Central Vietnam in Five Days: Hue, Phong Nha, Hoi An

Five days covers Hue, Phong Nha and Hoi An properly if you get one thing right: do not travel directly between Hoi An and Phong Nha. That leg is 346km and takes six to eight hours. Hue sits between them, so breaking the journey there turns one wasted day into two useful half days. Fly into Da Nang, out of Dong Hoi, or the reverse, and never backtrack.

The three places are genuinely different: an imperial capital, a national park and a trading port. Five days gives each of them enough without a single one-night stop.

The five-day central Vietnam route

Run it in reverse if your flights suit: into Dong Hoi, out of Da Nang. The days work identically and the Hai Van Pass is better southbound, when the sea is on your left.

Every transfer between Hue Phong Nha and Hoi An

Da Nang to Hoi An. Forty-five minutes by taxi or private car, and there is no train because Hoi An has no station. Book a car through your hotel rather than queueing at the airport.

Hoi An to Hue. About 120km and three hours direct through the Hai Van Tunnel, or five to seven hours if you take the pass road and stop at Lang Co and Marble Mountain. The slow version is the right call.

Old-town streets like this are the reason Hoi An overruns its schedule.

Hue to Phong Nha. About 210 to 215km and three and a half to four and a half hours by road, or roughly three hours on the train to Dong Hoi plus a transfer. The bus is around ten US dollars.

Hoi An to Phong Nha direct. 346km, six to seven hours by bus and six and a half to eight by private car. It is the leg this itinerary exists to avoid, but if your dates force it, Hoi An to Phong Nha lays out the options, and a private car transfer is the civilised way to do it.

Getting to and from Phong Nha itself. Everything runs through Dong Hoi, 45 minutes away, and the local bus is 35,000 dong while a taxi is 450,000 to 550,000. There is no public bus at Dong Hoi airport at all, so arrange a pickup. The Phong Nha halt exists but almost nobody should use it.

Which direction to run it

Two things decide this, and neither is the itinerary itself.

The Imperial City is a half day and the royal tombs are another, so five days buys one of the two.

The first is your flights. Da Nang has far more international and domestic connections than Dong Hoi, so most people fly into Da Nang. If you are continuing north to Hanoi afterwards, ending at Dong Hoi is better, because you are already a third of the way there.

If you take one thing from this page, make it the seat side. Going north from Da Nang to Hue, sit on the right. Going south, sit on the left. It costs nothing to choose, and it is the difference between the best hour of the journey and an hour of rock wall.

The second is the Hai Van Pass. Going south from Hue to Da Nang the sea is on your left; going north it is on your right. On the train it is the same rule, and the seat side matters more than the direction does.

Fly into one end and out of the other, because doubling back costs a full day of five.

If you would rather not book five transfers yourself, there is a guided five-day Da Nang to Hoi An route through Loc Yen ancient village, which runs from $390 per person in a group of ten. It is a different trip from the one above: it keeps Da Nang as the base and trades Phong Nha for Ba Na Hills and the Marble Mountains. Worth knowing about if the caves are not the reason you are coming.

What Hue Phong Nha and Hoi An each offer

Hoi An is the easiest to enjoy and the hardest to leave on schedule. Two nights covers the old town, one tailor fitting and an afternoon at An Bang beach. Things to do in Hoi An will fill more days than you have.

Hue needs less time than people give it and more than one night. The Imperial City is a half day and the royal tombs along the Perfume River are another. On a five-day trip you get the evening and the following morning, which is enough for one of the two. Things to do in Hue covers which tombs earn the entry fee.

The road between the three stops runs through this the whole way.

Phong Nha is the one people underestimate and the reason to build the trip this way round. It is a small town in a World Heritage national park with several hundred kilometres of cave passage underneath it. Things to do in Phong Nha covers the range from a ticket to a five-day expedition.

The Phong Nha day

With one full day here, the choice is between two show caves or one guided trek, and they are different holidays.

Two show caves means Paradise Cave in the morning and Phong Nha Cave by boat after lunch, for about 420,000 dong plus a boat fee. No guide, no booking, no fitness required, and you see the scale of the place.

One guided day means a jungle trek into a cave with no boardwalk and no lighting, ending with a swim through a water cave. It costs 1,950,000 dong, takes anyone from age nine, and includes guides, porters, gear, all meals and transfers. It is the thing you cannot do anywhere else on this route.

The boat into Phong Nha Cave is the one everybody does, and it earns it.

If you arrive in the afternoon of day four, do a show cave then and keep day five for the guided trek. That sequencing is the whole reason this itinerary puts Phong Nha last.

When to do this route

February to April is the best window for all three places at once. September to November is the wet season on this coast, when the Son River floods several times a month and the Phong Nha Cave boats stop, though the dry caves and the guided treks keep running. Jungle Boss closes only Bach Ma Discovery and the two Do Quyen Waterfall tours across those three months, reopening them on 1 December. the central Vietnam rainy season covers that part properly.

June and July are dry and run to 34°C, which makes the Hue tombs and the Hoi An old town hard work in the middle of the day and makes the caves, at a constant cool temperature, more appealing than usual.