Ninh Binh

Quan the nha tho Phat Diem

Built 1875 to 1899 with the low curved tiled roofs of a Vietnamese dinh instead of spires, and a nave carried on 48 monolithic ironwood columns.

Bến thuyền Tràng An (Tràng An wharf)

A hand-rowed sampan takes you through nine separate water-filled limestone tunnels in a single circuit, and in the biggest of them the roof drops to about a metre above the water, so you lie back along the boat and watch the rock go past your face.

Khu bảo tồn thiên nhiên đất ngập nước Vân Long (Vân Long Wetland Nature Reserve)

A 2022 survey put about 60 per cent of the world's Delacour's langurs in this wetland and the valley beside it. You look for them from a flat-bottomed boat poled by hand across water a few tens of centimetres deep, scanning bare grey limestone rather than tree canopy.

Endangered Primate Rescue Center

Around 160 animals across 15 langur, douc and loris species, six of which are in captivity nowhere else in the world. The keeper talk, not the enclosures, is the point, and almost nobody arrives knowing what a grey-shanked douc is.

Co do Hoa Lu special national relic site

Village teams re-enact a tenth-century boy drilling his childhood army with reed flags, and hundreds of massed villagers walk formations that spell out a reign name. Both are competitions, and the villages rehearse for weeks beforehand.

Dan vien Xito Thanh Mau Chau Son

Built 1939 to 1945 in bare red brick with no cement and no steel reinforcement, by a young monk who had never attended a school of architecture and worked with no drawings.

Den tho Vua Dinh Tien Hoang

The second temple is the one people skip and the more interesting building. It venerates not only the emperor but the empress who was consort to him and to his predecessor, which is an unusually frank piece of dynastic history to enshrine.

Khu di tich Co do Hoa Lu

Almost every visitor walks 200 metres to two temples and leaves inside the hour. The reason to come is the perimeter: earth ramparts closing the gaps between limestone towers, which is how a valley became a defensible capital for 42 years.

Dong Am Tien

The enclosed karst bowl where Duong Van Nga took vows at the end of her life, and which tradition remembers as the Dinh court's execution ground.

Tam Coc paddy field, between the wharf and hang Ba

For roughly a fortnight either side of the harvest the valley floor turns gold and carries a giant figurative picture, planted rather than mown, which you look down on from the ridge and then row straight through at water level.

Cuc Phuong National Park

A 7km forest loop out to a tree a thousand years old, and a cave where human skeletons and stone tools around 7,500 years old were dug out, in the country's first national park. The trailhead is 20km inside the gate, which is the detail day-trippers miss.

Bến thuyền Tam Cốc / Đình Các wharf

The river physically cuts through three separate limestone hills in a couple of kilometres, and the rowed boat goes through all three and back, with working rice paddies on both banks in between.

Động Thiên Hà (Galaxy Cave)

You get there by small boat along a kilometre of canal between paddy fields, then walk to the mouth: a 700-metre cave, part dry and part flooded, and one of the caves in the massif where prehistoric stone tools have actually been recovered.

Den Thai Vi

Around thirty palanquin teams converge on a single stone temple, and the ritual climax has nine men reading nine movements of an ode, each answered in ca tru.

Trang An ecotourism complex boat wharf

The woman rowing you is a farmer from the next commune working a shared rota, and she is also your guide. Reporting puts around 10,000 people making a living from the complex, roughly half of them farmers, with close to 3,000 rowers working at peak.

Cuc Phuong National Park

For a few weeks each spring the forest road fills with butterflies thick enough to obscure the track, and the same window carries a firefly season at night. Day-trippers get half of it; the fireflies need you sleeping inside the forest.

Cau lac bo hat xam Ha Thi Cau

Hat xam is the blind street-singing tradition of the northern delta, and its last great practitioner lived and died in this commune. The club named for her has 32 members aged six to eighty-seven, and a rehearsal is a grandmother teaching a nine-year-old a verse.

Minh Trang Handmade

The village where the Tam Cốc boats tie up has been embroidering by hand for some 700 years, and at least one workshop there will hand you a hoop and sit an artisan beside you. Arrange it first: the sessions are booked, not ticketed.

Trang trại dê Trịnh Văn Đàm

The goats really are turned loose on the karst all day and really do come back on their own at dusk, pulled down by salt blocks rather than driven. At a farm at the dead end of one valley road you can be standing there when the herd comes down the slope.

Goat and cơm cháy restaurants

The crisped rice now sold in bags nationwide started here about 120 years ago, and the version worth eating is fried the moment you order and served under a sauce made from mountain goat. Ask for sốt dê, not pork floss.

Lang Vua Dinh Tien Hoang

From the saddle of Ma Yen you see the whole enclosure at once: the ring of karst towers standing as the curtain wall, and the river winding outside it. The tomb at the top is a modest stone box; the climb is the point.

Restaurants serving ốc núi

These snails spend most of the year sealed into limestone crevices and only emerge to feed after heavy rain, so the dish exists for about four months and cannot be farmed. They browse medicinal plants off the rock, and the meat smells of herbal medicine.

Nem chua Yên Mạc Anh Quân

This is not the sour nem chua sold across Vietnam. It is barely sour, made from rump off a pig killed that morning and bruised with the back of a knife, from a court recipe a minister's daughter learned in Huế and brought home. Locals eat it at weddings; almost no visitor orders it.

Thung Nham ecotourism zone

A natural heronry inside the karst, watched from a boat in the last hour of daylight as tens of thousands of wild birds come back to roost in one sustained movement. Visitors who arrive at noon and leave at four have paid for the venue and missed the event.

Suoi nuoc nong Kenh Ga

A mineral spring runs out of the base of a limestone hill at a constant 53C, and you get to it by boat rather than by road, passing a village whose houses float on the river on the way.

Ninh Vân stone carving village

Ten of this village's twelve hamlets carve limestone, and the output is checkable: the stone cathedral at Phát Diệm, the Khải Định tomb at Huế, the 500 arhat statues at Bái Đính. The interesting half hour is about choosing the block, not the finished Buddha.

Thanh Nguyễn mắm tép workshop

The paste is made from the tiny freshwater shrimp of a seasonally flooded lowland, salted with roasted rice powder and left in earthenware for six months to a year, which is why it comes out red-gold and thick. Locals do not dip it; they fry it down with pork belly and eat it on hot rice.