Destinations

Fifteen places, and how long each is worth

Not a list of everywhere. Fifteen places we send people to, each with a night count, a bad month, and a section on when to skip it entirely.

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15places

4countries

Vietnam

Place	Nights	Best months	What it is for
Hanoi	2 - 3	Oct - Apr	A working old city, not a museum of one
Ha Giang	3 - 4	Sep - Nov, Mar - May	The best mountain road in Southeast Asia
Hoi An	3	Feb - Aug	A Cham and Japanese trading port with a beach behind it
Mekong Delta	2 - 3	Nov - Apr	Water-level Vietnam, and the road into Cambodia

Laos

Place	Nights	Best months	What it is for
Luang Prabang	3	Nov - Feb	The only town in Laos most people see, and it deserves the visit
Nong Khiaw	2 - 3	Nov - Feb	Where the Nam Ou cuts through vertical limestone
Vientiane	1 - 2	Nov - Feb	A capital most itineraries write off, and one museum that justifies it
Four Thousand Islands	2 - 3	Nov - Feb	The Mekong spread across fourteen kilometres of channels

Cambodia

Place	Nights	Best months	What it is for
Angkor	3 days on a pass	Nov - Feb	Four hundred square kilometres of Khmer capital
Siem Reap	3 - 4	Nov - Feb	The town you sleep in, which is better than its reputation
Phnom Penh	2	Nov - Feb	A river capital and the hardest morning of the trip
Kampot and Kep	3	Nov - Apr	Pepper, a decaying seaside town, and the best crab in the country

Thailand

Place	Nights	Best months	What it is for
Bangkok	2 - 3	Nov - Feb	The region's hub, and a city worth more than a transit night
Chiang Mai	3	Nov - Feb	The northern old city and the valleys behind it
Chiang Rai and the Golden Triangle	2	Nov - Feb	Three borders on one river, and the road into Laos

How to read the night counts

The nights column is the number below which the place stops working, not the number at which you have seen everything. Two nights in Luang Prabang means one full day, which is enough for the town and not enough for the country. Three nights at Angkor is three days on the pass, which is when it stops being a checklist.

Almost every itinerary problem we see is the same problem: a place given one night fewer than it needs, repeated six times, so that the whole trip is a series of half-days. If your days do not stretch to the numbers in these tables, take a place out rather than taking a night off each one.

Read how many days you need for the arithmetic, and two countries or four for the harder version of the same question.

What is not on this list, and why

Sapa. Comprehensively built over. Ha Giang is what Sapa was, three hours further away.
Sihanoukville. Transformed by casino construction since 2017 and we do not send people there.
Vang Vieng. Cleaned up since its worst years, but it is a landscape with an activity park attached, and Nong Khiaw does the same thing better.
The Thai islands. Excellent, and a different holiday. We build mainland overland trips.
Myanmar. We do not operate there and will not while the current situation holds.
Ha Long Bay proper. We use Lan Ha, the southern part of the same karst system, boarding at Got pier rather than Tuan Chau. Same limestone, a fraction of the boats.

Where these places appear in our routes

Every destination page links to the tours that visit it, but the short version is this: the eighteen-day classic covers Hanoi, Luang Prabang, Nong Khiaw, Vientiane, Angkor, Siem Reap, Phnom Penh and the delta. The twenty-four-day route adds Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. Everything else is a single-country route or a two-country crossing.

Not sure which places fit your days?

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Common questions

Questions travellers ask most

Why only fifteen places?

Because a page we cannot write honestly is worse than no page. These are the fifteen we send people to often enough to know what has changed since last year.

We would rather have fifteen pages that are current than fifty that are copied from a guidebook.

Can I visit somewhere not on this list?

Usually yes. The list reflects what we write up, not the limit of what we run. Ninh Binh, Hue, Phong Nha, Battambang, Savannakhet and the Bolaven Plateau all appear inside our routes without having their own page.

Which is the single best place across the four countries?

If you allow only one answer: Angkor, because there is nothing else of that scale and age anywhere in Southeast Asia.

If you allow a second: the Nam Ou valley at Nong Khiaw, which is the place people are most surprised by.

Do I need to visit the capitals?

Hanoi and Phnom Penh, yes — both carry a great deal of what their countries are. Vientiane is worth one night for the COPE centre and not much more. Bangkok is worth two or three nights on its own terms and you will pass through it anyway.