6-Day Hanoi Itinerary — Ninh Binh, the Perfume Pagoda & Bat Trang

Bach Ma Temple

📍 76 Hang Buom, Old Quarter

The oldest temple inside the Old Quarter, founded in the 11th century for the white horse that showed Ly Thai To where the citadel walls would hold. Dark timber, a red palanquin, and almost nobody in it.

O Quan Chuong

📍 Dong Ha Gate, Hang Chieu

The last of the sixteen gates of the old walled city, built in 1749 and still standing over a working street. Traffic pours through the arch exactly as it has for 275 years.

Hang Ma Street

📍 Old Quarter

The paper street — votive offerings, lanterns and festival decorations, restocked entirely for each holiday. Come near Mid-Autumn or Tet and the whole lane turns red and gold.

Cha Ca Thang Long

📍 19-21-31 Duong Thanh

One dish only: turmeric-marinated fish finished at your table over a charcoal burner with dill and spring onion, over rice noodles with peanuts and fermented shrimp paste. Order it and stop reading the menu.

Hanoi Ceramic Mosaic Mural

📍 Yen Phu, Tran Nhat Duat dyke road

Four kilometres of ceramic mosaic along the Red River dyke wall, laid for the city's 1,000th anniversary in 2010 and once the longest in the world. Walk a stretch of it, not all of it.

Long Bien Bridge

📍 Red River, Hoan Kiem / Long Bien

Designed by the Daydé & Pillé firm and opened in 1902, bombed repeatedly in the war and patched rather than replaced — you can read the repairs in the steel. Walk the pedestrian lane at sunset while the trains still run down the middle.

Hoa Lu Ancient Capital

📍 Truong Yen, Hoa Lu

Vietnam's capital in the 10th and 11th centuries, before Thang Long. Two small temples remain, to Dinh Tien Hoang and Le Dai Hanh, ringed by the limestone walls that made this a defensible seat in the first place.

Trang An Scenic Landscape Complex

📍 Ninh Xuan, Hoa Lu

The UNESCO site, and the reason to come. Three hours in a rowed sampan through nine flooded caves — some so low you lie back — between karst towers. Route 1 is the classic; Route 3 takes in the Kong: Skull Island film set.

Mua Cave

📍 Hung Thi, Hoa Lu

Five hundred stone steps up a limestone spur to a dragon statue on the ridge. The view down over the Tam Coc river bends is the single best panorama in northern Vietnam — go up in the cooler part of the afternoon.

Bich Dong Pagoda

📍 Ninh Hai, Hoa Lu

A three-level pagoda built into a cliff face in 1428, reached over a stone bridge across a lotus pond. Climb through the middle cave to the upper level for the valley view.

Tam Coc

📍 Ninh Hai, Hoa Lu

The 'three caves' stretch of the Ngo Dong river, rowed by boatwomen who famously use their feet. Late May to early June the paddies on both banks turn gold — the best two weeks of the year to be here.

Vietnam Museum of Ethnology

📍 Nguyen Van Huyen, Cau Giay

The most substantial museum in the country and the one most visitors skip because it is 7km out. All 54 ethnic groups, and an outdoor park of full-scale reconstructed houses — including a Bahnar communal house you climb into.

Vietnam Fine Arts Museum

📍 66 Nguyen Thai Hoc, Ba Dinh

Colonial building, superb collection: Champa stone, folk woodblock prints, and the lacquer and silk painting that is Vietnam's real contribution to 20th-century art. Quiet on weekday mornings.

Huu Tiep Lake

📍 Ngoc Ha, Ba Dinh

A B-52 shot down in December 1972 still lies in a small residential pond, tail and undercarriage above the water, with houses built right up to the edge. Signposted from Hoang Hoa Tham but easy to miss.

Quan Thanh Temple

📍 Quan Thanh, Ba Dinh

An 11th-century Taoist temple holding a four-metre black bronze statue of Tran Vu cast in 1677 — nearly four tonnes of it. On the corner where West Lake meets Truc Bach.

Phu Tay Ho

📍 Quang An, Tay Ho

The temple to the mother goddess Lieu Hanh, on a spit of land in West Lake. Busiest on the first and fifteenth of the lunar month, when the queue for offerings runs down the lane of banh tom stalls. The Trinh Cong Son walking street a few minutes away runs Friday to Sunday evenings.

Nhat Tan Bridge

📍 Nhat Tan, Tay Ho

The cable-stayed bridge over the Red River, opened in 2015, with five spans standing for Hanoi's five old gates. The cables are floodlit and change colour after dark — the one piece of modern Hanoi worth crossing town for.

Bat Trang Ceramic Village

📍 Bat Trang, Gia Lam

Seven hundred years of pottery, 13km southeast across the Red River. The old lanes behind the market are where the kilns still are — and you can throw and fire your own piece for the price of a coffee.

Bat Trang Pottery Museum

📍 Bat Trang, Gia Lam

The seven-storey building of curved brick spirals modelled on a potter's wheel, opened 2021. Worth it for the architecture alone; the top-floor terrace looks over the whole village.

But Thap Pagoda

📍 Dinh To, Thuan Thanh, Bac Ninh

A 17th-century pagoda holding the finest wooden sculpture in Vietnam: a thousand-armed, thousand-eyed Quan Am carved in 1656, over three metres tall. Almost no tour buses come here, and the nearby Dau pagoda is held to be the oldest Buddhist site in the country.

Dong Ho Painting Village

📍 Song Ho, Thuan Thanh, Bac Ninh

Woodblock folk prints on do paper sized with crushed scallop shell, printed one colour per block. Two families still practise it; the workshops will run a block through for you, and it is a twenty-minute drive back to the river road for Hanoi.

Thien Tru Pagoda

📍 Huong Son, My Duc

'Kitchen of Heaven', the main complex at the top of the landing steps. Getting here is half the day: two hours southwest to Ben Duc wharf, then an hour rowed up the Yen stream between rice paddies and limestone hills. Buy the combined boat and entrance ticket at the wharf.

Giai Oan Pagoda

📍 Huong Son, My Duc

Halfway up the mountain path, built around a spring where Quan Am is said to have bathed. Pilgrims stop to wash and to be absolved — the name means 'unjust suffering undone'. There is a cable car if the climb is too much.

Perfume Pagoda

📍 Huong Son, My Duc

The destination: the Huong Tich cave shrine, reached by 120 stone steps down into a vast mouth in the mountain, carved in 1770 with the words 'the finest cave under the southern sky'. Stalactites blackened by three centuries of incense.

Quan Son Lake

📍 Hop Tien, My Duc

Twenty minutes north and almost unvisited: a shallow lake studded with a hundred limestone outcrops, rowed in a flat boat through lotus beds. Locals call it the Ha Long Bay of Hanoi and on a weekday you will have it to yourself.

Duong Lam Ancient Village

📍 Duong Lam, Son Tay

The first village in Vietnam listed as a national heritage site. Nearly a thousand houses built from laterite blocks and mud, some 400 years old, along lanes too narrow for cars — and it is still farmed, not staged.

Mong Phu Communal House

📍 Mong Phu, Duong Lam, Son Tay

The village's 17th-century dinh at the centre of Mong Phu hamlet, on a raised platform with a tiled roof that sweeps almost to the ground. The Mia pagoda a few lanes away holds 287 statues, the largest collection in the country.

Thay Pagoda

📍 Sai Son, Quoc Oai

An 11th-century pagoda on a pond with a water-puppet stage built out over it — this is where the art form is said to have started. Two covered bridges by the 17th-century poet Phung Khac Khoan flank the water.

Tay Phuong Pagoda

📍 Thach Xa, Thach That

Two hundred and thirty-nine laterite steps up a hill shaped like a buffalo, to three halls of dark ironwood. The 18 arhat statues here are the most famous wooden sculptures in Vietnam — gaunt, individual, unmistakably portraits.

Ba Vi National Park

📍 Tan Linh, Ba Vi

Cloud forest an hour further west, with the ruins of a French hilltop settlement — a church and a sanatorium — being taken back by roots. The road climbs to a temple to Ho Chi Minh at 1,296m.