried to compliment a vendor’s spring rolls (beautiful) and the entire stall went silent. Lena, without looking up from her camera, said “you just said something about a ghost.” I have never been corrected so efficiently in my life. From then on, I pointed at menus and smiled. Pointing is a universal language. Smiling helps.

Bia hơi corner. On our second night, Jack discovered bia hơi: fresh draft beer, brewed daily, served on plastic stools on street corners for about 5,000 dong a glass. Twenty cents. We sat on Tạ Hiện with a dozen old Vietnamese men who treated Jack like a grandson and taught him to say “một, hai, ba, dzô!” (one, two, three, cheers). Jack tried to keep up. Jack is 22 and Australian and still lost. By glass four he was telling the table about his thesis. By glass six Lena was filming him for evidence. Total damage for the three of us: less than two dollars. The hangover was free.

Train Street. The famous one: a working railway track through a residential alley, trains passing inches from people’s front doors, cafes set up along the rails. It’s touristy, it’s slightly absurd, and when the train actually comes through and everyone pulls their chairs back in unison, it’s genuinely thrilling. Go for the 3:30 or 7:30 p.m. train, buy a coffee from one of the trackside cafes, and don’t be the person who stands on the rails for a photo. (Jack was almost that person. Lena physically moved him.)

The water puppets. Okay, this one’s for the skeptics, because I was one. The Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre near Hoan Kiem Lake: puppets dancing on water, live traditional orchestra, stories about dragons and farmers, all in Vietnamese. Tickets about 100,000 dong (four bucks). Jack laughed for the entire 45 minutes. Lena cried a little at the dragon dance and blamed the humidity. I sat there grinning like an idiot. It’s touristy, it’s weird, it’s wonderful. Go.

Temple of Literature. Vietnam’s first university, founded 1070, all courtyards and stone stelae and 800-year-old trees. It’s the quietest place in the Old Quarter’s orbit, and after two days of motorbike symphony, the silence hits like a drug. Eighty thousand dong to get in. Worth it for the reset alone.

The exchange rate that broke my brain: $1 is about 25,800 dong. Everything costs thousands. You feel like a millionaire and a pauper simultaneously. I paid 15,000 dong for a beer and felt like I’d robbed the place. (That’s sixty cents. I had three. Don’t judge.)

By the end of the first few days, the trio had rituals: breakfast phở together, Lena rationing her film like a wartime general (six rolls for two weeks, so every shot had to matter), Jack saying “no worries” about things that were, in fact, worries. I started keeping count. By the end of week one we were at 112. I was supposed to be the solo guy. I was having more fun than I’d had alone in Bangkok. I filed this information away and ignored it.

Breakfast of champions: bún chả on plastic stools, Old Quarter, 7 a.m. Jack just properly trained me on how to use the chopsticks. (AI-generated image)

Paddling into the hidden lagoon. Lena went first, fearless. Jack screamed. I understood both. (AI-generated image)

Ha Long Bay: the splurge

Here’s where the budget purist in me had a full crisis. Ha Long Bay (the limestone karsts rising out of green water, the UNESCO icon, the thing on every Vietnam poster) is not a budget activity. And I didn’t do the day trip. I did the overnight cruise. Two days, one night on the water, about $110 booked through the hostel, meals included.

Jack was all in before I’d finished the sentence. Lena did the math out loud, frowned, and said “it’s the thing you go to Vietnam for.” And she was right, which was annoying, because I’d already decided to go and wanted to be the responsible one who talked them into it.

So we went. And look, I’m going to drop the budget act for one section, because some things are worth it and this is one of them.

The bus picked us up at 8 a.m. By noon we were on the water, and the karsts just... keep coming. Hundreds of them, green-topped, mist hanging between them. We kayaked into a lagoon you can only reach through a low cave: you have to time the paddle with the tide and duck. Lena went first, fearless. Jack went second and screamed. I went third and understood both of them.

Dinner on the boat, then squid fishing off the back deck at night: you dangle a line with a glowing lure and wait. Jack caught a squid the size of his thumb and celebrated like he’d won the World Cup. The crew cooked it immediately. I have eaten a lot of questionable things on this trip; squid I watched get caught ten minutes earlier is not one of them. It was perfect.

Dawn: tai chi on the sundeck at 6 a.m., the karsts pink in the morning light, a dozen hungover backpackers moving very slowly in unison. Then more kayaking, a floating village, and the bus back to Hanoi by late afternoon.

On the bus back, sunburned and quiet, Jack said “best two days of the trip so far” and nobody argued. Sometimes the spreadsheet loses. The spreadsheet was wrong.

Five hundred steps for this. Worth every one. (AI-generated image)

Ninh Binh: Ha Long Bay on land

Two hours south of Hanoi by train (about 100,000 dong), and everyone calls it “Ha Long Bay on land”: the same limestone karsts, but rising out of rice paddies and rivers instead of the sea. We did it as an overnight, because the best hour in Ninh Binh is sunset and the day-trippers miss it.

Tam Coc. The boat ride: a tiny rowboat, a rower who rows with her feet (I am not exaggerating; she rows with her feet while eating a snack with her hands), drifting down the Ngo Dong river between karsts, through three caves. About 250,000 dong for the boat. Jack spent the whole ride trying to figure out the foot-rowing physics. Lena shot half a roll of film. I just sat there.

Mua Cave. Not a cave, a viewpoint. Five hundred steps up a limestone peak, and at the top: the whole Tam Coc valley spread below, river winding through paddies, karsts everywhere. We climbed for sunset. There were maybe thirty people up there, the light went gold, and Jack, who says “no worries” about everything, went quiet for a full five minutes. Then he said “okay, that’s the best view so far,” and Lena said “it’s the best view of the trip,” and I didn’t say anything because they were right.

That night we ate goat (Ninh Binh’s thing, dê, the local specialty) at a family restaurant by the river, and I realized we’d been traveling together for ten days and it felt like a month, in the good way.

Hue: the quiet middle

From Ninh Binh we took the overnight sleeper bus to Hue: twelve hours, about $15, in a bus with three rows of flat-ish berths where your feet go in a little cubby. Jack, who is six-foot-one, folded himself in like a deck chair and slept the entire way. Lena and I stayed up half the night talking over the hum of the engine, watching the lights of small towns slide past. Some of my favorite travel memories are just... transit, with the right person awake next to you.

Hue is Vietnam’s old imperial capital, and it’s the quiet one: no chaos like Hanoi, no postcard-perfection like Hoi An. Just history, stacked deep.

The Imperial City. Two hundred thousand dong to walk into what was once the seat of the Nguyen emperors: massive walls, moats, the Forbidden Purple City inside (mostly ruins now, bombed in the wars, being slowly restored). It’s enormous and half-empty and haunting. We spent four hours there and barely spoke.

The tombs. The emperors built themselves elaborate tomb complexes outside the city. Minh Mang’s is all lakes and pavilions, Khai Dinh’s is a fever-dream of mosaic dragons and concrete. The combo ticket covers several. We rented bicycles and rode between them, getting lost twice, finding a roadside stall selling the best bun bo Hue (the city’s signature spicy beef noodle soup) of the trip. 40,000 dong. Jack had two bowls.

Hue was where the trio got real. One night on the Perfume River, with dragon boats lit up and the city quiet, Lena told us why she actually took the sabbatical (burnout, the Berlin kind, where you don’t notice until you can’t get out of bed). Jack admitted he’s terrified of going home with no plan. I told them about my mom calling me “the journalist.” We didn’t fix anything. We just sat there. That’s the thing about two weeks with the same people: somewhere around day ten, the small talk runs out and the real talk starts. I’d travel with these two anywhere.

Hoi An: the pretty one

Hoi An after dark. Lena went silent for a full minute. Lena is never silent. (AI-generated image)

An Bang Beach: four hours of nothing. Jack read a book. Growth. (AI-generated image)

Bus from Hue to Hoi An, a few hours down the coast, through the Hai Van Pass (the Top Gear road, if you’re into that). And then: the prettiest town in Vietnam, and it isn’t close.

The Old Town is all mustard-yellow shophouses, the Japanese Covered Bridge, and at night, lanterns. Thousands of silk lanterns strung across every street, reflected in the river, boats with lanterns floating past. Lena went silent for a full minute when we turned the corner onto Bach Dang street, and Lena is never silent.

The morning market. Go at 6:30 a.m., before the tour buses. The central market is chaos in the best way: fish still flopping, herbs in mountains, old women who’ve run the same stall for forty years and will absolutely feed you something if you smile. We ate white rose dumplings (the Hoi An specialty: tiny shrimp dumplings, translucent, perfect) standing at a stall for 50,000 dong and watched the town wake up.

The lantern workshop. My one hands-on thing this trip: a lantern-making workshop in a little family shop (about 300,000 dong, two hours). You pick your silk, stretch it over the bamboo frame, glue, trim, wire. Mine is lopsided. Lena’s is perfect, obviously. She’s a designer, it would’ve been embarrassing otherwise. Jack’s looks like a jellyfish. We hung them in our hostel dorm. They’re coming home with us. Somehow.

The tailoring. Hoi An’s whole economy runs on tailors who’ll make you a custom suit in 24 hours. I don’t need a suit. I need content-creator clothes that don’t look like I sleep in hostels (I do). So I got a shirt made: picked the fabric, got measured, came back the next day for a fitting. About $30, fits like it was... well, made for me. Jack got shorts. Lena got a linen blazer she is insufferable about, in the best way.

The food, part two: cao lầu (the Hoi An-only noodle dish: thick noodles, pork, greens, made with water from one specific well, or so they claim), and banh mi from Banh Mi Phuong (the Anthony Bourdain one, still excellent, still a line). One soggy October afternoon (central Vietnam’s rainy season runs September through December, so plan accordingly) we hid in a cafe and drank our way through the rain. No notes.

An Bang Beach, twenty minutes by bike: wide, calm, cheap loungers, the South China Sea doing its thing. We went on our last full day and did absolutely nothing for four hours. Jack read a book for the first time since graduation, by his own admission. Growth.

The lantern boat. On our last night, we did the thing: a little wooden sampan on the Hoai River, the boatwoman rowing us under the lantern-lit bridges while we each released a floating lantern with a wish. About 200,000 dong for the boat, split three ways. Lena wished for something she wouldn’t tell us. Jack wished for “employment, eventually.” I wished for more weeks like this one. The lanterns floated away downstream, hundreds of them, and for about ten minutes nobody said anything. Then Jack said “no worries” and we all lost it.

Wishes released. Jack wished for “employment”, eventually. (AI-generated image)

And then it was over. Jack was heading south to Ho Chi Minh City. Lena was flying home to Berlin from Da Nang. We had dinner on our last night, the three of us at a plastic table on the sidewalk with too much food, and did the backpacker thing where you promise to visit each other’s countries and mean it completely in the moment. Lena gave me a print she’d shot of the three of us on the Ha Long Bay boat. It’s on my phone background now. Don’t tell anyone I’m sentimental.

Train Street, 3:30 p.m. Lena moved Jack off the rails. You're welcome, Jack. (AI-generated image)

What the trio taught me

I’m the solo guy. That’s my whole brand: the backpack, the spreadsheet, the “I go where I want” thing. And it’s real. I love traveling alone.

But here’s what two weeks with Jack and Lena taught me: the best moments of this trip weren’t the things I planned. They were Jack screaming off a boat deck. Lena correcting my Vietnamese. The three of us lost in the Old Quarter at midnight, laughing too hard to navigate. The night on the Perfume River when the small talk ran out. Splitting a $2 dinner three ways and somehow having more fun than the $45 hotel rooftop in Bangkok.

Traveling solo means freedom. Traveling with the right people means the stories are funnier. Turns out you can have both. You just have to say yes when the universe puts you in seat 24B.

Diego’s Vietnam playbook

• Sit in the middle seat. Okay, not literally. But say yes to the hostel dorm, the shared table, the “we’re going to Train Street, come.” The trio doesn’t happen in a private room.

• Hanoi first, always. Three full days minimum. The Old Quarter rewards wandering. No itinerary, just walk.

• Ha Long Bay overnight is worth the splurge. 2D1N cruise, ~$110 with meals, booked through your hostel. The day trip is fine; the night on the water is the thing.

• Do Ninh Binh. The day-trippers miss sunset at Mua Cave. Stay one night.

• Sleeper bus to Hue. $15, twelve hours, and the best conversations happen after midnight.

• Fly or bus to Hoi An; get the shirt made. Measured day one, fitting day two, pickup day three. Plan for it.

• Cash in small denominations. Vietnam runs on dong, and nobody can break your 500,000 note at a street cart.

• October in Hoi An means rain is possible. Central Vietnam’s rainy season runs September through December. Pack the rain shell, keep a cafe backup plan, embrace it.

Two weeks, three people, one middle seat. Vietnam, you’re chaotic and I love you. Jack, Lena: Brisbane, Berlin, I’ll be there. Eventually. When the spreadsheet allows.

— Diego

Next up: south. Ho Chi Minh City, the Mekong Delta, and whatever Jack gets us into down there. (He’s already texted twice.)