Day Trips from Hanoi: Ninh Binh, Ha Long and the Craft Villages

Hanoi is unusually well placed for day trips, and the mistake is attempting the ones that are really overnight trips.

Ninh Binh is the best of them by a distance. Limestone karsts identical in geology to Ha Long's, seen from a small rowing boat on a river, with Mua Cave's staircase for the view over the whole valley. Two hours each way, and a full day is genuinely enough.

Ha Long works as a day trip but gives up the part worth having, which is the hours either side of the day fleet.

Sapa does not work as a day trip in any form. Five to six hours each way means ten to twelve hours in a seat for a few hours in the hills. Anyone selling it as one is selling a bus ride.

Within an hour of the city there are villages that have made one thing for centuries: Bat Trang for ceramics, Van Phuc for silk, Quang Phu Cau for the incense sticks that photograph as fields of red.

These are working places rather than exhibits, which is the appeal and also the caveat: there is no performance laid on and a village that is having a quiet day is having a quiet day.

They suit a half day rather than a full one, and they pair well with a late afternoon back in the Old Quarter.

Almost every day trip quotes driving time from the edge of Hanoi, not from your hotel.

A shared tour collects from several hotels first, which adds close to an hour at the start and a slower drop-off at the end. On a Ninh Binh day that turns a nine-hour itinerary into eleven.

A private transfer removes it. On anything two people or more it is usually the best-value change you can make to a day trip, and it also means you leave when the light is still good rather than when the last hotel has been collected.