Hanoi, and the three nights it needs

Hanoi holds about eight million people and something close to seven million motorbikes. Almost none of that is what you came for. The part a visitor uses is three adjoining districts: the old quarter north of Hoan Kiem lake, the French quarter east and south of it, and the ceremonial strip around the mausoleum and the citadel. Together they cover roughly four square kilometres. Everything beyond is ring roads, apartment towers and industrial suburbs, and that is where the people in your photographs go home to.

The old quarter is thirty-six short streets, each named for the trade once done on it. Some of the names still mean something. Hang Bac still sells silver, Hang Ma still sells paper offerings and turns gold and red for a fortnight before Tet and again before the mid-autumn festival. Others are now hotels and travel desks with the old name on the sign. Buildings are two to four storeys, three to four metres wide, thirty metres deep, because frontage was taxed. You will keep looking down corridors into courtyards that were not built for you to see.

Two parts of this have been worn through, and pretending otherwise wastes your time. The first is Ta Hien, the beer corner, which after 19:00 is four blocks of plastic stools serving mainly foreigners at roughly double the price of the same beer two streets away. The second is the railway alley near Phung Hung, where cafes set up chairs against the track. It has been cleared by the authorities and quietly reopened more than once since 2019, and on the days it is open it is a queue of people waiting to photograph a train. Neither is a scandal. They are just not worth a slot in a three-day visit.

What is still worth the slot: the market end of the quarter between 06:00 and 08:00, when it is a wholesale operation and nobody is selling you anything; the Museum of Ethnology, seven kilometres west, which is the best museum in the country and the least visited of the big ones; the Thang Long citadel, half-excavated and more interesting for it; and Tay Ho, the lake district to the north, where Hanoians with money actually spend their evenings.

Land costs only, and nothing here is a tour price. This is what a day in Hanoi costs if you are paying for it yourself.

Hanoi is the start of almost everything we run in the north. The twelve-day Vietnam north to south route gives it three nights before going to the coast, and the fifteen-day Classic Indochina route does the same before crossing to Laos and Cambodia.

If you want the city as a base rather than a stop, the northern Vietnam walking route uses it at both ends, and the family route shortens the old quarter day and swaps the museums for the water puppets and a ceramics workshop.

• You have ten days or fewer and want beaches and Angkor. Hanoi is a city day, not a rest day, and it will not compete with what you have cut it against.
• Noise and traffic genuinely distress you. The old quarter is loud from 05:30, and the quiet hotels are outside the part you came to walk.
• You are arriving in late June, July or August and will not go out before 08:00. In 36 degrees at 80 per cent humidity the middle of the day is unusable, and a city visit that only happens at breakfast and dusk is a wasted two days.
• Your dates fall on the three days either side of Tet and you want restaurants and markets open. They will not be.
• Steps and uneven paving are a problem. Old-quarter pavements are parked on, broken and often twenty centimetres high, and there is no way to plan around that.