Hanoi

Hanoi wants three days and keeps them in the Old Quarter, around Hoan Kiem lake, from where everything is on foot. The first thing you learn is how to cross the road: the traffic does not stop, it flows around anyone walking at a steady pace — stopping halfway across is the one mistake that actually matters here.

The Old Quarter is a grid of some thirty streets that for centuries took their names from the trade practised in them — silk, bamboo, tin — and in a few you can still see it. You do not tour this by list; you wander, sit on a plastic stool twenty centimetres high and eat whatever that particular junction makes. In the evening some streets close to traffic, and the corner of Ta Hien and Luong Ngoc Quyen — the city's known 'beer corner' — fills with the same stools and beer late into the night.

Hoan Kiem lake is the centre everything turns around, with the Turtle Tower on its islet and a temple on a red bridge. At weekends the road around it is pedestrian from Friday evening to Sunday night. Early, around half past five, the shore fills with people exercising — tai chi, aerobics, badminton, even an improvised gym with concrete weights — and by half past seven it is over, as if none of it happened.

Ha Long is three hours away by motorway and almost everyone does it from here, as a trip with one night on a boat. Ninh Binh, which people call Ha Long on land, is two and a half hours by train and works as a day trip — the same limestone cones, only above rice fields instead of the sea, and without a boat.