Best Things to Do in Hanoi

Hanoi rewards wandering more than ticking off, but there is a real short list underneath the wandering. These are the things worth building a day around, with a plain note on each about what you are actually getting.

Hoan Kiem Lake and the Old Quarter

Not an attraction so much as the city's organising principle, and the single best use of a first morning. The lake at six is full of exercise classes, badminton and tai chi; by evening it is couples and ice cream. Ngoc Son Temple sits on an island reached by a red bridge and takes twenty minutes.

At weekends the streets around the lake close to traffic and the whole district changes character — street games, music, families. If your dates include a weekend, keep an evening for it.

Temple of Literature

Vietnam's first university, founded in 1070, and the best place in the city to see pre-colonial Vietnamese architecture in a sequence of courtyards. It is calm in a way almost nothing else in central Hanoi is. An hour is enough.

The Ho Chi Minh complex

The mausoleum, the stilt house where he actually lived, the Presidential Palace grounds and the One Pillar Pagoda sit together and are done as one walk. The mausoleum has limited morning hours, closes one or two days a week, and shuts entirely for a period each year for maintenance — check before going.

A strict dress code applies — shorts and bare shoulders are not accepted, hats come off, and phones and cameras are not permitted inside the viewing chamber. Rules are enforced and have changed before, so check the current ones rather than relying on this paragraph. The queue generally moves quickly and the room itself takes a minute or two.

The two museums that matter

The Vietnamese Women's Museum is consistently the best-curated museum in the city and the one that most reframes the country for a visitor — it covers marriage customs, street vendors and the role of women in the war with real depth. Two hours.

Hoa Lo Prison, the Hanoi Hilton, is the other. Its account of the French colonial period is harrowing and its account of the American POW period is partisan. Both halves are worth your time, and knowing which is which going in is the point.

Train Street, with a caveat

The narrow residential stretch where the railway runs within arm's reach of cafe tables is genuinely striking. Access has been restricted and reopened repeatedly on safety grounds, and the current rules change — check locally rather than planning around it.

Water puppets, and whether to bother

The Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre runs a short show of an art form that originated in the villages of the northern delta, performed by puppeteers standing waist-deep behind a screen. It is squarely aimed at visitors and it is also very old. An hour, and worth it once.

Getting out onto the water and the hills

Two half-days inside the city limits are easy to miss. West Lake is large enough to cycle around in a leisurely couple of hours, passing Tran Quoc Pagoda — the oldest in Hanoi, on a causeway over the water — and a string of lakeside cafes that make a good late-afternoon stop.

The Long Bien Bridge, a French-built steel span from the turn of the twentieth century that was bombed repeatedly during the war, is still in use and can be walked. Underneath it, on the sandbanks in the middle of the Red River, there are banana plantations and market gardens that feel a very long way from the Old Quarter ten minutes behind you.

A cooking class, if you have four days

Most start at a market, which is the useful half — someone explaining what the herbs are and why northern cooking uses fewer of them than southern does changes how you eat for the rest of the trip. The cooking itself is secondary.

Eat as an activity

Eat as an activity

The most memorable thing most people do in Hanoi is not on a list of sights. Bun cha at lunch, pho at breakfast, bia hoi — the fresh draught beer poured on street corners in the late afternoon — and egg coffee in a room above the street. A guided street-food walk on a first evening is one of the few organised activities that reliably pays for itself.

The quieter alternatives

If the main list feels crowded, three places tend to be much quieter. Quan Thanh Temple, near West Lake, is a Taoist temple with a large bronze statue and far fewer visitors than the lakeside sites. The Fine Arts Museum has an excellent collection of lacquer and silk painting in a colonial building, and is usually near-empty. And the Long Bien Bridge, a French-built span repeatedly bombed during the war and patched ever since, can be walked across for a view of the river and the banana fields below it.

Day trips

Ninh Binh, two hours away, is the strongest: karst landscape on rivers rather than sea, reached by rowed boat. Ha Long Bay as a day trip means a long road transfer in each direction for a few hours afloat, which is why most people who have done both recommend the overnight cruise. The Perfume Pagoda is a boat ride and a climb, and it draws very large crowds during its spring pilgrimage festival in the months after Tet. Outside that period it is far quieter. (This article contains affiliate links — if you book through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.)