Our favorite Vietnam tours and excursions

If destinations and accommodation are the bread and butter of a great vacation, a hands-on cultural experience is the secret sauce that brings it all to life.

One bad guided tour can be enough to put you off the idea entirely – but a really good guide (and you can rest assured, we only work with the absolute best) can turn what an uninspiring box-ticking exercise into an experience you’ll remember for the rest of your life.

What it comes down to is this: there’s a difference between seeing and understanding, and the only way to bridge that gap is to get stuck in. No amount of looking will ever tell you as much about a Hanoian wet market than a morning spent shopping with a local chef – and if you don’t jump on the back of a vintage Vespa, how will you ever know how exhilarating it feels to zip through the streets of Saigon?

It doesn’t matter where you are or what the experience: these are the most exciting and immersive things you can do in Vietnam, run by some of the most charismatic and interesting people we know.

Insider Experience: Contemporary art in Hanoi

Get an insider’s look at the capital’s thriving contemporary art scene with curator and artist Nguyen Anh Tuan.

You'll begin the day with a visit to the private collection of Suzanne Lecht, where you'll see works by some of Vietnam’s most exciting emerging artists. From there, Nguyen will guide you through an exhibition of virtual public art using an augmented reality app – the first of its kind in Vietnam – to see how young Vietnamese artists are pushing the boundaries of technology. Finally, you’ll round off the tour at Manzi Art Space, a chic gallery-cum-café-bar where a cold drink in the courtyard garden makes for a refreshing end to the day. It’s the perfect modern counterbalance to traditional Hanoi.

Local life in the Mekong Delta

This action-packed day tour is your chance to peep behind the curtain of daily life in the rural Mekong Delta.

You'll travel from village to village with cycle rides on sun-dappled tracks and sampan cruises through rice paddies and fruit farms, stopping to refuel at the wonderful Mango Riverside Restaurant for lunch. This isn’t your ordinary sightseeing tour, it’s a true insider’s insight into riverside life -- whether it’s visiting the home of a family to learn about the myriad products you can make out of a coconut, or sitting down with the locals to sip honey tea and try tropical fruits from their garden.

Cycling along the banks of the Thu Bon River near Hoi An

Cycling along the Thu Bon River

Usually we don’t like telling people what to do, but we’ll make an exception here: you can’t visit Hoi An without exploring its rural outskirts – and this is one of our absolute favorite ways to do it.

First off, this is not just a bike ride: this is an immersive experience that’ll take you right into the homes, workshops and markets of the Hoi An countryside. You’ll get to try your hand at sedge weaving, see how fish sauce is traditionally made, and sit down for a home-cooked lunch with a local family – and that’s just for starters. This tour is a proper insider’s look at traditional Vietnamese life, and we can’t recommend it enough.

Phong Nha caving

Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park is a Natural World Heritage Site and home to some of the world's most dramatic caverns, including the largest in the world.

Some of these bewitching and cathedralesque caves can be visited via boat or boardwalk without even ducking your head, but the real adventure starts when you head into the mountains on a multi-day trek. Spend your nights in tents or hammocks in the jungle, and don your headtorch to swim in underground lakes, wriggle through tight passageways, and wander vast, dark caverns filled with 360-million-year-old rock formations. Trust us: no matter how you feel about going underground, these are some caves you don’t want to miss.

Authentic Life of Hanoi

Hanoi is a maze of streets, a hotch-potch of eras, a tangle of stories.

Why just admire crumbling colonial townhouses when you can visit a local family who’ve lived in one for four generations? Why watch trains trundling past when you can hop onboard and meet the commuters? Wander the capital on your own and you’ll breeze past countless secrets waiting to be uncovered. On this tour, your guide is your passport to the hidden life of Hanoi -- taking you into the backstreets to seek out the best street food snacks and telling you the stories that will bring the city around you to life.

Ninh Binh Sampan

With its sheer-sided mountains rising dramatically from flat-bottomed valleys, Ninh Binh’s scenery is almost otherworldly.

It’s the perfect setting for a gentle sampan ride through the flooded fields of rice plants, lotus and waterlily, with opportunities to float through caves by torchlight, spot temples hidden in the forests, and see water buffalo wading on the banks of the rivers.

Though we love hiking and cycling through the region’s farms and villages, the classic way to appreciate this quintessential Vietnamese scenery is from a sampan boat on one of its slow-moving rivers. These days the main waterways can get quite busy, but there are still plenty of smaller and quieter routes to ply — with opportunities to float through caves by torchlight, spot temples hidden in the forests, and water water buffalo wading on the banks of the rivers.