Vietnam

Two nights at the Metropole to land properly: the Old Quarter's guild streets with a resident historian, Hoan Kiem at the slow hour, and an evening street food circuit where the guide orders and you eat. The city is the softest possible introduction to the north's appetite for life outdoors, on plastic stools, at all hours.

Hanoi · 2 nights · Private arrival transfer · The landing

A travelling day, declared as one: six hours north as the delta gives way to hills and the hills to real mountains, rice terraces stacked to the ridgelines and buffalo setting the pace through the villages. P'apiu waits at the end, a hideaway with a single valley to itself, where the evening is a fire, the terrace, and the sound of nothing much at all.

The high country · 1 of 3 nights · Private car (6 hrs, broken well) · The one long road

Two days on the great loop with a local guide who grew up on it: the Quan Ba twin hills, stone forests, and the Ma Pi Leng pass, where the road hangs above the Nho Que river's jade gorge. You go down to the water too, by boat between cliffs four hundred metres high. Between the set pieces are the villages, Hmong and Tay hamlets where the terraces are still cut by hand, and, if the calendar is kind, a highland market where the hills come down to trade everything from indigo cloth to buffalo.

The high country · 2 & 3 of 3 nights · The loop by car and boat · The reason you came north

The long descent back through the hills is the journey's second declared travelling day, softened by the fact that what waits at the end is your own boat. A private charter does not sail on a schedule; it sails when you arrive. By late afternoon you are on the water in Lan Ha, and by dusk at a silent anchorage among the karsts, dinner cooked from the morning's catch.

Lan Ha Bay · 1 of 2 nights · Private car, then aboard · The reward

A full day in the quieter bay: kayaking through tunnels in the karst at dawn, the floating fishing villages, a swim off the back deck, and the particular luxury of a route decided over breakfast rather than printed in advance. Lan Ha carries the same geology as Halong with a fraction of the boats.

Lan Ha Bay · 2 of 2 nights · Aboard · Yours

A slow morning on the water, then the expressway back to Hanoi's airport, met and walked through to the international departure. The far north, the high road and the quiet bay, in eight days that never once queued.

Lan Ha Bay · Expressway (2.5 hrs) · Met throughout · A quiet close