Sapa and Halong Bay Package Tour 7 Days

Welcome to the highly cultural capital of Vietnam, Hanoi. Meet your driver at the airport before taking the transit into the city’s central district of the Old Quarter. You can check into your hotel after this and enjoy your first explorations of the Hanoi, along with the first few hours of your Sapa and Halong Bay combined tour.

In the late afternoon, you will have free to discover Hanoi Old Quarter and Hoan Kiem Lake. Stay overnight in Hanoi.

Enjoy breakfast at the hotel before the guide returns in the morning. We begin our Hanoi City Tour at the Ho Chi Minh Complex, which features everything of reverence for the national hero of Vietnam. Here, we can see his body at the mausoleum, as well as his wooden stilt house that was built amongst the concrete of Ba Dinh Square. We also take a look at the One-Pillar Pagoda and the Presidential Palace to get a feel for the ancient and colonial aspects to Hanoi

From here, we head southwards to the Temple of Literature, a Confucian university that was the country’s first, built in 1070. The verdant grounds and ornate architecture of the temple here offer much beauty for guests and a deeply meditative atmosphere for its past students.

We have lunch nearby and pick one of two museums to carry on our tour. Hoa Lo Prison Museum takes visitors through the tortuous experiences of the Vietnamese and then Americans during the existence of this French-built prison, while the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology describes the cultures of Vietnam's 53 ethnic minorities through fabulous artifacts and stilt house replicas.

After this, we return to the Old Quarter to take a walking tour around its enchanting and bustling alleyways. We find many examples of Hanoi’s history plastered across its architecture and streets, full of people and an excited energy. The city tour finishes at your hotel.

Relax until the evening, when the driver will return to the hotel and take you to Hanoi’s main train station for your overnight train to Sapa.

We continue this weeklong Sapa and Halong Bay tour in the incredible mountains of Vietnam’s far north. Your new guide will collect you from the train station in the morning and transfer you to Sapa town, where we can have breakfast and rest for a while. After this, we begin our easy trek to Ta Van Village, stopping at many sites on the way.

The first such site is the Muong Hoa Valley, which offers awe-inspiring views of Sapa from the top, through its mountain, rice paddy and stilt house scenery. This is one of the most perfect and most enduring pictures of Sapa, so we will stop here for a while before descending into the valley past cascading rice terraces dotted with farmers and buffalo.

We make our second stop at Lao Chai village, one of the homes of the Black H’mong ethnic minority, from whom we can learn more about an exotic culture situated high up in the mountains of Sapa. We take in the views and have a local lunch in Lao Chai before moving on.

We arrive in Ta Van village in the early-mid afternoon and take the rest of the day to relax. The views from here are stunning and the friendly hosts of our homestay, part of the Giay hill tribe, will greet us warmly. You may help to prepare dinner with our host family before enjoying an utterly tranquil evening in their stilt house, amongst the picture-book beauty of Sapa. 

Breakfast at the homestay will come before our return to Sapa, which we will do via car. Take in the spectacular views on the way, including ones of Fansipan, the tallest mountain in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Also on the way, we will make a stop at the beautiful Silver Waterfall, named for the water cascading like a sheet of silver. We will enjoy this site before driving on to reach the Heaven Gate, Vietnam’s highest mountain pass. The gate itself is a large, natural hole in a mountain, which is only accessible up the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ – a straight ascending staircase offering incredible views. From the top, views stretch down the other side of the mountain and the imposing ranges in the distance.

As we approach Sapa town, we make our final stop at a farm near the O Quy Ho pass, which will give us an introduction to the vegetables, fruits and medicinal herbs that grow up here.

We continue onto Sapa town after this, where you will have free time to enjoy the last of Vietnam’s premier mountain region on our Sapa and Halong Bay 7 Day. You can use this time to visit Ham Rong mountain or check out the central Sapa Lake.

The driver will return in the late afternoon to transfer you to Lao Cai train station. You will get your night train back to Hanoi from here.

Please Note: The following itinerary is an example and may not be the exact itinerary that you follow in Halong Bay. Your itinerary will depend on the cruise that you choose at the time of booking with us. Click Here to see the options for the cruises in Halong Bay.

Morning

Await the arrival of the driver and bus. We will be heading from your hotel to Halong Bay along with the vast beauty of the Red River Delta. Arriving at Hon Gai Harbour, we find our cruise ship waiting majestically in the water.

Afternoon

We board the boat and are welcomed by the crew, who will have prepared a fantastic lunch to serve in the dining room. After this, we begin our sailing, passing a plethora of limestone rocks, beaches and fishing villages along the way. After a few hours of serene drifting, we arrive at our first destination, the quiet Tra Bau area, where we can kayak between some of the towering karsts for which Halong Bay is known.

Continuing onto Ba Trai Dao beach, we enjoy the wonders of this strip of white sand amongst a beautifully natural backdrop. We can swim and relax here before returning to the cruise in the late afternoon.

Evening

The evening’s festivities begin with a party atop the sundeck of the cruise, where we will be able to share stories and pictures of the day. The sun sets behind the mountain peaks as dinner is served in the dining room. After this, you are free to relax as you wish in the enchanting nighttime atmosphere of Halong Bay.

The day starts early atop the sundeck, where a tai chi session will be held in front of the Halong Bay sunrise. This comes before breakfast, served downstairs as we begin our cruising.

Our destination this morning is the Dark and Bright Caves, a twin limestone system opening up onto a hidden lake at the far side. A local will row us through the caves on a bamboo boat, letting us observe the limestone features of the cave and the secretive atmosphere of the lake, surrounded by stretching cliff walls adorned with trees.

We return to the cruise for the final time and savour a delicious brunch on the way back to the harbour. At the harbour, we disembark and head back to Hanoi on the shuttle bus that will be waiting for us. We reach your hotel in the mid-late afternoon, and you will be able to enjoy your final day in Hanoi.

Enjoy breakfast and savour your last few hours in Hanoi, exploring at will before the driver arrives at your hotel. The transfer to Hanoi’s Noi Bai airport follows this, where you will wave goodbye to the driver and end your 7-day Sapa and Halong Bay Package Tour by catching your onwards flight.

We are very grateful for your interest in our tour. We sincerely hope that you enjoy the rest of your trip through Vietnam!