Twenty-one days from Bangkok to Hanoi: everything gets slower and better the further north you go

Older than the city around it and rebuilt on a grand scale by Rama I when he founded Bangkok. The reclining Buddha is forty six metres long with mother of pearl on the soles of its feet, and the surrounding cloisters hold a thousand more. It was Thailand's first public place of education, with the walls carved in medicine and astrology, and the massage school inside still teaches.

Four minutes across the water by ferry from Tha Tien pier for a few baht. The central prang stands about seventy metres and is covered in broken Chinese porcelain, ballast from trading junks pressed into the plaster. Climb it if the heat allows, then cross back and watch it light up from the eastern bank.

The lanes behind Tha Tien and the pier at Tha Maharaj both do riverside tables at reasonable prices. Order tom yum goong, and something grilled from the charcoal end of the kitchen.

Rama I laid it out in 1782 after moving the capital across the river, and it stayed the royal residence for the next century and a half. Inside the walls is the royal chapel with the Emerald Buddha, a jade figure under seventy centimetres high whose robes the king changes three times a year. Go to the chapel first and work backwards through the throne halls.

The lanes towards Thammasat University are full of student prices: boat noodles, khao man gai, and iced coffee served in a bag with a straw in it.

Housed in the eighteenth century Front Palace, which was the residence of the deputy king, and holding the best collection of Thai art in the country: Dvaravati stone Buddhas, Sukhothai bronzes, the royal funeral chariots in their own hall. Signage has improved and the buildings alone justify the ticket.

An artificial hill raised in the nineteenth century when a chedi collapsed and its rubble was left to grass over, with three hundred and some steps spiralling up to a golden chedi at the top. The climb is shaded and lined with bells. From the terrace you get the whole old city, and it stays open into the evening.

Six traditional teak houses bought around the country and reassembled beside a canal in 1959 by an American who had served in the OSS during the war and then rebuilt the Thai silk industry more or less by himself. He walked into the jungle in the Cameron Highlands in 1967 and was never found. Entry is by guided tour and they leave every twenty minutes.

One of the oldest and largest temples in Bangkok, with a viharn the size of an aircraft hangar and murals covering every wall of it. The red teak frame in the square outside is the Giant Swing, where until 1935 Brahmin priests swung on a plank some twenty metres up trying to catch a bag of coins in their teeth. Several died, which is why they stopped.

The road running west from the swing sells nothing but Buddhist supplies: monks' robes, alms bowls, and life sized bronze Buddhas propped on the pavement waiting for a lorry. Worth twenty minutes, then coffee in one of the shophouses at the Chinatown end.

The biggest and busiest Chinese temple in Bangkok, founded in 1871, with a century and a half of incense worked into the roof beams. Come in through the dragon gate off Charoen Krung and leave through the flower and medicine lanes on Soi Itsaranuphap, which puts you exactly where you want to be for dinner.

An hour and a quarter from Krung Thep Aphiwat, several a day, and cheap enough that the class you pick barely matters. Buy at the counter on the day. Tuk tuks wait outside Ayutthaya station and will quote a fare to any guesthouse.

The stone Buddha head held in the roots of a bodhi tree is the photograph everybody takes, and the rule is to crouch so your own head is lower than his. The rest of the compound is more interesting: the stump of what was one of the tallest prangs in the kingdom, and rows of headless seated Buddhas the Burmese decapitated for the gold.

Across the road, and the one prang here restored close to its original height, which lets you climb the steep interior stair down into the crypt. There are fifteenth century murals on the walls, and a hoard of gold regalia was taken out of it in 1957, most of it by looters before the archaeologists arrived. What was recovered is in the museum on the island.

The market on the riverside near Chao Phrom does river prawns, boat noodles and roti sai mai, sugar floss rolled in a thin pancake, which is the local speciality and sold by the bag everywhere.

The royal temple inside the palace compound, with three restored bell shaped chedis in a row holding the ashes of three fifteenth century kings. No monks ever lived here: it was the private chapel of the court, the model for the one Rama I later built inside the Grand Palace. Come at eight and the row of chedis throws long shadows west.

Next door, a modern hall around one of the largest bronze Buddhas in Thailand, cast in the fifteenth century, struck by lightning, damaged when the Burmese burned the building down, and repaired repeatedly since. The present hall dates from 1956. It is a working shrine rather than a ruin, and the contrast with everything around it is the point.

There are cafes with air conditioning along the eastern side of the island and riverside restaurants at the southern tip. Between noon and four the ruins are punishing and there is nothing to be gained by being out in them.

King Prasat Thong built it in 1630 on the west bank, in a deliberately Khmer style, and it is the most complete thing standing at Ayutthaya: a central prang with four smaller ones around it on a raised platform, ringed by chapels of headless Buddhas. It faces east across the river, so the last hour of daylight puts the sun behind you and the brick turns orange.

Around ten hours from Ayutthaya. Second class air conditioned with reserved seats is the sensible choice and needs booking a few days ahead in season. Sit on the left for the mountains after Lampang.

Chiang Mai station is a couple of kilometres east of the old city. Whatever your hotel, the food courts behind the night bazaar on Chang Klan Road are open late and do khao soi, the northern curry noodle soup with crisp noodles on top that is the one dish to eat here.

The best known temple in the city, founded in 1345, and the compound is more interesting than the main hall. Go round the back to the Wihan Lai Kham, a small wooden chapel with gold stencilling on red lacquer and some of the finest mural painting in northern Thailand, showing Lanna life in the nineteenth century in enormous domestic detail.

The stump of what was once the tallest building in the Lanna kingdom, begun in 1391 and brought down to about sixty metres by an earthquake in 1545. The Emerald Buddha, now in Bangkok, sat in the eastern niche here for eighty years. Elephants in brick hold up the base, and the scale of what is left tells you how big it was.

Khao soi is the dish and there are a dozen shops that specialise in it, most of them shut by two. Otherwise sai ua, the northern herb sausage, and nam prik ong, a tomato and pork chilli dip eaten with vegetables and pork crackling.

The oldest temple in Chiang Mai, said to date from 1296 and the founding of the city, when King Mangrai lived on the site while it was being built. It holds two small and very old Buddha images, a crystal one and a marble relief, both brought out for the April new year, and a chedi carried on the backs of fifteen stone elephants.

A shaded footpath climbing through dry forest, marked by strips of orange robe tied around trees, and used by the monks at the temple above rather than laid out for visitors. It is about an hour of steady uphill, humid, not technical, and much more pleasant than the switchbacks the trucks take. Take water and go early.

The forest temple halfway up, where the monks used to break the climb. Moss on everything, a stream running through the compound over a rock shelf, a small chedi and mosaic walls, and a terrace looking straight down over the city. Almost nobody comes here and it is the best half hour on the mountain.

Not glamorous, but the stalls at the foot of the staircase do good noodle soup and cold drinks, and you will want both before you climb the steps.

A gold chedi on a terrace at a thousand metres, founded in 1383 around a relic carried up the mountain, according to the story, by a white elephant that climbed until it died on the spot. Three hundred and six steps up a naga staircase, or a funicular for anybody who has had enough. The terrace looks out over the whole valley and the city is a grid below.

Three hours from Chiang Mai's Arcade bus terminal on Green Bus, which runs comfortable coaches with reserved seats through the day. Book online or at the counter an hour ahead.

Chalermchai Kositpipat began building it with his own money in 1997 and it is still not finished. Everything is white plaster set with mirrored glass, and you approach across a bridge over a pit of reaching hands. The murals inside include burning towers, comic book characters and a good deal of argument about the modern world. An earthquake damaged it in 2014 and it was repaired within a year.

Finished in 2016 by an artist who trained under the man who built the white one, and done entirely in cobalt and gold: blue walls, blue ceiling, blue naga at the door, and a white seated Buddha at the far end that the colour throws forward. Smaller, quieter and free, ten minutes north of the centre.

Chiang Rai's night market is small, mostly local, and has a covered food court with a stage in the middle where somebody is always singing. Northern Thai and Chinese Yunnan dishes, and no pressure to buy anything.

Forty odd buildings in dark teak, filled with animal bones, hides, carved horns and enormous tables, built over decades by the late Thawan Duchanee as house, studio and collection. It is the deliberate opposite of the white temple across town, and the two artists knew each other well. Unsettling, and much more interesting than it sounds.

A hilltop complex north of the city with a nine storey pagoda you can climb by lift, and behind it a seated white Guan Yin nearly eighty metres high with an observation room in her head. It was built by a Chinese Thai congregation and it is unlike anything else in the country. Free, and the views are the best in the province.

Chiang Rai does khao soi as well as Chiang Mai and charges half as much for it. There are also Yunnanese Chinese restaurants here run by families who came south in the 1950s, doing steamed buns and braised pork leg.

A quiet wooden temple in the old centre, and the most important spot in northern Thailand. In 1434 lightning split a chedi here and revealed a plaster Buddha with green stone showing through the crack: the Emerald Buddha, which then travelled to Lampang, Chiang Mai, Luang Prabang and Vientiane before ending up in Bangkok. A jade copy sits here now.

Twelve to fourteen hours all in, on a through ticket bought from any guesthouse in Chiang Rai. Take clean US dollar bills and a passport photograph for the visa desk at Huay Xai, keep small notes for the shuttle across the bridge, and do not put anything you will want during the day in the hold.

The night market on Sisavangvong Road runs until about ten, and the alley off it does a vegetarian buffet by the bowl for a couple of dollars, which is exactly what you want after a day on a bus. Add a Beerlao and go to bed.

Tak bat begins around half past five and is over in twenty minutes. Several hundred monks and novices in orange walk in order of seniority and take a handful of sticky rice from each person kneeling on the pavement. Watch quietly from a distance or do not watch at all; there are signs all over town asking exactly this and they are there for a reason.

Built in 1904 for King Sisavang Vong, French designed with Lao details, and turned into a museum in 1975 when the monarchy was abolished. The throne room has mirrored mosaic walls, the residential rooms are left as the royal family used them, and the gilded chapel by the gate holds the Pha Bang, the gold Buddha the town is named after. Shoes and bags stay at the door.

The restaurants overlooking the smaller river do laap, minced meat with herbs and toasted rice powder, and or lam, a stew thickened with a peppery wood that makes your mouth tingle. Sticky rice with everything, eaten by hand.

Built in 1560 by King Setthathirath at the tip of the peninsula, and the one building here that is worth crossing a continent for. The roofs sweep almost to the ground in three tiers, the rear wall carries a tree of life in coloured glass mosaic on a red ground, and the funeral chapel beside it holds the royal hearse with seven headed nagas on the front.

A wide, tiered fall dropping through forest into a chain of shallow pools, the water turned opaque blue green by the limestone it runs through. The main drop is about sixty metres and there is a steep path up beside it to the top. Swimming is allowed in most pools and not in the one directly under the fall. Take a towel; changing huts are basic.

The cafes along the Mekong bank do baguettes properly, which is the one genuinely good thing the French left behind, and Lao coffee from the Bolaven plateau, which is better than its reputation.

A small private museum in a restored building above the town, dedicated to the ethnic groups of northern Laos: Hmong, Akha, Tai Dam, Khmu. Textiles, silverwork and headdresses, explained by people from those communities rather than about them. An hour, and it is the best hour indoors in Luang Prabang.

A hundred metres above the middle of the peninsula, up three hundred and some steps from the main street, with a small gold chedi on top and the Mekong on one side and the Nam Khan on the other. Everybody comes for sunset and it does get crowded, but the geography of the town only makes sense from up here.

About an hour, on trains that run several times a day and leave from a station roughly ten kilometres north east of Luang Prabang. Book ahead, be at the station forty minutes early for the security check, and arrange the van at both ends through your guesthouse.

A spring fed pool at the foot of a limestone cliff about seven kilometres from town, cold, clear and deep, with a tree over it that people jump from. Above it, a cave with a reclining gold Buddha in the entrance chamber and a very dark passage running back into the hill. Bring a torch; the ones for hire are feeble.

The restaurants along the river face west into the karst and the sunset behind it, which is what the town is really for. Lao food, wood fired pizza and a great deal of fruit shake. Prices are low even by Lao standards.

Half an hour of very steep steps and ladders straight up a limestone face, with a wooden platform at the top and the whole valley underneath: the river, the paddies, the towers going back into haze. Go at six for the mist. It is genuinely steep and the rock is slick when damp, so trainers rather than sandals.

Baguettes with pate and green papaya from the carts on the main street, or khao piak sen, a thick rice noodle soup that is the Lao breakfast and is sold from about six.

A water cave a few kilometres north where you go in on an inner tube, pulling yourself along a rope in the dark with a head torch. The passage runs a long way back into the hill and the water is cold. It is usually sold as part of a half day with kayaking, and it is the one genuinely memorable thing to do here besides the view.

The tubes are still here and the trip is now a straightforward hour and a half down the Nam Song between the cliffs, dropped upriver by tuk tuk and floating back to the edge of town. Go in the afternoon when the light is low on the karst. Take nothing you mind getting wet and agree a time to be picked up.

About an hour from Vang Vieng, arriving at a station some way north of the capital with shuttle vans and taxis waiting. Book the day before. The line continues north to the Chinese border, which is why the trains are as full as they are.

The national symbol, and it is on the state seal: a gilded stupa in three tiers, built in 1566 by King Setthathirath over what is said to be a much older reliquary, sacked by a Siamese army in 1828, and reconstructed by the French in the 1930s from a nineteenth century sketch. Best in late afternoon when the gold takes the light.

A monumental arch on a boulevard, begun in 1957 with cement the United States had supplied for a new airport runway, which is why people here call it the vertical runway. Lao details rather than French ones: nagas, kinnari and a ceiling of Buddhist figures. Climb the seven storeys for the view down the avenue, past a floor of souvenir stalls on the way.

The Mekong promenade has a night market along it and a strip of restaurants behind, and the sun goes down over Thailand. Grilled fish stuffed with lemongrass, tam mak hoong, the fiercer Lao version of green papaya salad, and Beerlao.

A visitor centre run by the organisation that makes prosthetic limbs for people injured by unexploded bombs. Between 1964 and 1973 American aircraft dropped over two million tonnes of ordnance on Laos, more than on Germany and Japan combined in the whole of the Second World War, and around a third of the cluster bomblets did not go off. The exhibits are made from what is still being cleared. It is free and it takes an hour.

Built in 1818 in a Siamese rather than a Lao style, which is probably why the Siamese army spared it ten years later when it destroyed everything else in the city. The cloister walls hold several thousand small Buddha images in niches, most of them silver and ceramic, and a trough shaped like a naga used for washing them at the new year.

The French bakeries around Nam Phou are a hangover from the colony and a good one: baguettes, croissants and strong coffee. Otherwise khao poon, a spicy coconut noodle soup, from any market stall.

Twenty five kilometres downstream by bus, a meadow above the Mekong filled with enormous concrete Buddhist and Hindu figures cast from 1958 onwards by a self taught monk and shaman who mixed the two religions freely. A reclining Buddha forty metres long, a pumpkin shaped dome you climb inside through a demon's mouth, and no explanation of any of it anywhere.

About seventy minutes, with a couple of departures a day. Noi Bai airport is thirty kilometres north of the city and the airport bus into the Old Quarter is cheap and frequent. Have the Vietnamese e-visa printed.

The Lake of the Returned Sword, named for a fifteenth century king who is supposed to have handed a magic blade back to a golden turtle here after driving out the Chinese. A soft shell turtle genuinely did live in it, revered and enormous, until it died in 2016, and it is preserved in a case in the temple on the island.

On a small island at the northern end of the lake, reached by a scarlet wooden bridge that is the most photographed thing in Hanoi. Inside is a temple to a thirteenth century general who beat the Mongols, a scholar, and a physician, and the turtle in its glass case at the back.

Fresh unpasteurised beer, brewed that morning, poured from a keg into a glass on a plastic stool at the corner of Ta Hien and Luong Ngoc Quyen. It costs almost nothing, it is drunk by everybody, and the food carts around it do grilled pork and nem.

Ho Chi Minh died in 1969 and asked to be cremated. He was embalmed instead and put in a granite mausoleum on Ba Dinh square, where he had declared independence in 1945, and it opened in 1975. Guards in white salute at the corners, the queue files past in two lines, and nobody stops walking. Mornings only, closed Mondays and Fridays.

Two minutes from the exit, a tiny wooden shrine on a single stone pillar in a pond, built to look like a lotus rising out of the water. An eleventh century emperor put the first one here after dreaming of the goddess of mercy handing him a son. The French blew it up as they left in 1954 and it was rebuilt the following year.

Bun cha, grilled pork patties in a bowl of sweet and sour broth with cold noodles and herbs alongside, is Hanoi's own dish and lunch only. The shops that do it are open from eleven and sold out by two.

Founded in 1070 as a temple to Confucius and six years later as the country's first university, training the mandarin class for seven hundred years. Five walled courtyards in sequence, with eighty two stone stelae on the backs of tortoises carrying the names of everybody who passed the doctoral examinations between 1442 and 1779. Students still come here before exams.

The French built it in 1896 to hold Vietnamese political prisoners and it later held American pilots, who named it the Hanoi Hilton. Most of it was demolished in the 1990s and the gatehouse survives as a museum. Two thirds of it covers the colonial period, in some detail and with a guillotine; the section on the American prisoners is short and its account of their treatment is contested.

Ca phe trung, egg yolk whipped with condensed milk over strong coffee, was invented in Hanoi in the 1940s when milk was scarce. It is served in a bowl of hot water to keep it warm and it is closer to a dessert than a drink.

Vietnam recognises fifty four ethnic groups and this museum covers all of them without condescension: tools, clothes, funeral figures, a Tay shaman's kit. Behind the main building is a garden with full sized traditional houses moved here and rebuilt by the communities who own them, including a Bahnar communal house with a roof nearly twenty metres high.

The oldest Buddhist foundation in Hanoi, begun in the sixth century on the riverbank and moved to this islet in West Lake in 1615 when the river took the bank away. An eleven tier lotus tower stands in front of the main hall and a bodhi tree grown from a cutting from Bodh Gaya stands behind it. Sunset over the water from the causeway.

The largest covered market in Hanoi, put up by the French in 1889 at the top of the Old Quarter, burned down in 1994 and rebuilt behind its original facade. It is a wholesale market rather than a tourist one, three floors of fabric, hardware and dried goods, and the food alley along the northern side is where to have breakfast.

Pho bo is a breakfast in Hanoi rather than a dinner, and the northern version is plainer than the southern one: clear broth, no herb plate, a wedge of lime and a chilli if you ask. The shops that do it well open at six and are empty by ten.