Top 10 Things to Do in Hanoi | Get Lost in the Old Quarter

The best hour is half past five

Hanoi's best activity is getting lost on purpose and its best hour is before dawn. Neither is on a tour brochure, which tells you most of what you need to know about this city. Ask us about Vietnam.

The ten

1. Hoan Kiem Lake at half past five in the morning

Set an alarm. This is the most charming thing in Hanoi and it is free.

Hundreds of people around the lake in the half-light: tai chi, badminton, aerobics, running, stretching, an entire city exercising before work. It goes on for about an hour and then it dissolves and the traffic starts.

Almost no visitor sees it, because almost no visitor sets an alarm on holiday.

2. The Old Quarter, lost, for three days

Not a sight. A place.

A thousand-year-old grid of trade streets, and the striking thing is that most are still named for the single trade that has occupied them for centuries. Hàng Bạc was silver. Hàng Mã was paper goods, and it still is, so an entire street glows with red and gold votive paper. Hàng Thiếc was tinsmiths, and men are still hammering metal in doorways.

The specialisation survived the war, the French, socialism and tourism. It is genuinely medieval urbanism still functioning, and the way to experience it is to have no plan.

3. Bia hơi on a plastic stool

Fresh draught beer, brewed daily and drunk the same day, sold on street corners at a price that is essentially a rounding error, on a stool the size of a child's chair.

It is not a great beer. It is a great institution, and it is where you watch the street.

4. Bún chả for lunch

The Hanoi dish. Grilled pork in a bowl of dipping broth, cold rice noodles, herbs, and you assemble each mouthful yourself.

Lunch, not dinner. It is not served in the evening at the places worth going to. Compare Hanoi food tours on Viator.

5. Egg coffee

A Hanoi invention and not a gimmick. Yolk whipped with condensed milk into a warm custard on top of strong coffee, invented when milk was hard to get.

Somewhere between a drink and a dessert, and one of the few things you genuinely cannot get properly outside this city.

6. The water puppet theatre

It sounds like a tourist trap and it is not.

A genuinely ancient northern Vietnamese art form performed in a pool with a live orchestra, about an hour, and it is delightful. One of the very few staged things we recommend without qualification. Find water puppet tickets on Klook.

7. The Temple of Literature

Vietnam's first university, nine hundred years old: courtyards, and stelae carried on stone tortoises listing the names of graduates.

Calm, beautiful, an hour, and a genuine relief from the street.

8. Hoa Lo Prison

What American prisoners called the Hanoi Hilton. Uncomfortable, one-sided, and absolutely worth ninety minutes, if only because you are hearing the other side of a story most Australians only know one version of.

9. The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum

A serious place, treated seriously. He is there, embalmed, guarded, and the queue is silent and long. Rules on dress and behaviour are enforced without negotiation, and it closes for a period each year for maintenance.

Whatever your politics, it tells you something no museum will.

10. Ha Long Bay, overnight

See below, because this is the one people get wrong.

Ha Long needs a night, not a day

The strongest recommendation on this page.

The day trip is roughly four hours of bus, four hours of bay, four hours of bus, in a convoy with everyone else's day trip.

The bay's best hours are the early morning, before the sun burns off the mist, and the evening after the day boats have gone back. You cannot see either of those from a day trip.

That is not a small distinction. It is the whole difference between a nice photograph and the reason people go.

One night on a decent boat. Two if you want to reach the quieter parts, and consider Lan Ha Bay or Bai Tu Long, which are the same karst landscape with fewer vessels in it.

The honest caveat our Hanoi travel guide also makes: the bay is weather-dependent in a way brochures do not admit. In winter it can be flat grey fog, which is atmospheric if you decide it is and disappointing if you were expecting the postcard.

How to cross the road

Everyone writes about this and everyone is right, so here it is properly.

There are a great many motorbikes and they do not stop. What they do is flow, and flow works on prediction.

So: step off the kerb, walk at a constant speed, do not run, do not stop, do not change your mind halfway across, do not make eye contact and dither. The bikes will calculate where you will be and go around you.

The people who get into trouble are the ones who bolt or freeze in the middle, because both make them unpredictable.

It feels completely insane for about ten minutes and then it feels obvious, and by the end of the trip you will be doing it while looking at your phone, which is when it is time to go home.

Pack a jacket, and we mean it

The thing that ruins the most trips here and it has nothing to do with the list above.

Northern Vietnam is not tropical. Hanoi sits far enough north to have a genuine winter, and from roughly December to February it can be properly cold and damp, with a grey lid on the sky that does not lift for days.

Australians consistently arrive having packed for Bali, because South East Asia is filed in our heads as one climate. It is not. Ha Long Bay in February can be fog and grey water.

None of this is a reason to avoid winter, which has its own atmosphere and much thinner crowds. It is a reason to know.

And the visa, before anything

Not a things-to-do matter and the most important thing on any Vietnam page.

Australians generally need a visa arranged before you fly, most commonly the e-visa online. Vietnam does not wave us through on arrival the way much of the region does, and the airline checks it at Sydney check-in. You do not board without it.

Our flights to Vietnam page repeats this because it is worth repeating.

A note on Train Street

It has been repeatedly closed and reopened for safety reasons.

Check what the situation actually is when you are there rather than assuming, and if it is closed, respect that rather than finding the cafe that will sneak you in past a barrier. It is a railway with a train on it.

Booking notes

Prices shown by our partners are live and in your choice of currency, most activities confirm instantly, and free cancellation windows are stated on each listing. Very little in Hanoi needs advance booking: the lake, the Old Quarter, the stools and the coffee are simply there. The exceptions worth arranging are a Ha Long overnight, which is the one thing on this page that genuinely benefits from being chosen carefully rather than bought at a shopfront.

The construction worth asking about is the open jaw: into Hanoi and home from Saigon, so you never backtrack. Get a free Vietnam quote.