Twelve days in Vietnam: four cities, one sleeper train and a short flight south

Land, drop the bags and walk to the lake, which is the fastest way to work out where you are.

Hoan Kiem is small enough to circle in half an hour and is the city's front room: tai chi at six in the morning, courting couples at six in the evening, and closed roads and street games at the weekend. Its name means the Lake of the Returned Sword, after the legend that Le Loi, who drove the Ming out in 1428, was lent a magic blade by a golden turtle and gave it back here afterwards.

The temple on the island is a five minute visit with a preserved giant softshell turtle from the lake in a case, which sounds macabre and is oddly moving. Then eat bun cha, which is Hanoi's dish and which no other city gets quite right.

An early start, because the mausoleum shuts before lunch and is closed on Mondays and Fridays.

The rules are enforced at the gate: knees and shoulders covered, no bags, no cameras, no talking, hands out of pockets. You file past the body in about a minute, in silence, between soldiers. Whatever you think of it, it is a short, strange and genuinely memorable thing to have done.

The exit puts you into the garden compound behind the old governor-general's mansion, where Ho Chi Minh lived from 1954 until his death in 1969. He would not use the mansion, which the French built in 1906, and had a small house and then a wooden stilt house put up in the garden instead. The point is made with some care.

The citadel is a short ride away and takes an afternoon: an archaeological site rather than a rebuilt palace, with a thousand years of foundations, a flag tower and the concrete bunker from which the north ran its air defence during the American bombing.

Check out, leave the bags at reception, and use the day properly. The train south does not leave until the evening.

The Temple of Literature was founded in 1070 as a Confucian temple and became Vietnam's first university six years later. Five walled courtyards run back from the gate, and the third holds the stelae: stone tablets carried on the backs of tortoises and carved with the names of the men who passed the doctoral examinations from the fifteenth century onward. Go at opening.

Hoa Lo is the other kind of morning. The French built it around 1900 for Vietnamese political prisoners and about two thirds of it was pulled down in the 1990s for an office tower. What is left covers the colonial years in unsparing detail, including the guillotine, and then the American pilots held here from 1964, whose section is presented as a story of hospitality and does not match the accounts the prisoners gave.

Finish at the cathedral, have an early dinner, and be at the station half an hour before departure. The sleeper is your bed for the night.

The train arrives mid-morning. Drop the bags on the south bank, where nearly all the hotels are, eat a bowl of bun bo Hue, and cross the river in the early afternoon.

The Imperial City is a walled enclosure inside the much larger citadel, entered under the Ngo Mon gate where the emperor watched ceremonies from a pavilion on top. Inside are the Thai Hoa audience hall with its red and gold columns, the nine dynastic urns cast in the 1830s, the mandarins' halls and a restored royal theatre. In the middle is the Forbidden Purple City, where the emperor lived, which is now grass and foundations after 1968. Standing in that empty rectangle is the part of the day people remember.

The royal fine arts museum next door holds what came out of those buildings: court robes, sedan chairs, enamelled porcelain and lacquer. Half an hour, and it repopulates the empty rooms.

Hire a car and driver for the day. The tombs are four to ten kilometres out along the river and each is a separate estate with its own gate, so two of them is the right number and three turns the day into driving.

Tu Duc built his between 1864 and 1867 and used it while he was alive: fifty buildings around a lotus lake, a pavilion he wrote poetry in, a theatre, and a stele he composed himself listing his own failures as a ruler. He is not buried there. The real grave was hidden and the men who dug it were killed to keep the secret.

Khai Dinh's, further out and up a hillside, is the opposite. Built in the 1920s in blackened reinforced concrete, it looks grim from the steps and then opens into a chamber covered floor to ceiling in dragons and flowers made of broken glass and porcelain. People either love it or find it vulgar, and both reactions are reasonable.

Finish at Thien Mu, on a bluff over the Perfume River, whose seven-tiered tower is the emblem of the city. Behind it is a working monastery and a garage, and in the garage is the Austin that carried Thich Quang Duc to Saigon in 1963, where he sat down in the road and set himself on fire.

Leave Hue after breakfast by car and go over the top rather than through the tunnel. It is about 130 km and takes most of the morning if you stop.

The road climbs from the Lang Co lagoon to a saddle at the top where French and later American bunkers still sit in the scrub, and on a clear day you can see the coast in both directions from it. It is genuinely one of the great short drives in Asia, and the tunnel underneath saves forty minutes and shows you concrete.

Arrive in Hoi An for a late lunch, then buy the old-town ticket and use the first afternoon on two things rather than five. The covered bridge at the western end was built by the Japanese community here in the early 1600s, shortly before the shogunate called them all home; it has a small temple set into its side and it is on the twenty thousand dong note. A restoration finished in 2024 left it looking startlingly new.

The Fujian assembly hall on Tran Phu is the grandest of the Chinese halls, built in 1757 and dedicated to the sea goddess who looks after sailors, with coils of incense burning under the roof for weeks at a time.

A full day north to Da Nang. Take a car for the day; it is 30 km on a flat, quick road.

The Marble Mountains are five limestone outcrops standing out of the sand halfway there, named for the five elements. Thuy Son is the one you climb, and it is full of caves with Buddhist shrines built into them, including one enormous chamber where a hole in the roof drops a shaft of light onto the altar. There is a lift if the steps do not appeal, and no shade at the top.

The Museum of Cham Sculpture was founded in 1915 by the French archaeological school and holds the best collection of Cham stonework anywhere: sandstone altars, dancing figures, elephant-headed gods, all salvaged from temple sites across the middle of the country. An hour, and it makes sense of ruins you will otherwise walk past.

Stay for the evening. The Dragon Bridge over the Han river is a road bridge shaped like a dragon, lit in changing colours nightly, and at the weekend it breathes fire and then sprays the crowd with water.

Be out by half past seven, when the old town belongs to the people who live in it and the coaches have not arrived.

Tan Ky has been in the same family for seven generations: Japanese roof beams, Chinese poems inlaid in mother of pearl, and flood marks up the wall of the back room well above head height. A family member walks you round in a quarter of an hour and hopes for a tip. Quan Cong Temple, at the eastern end of Tran Phu opposite the market, has a courtyard, a carp pond and a fierce red-faced statue of a Chinese general venerated for loyalty.

Then take a bicycle to the sea. An Bang is four kilometres north on flat lanes through paddy fields, about twenty minutes, and the restaurants along the sand will lend you a lounger if you eat something. Spend the afternoon there and cycle back for the lanterns.

Fly from Da Nang. It is 45 minutes to the airport from Hoi An and a little over an hour of flying, so a late morning departure puts you in District 1 by the middle of the afternoon.

Saigon will feel like a different country, and in a sense it was one until 1975. It is bigger, hotter, louder and much more commercial than anywhere you have been so far, and the first evening is best spent getting the measure of it from above and then from the street.

The Skydeck on the 49th floor of the tower with the helipad stuck to its side is open late; go about an hour before sunset. Then walk Nguyen Hue, the pedestrian boulevard running from the old town hall down to the river, which fills every evening with skateboarders, wedding photographers, families and coffee carts.

A hard morning, and worth taking in this order because the palace makes far more sense after the museum.

The War Remnants Museum opened within months of the fall of Saigon and has never pretended to be neutral. Three floors cover the French war, the American one, the chemical defoliants and their effects on later generations, and the photographers killed covering all of it. Captured tanks, jets and a helicopter sit in the courtyard. The Agent Orange rooms are genuinely hard to be in.

Independence Palace is ten minutes away on foot and is the other half of the story. Built between 1962 and 1966 for the president of South Vietnam, it is kept as it stood on 30 April 1975 when a northern tank came through the gates: gold and lacquer reception rooms upstairs, a war room and a bunker of radio sets in the basement.

Finish at the cathedral and the post office opposite it, the most photographed corner of the city and, after that morning, a relief.

The older, quieter city, north east first and back to the market at the end.

The Jade Emperor Pagoda was built by Cantonese immigrants in 1909 and is the best temple in central Saigon: low, dark, thick with smoke and crowded with carved wooden gods, generals and the guardians of the underworld. There is a pond of turtles outside and almost no floor space inside. Shoes off, camera down when people are praying.

The history museum is a short ride south, at the gate of the botanical gardens, and runs from the bronze drums through Cham sculpture to the Nguyen dynasty. The Cham carving is what people remember, and the gardens next door are somewhere shaded to sit afterwards.

Then Ben Thanh in the late afternoon. The market hall dates from 1914 and the clock tower is the city's usual meeting point. Inside it is touristy and the haggling is relentless, but the food counters are good and the streets around it turn into an open-air kitchen once the stalls shut.

Nothing that needs a taxi until the last one. Tan Son Nhat is only about 7 km out, but the road to it is unpredictable, so allow far more time than the distance suggests.

The Fine Arts Museum is as much about the building as the pictures: a 1930s mansion built for a Chinese-Vietnamese merchant family, with tiled floors, stained glass, a courtyard and an antique cage lift. The collection runs from Cham stonework through lacquer and silk painting to the propaganda art of the war years, which is more interesting than it sounds.

Then a last iced coffee. The old apartment block at 42 Nguyen Hue has independent cafes on every floor and balconies looking down the boulevard, and ca phe sua da, poured over condensed milk, is the correct order for a departure morning.