Hanoi travel essentials: your first hours sorted

Hanoi’s airport (HAN) is about 45 minutes to an hour from the Old Quarter. The reliable options are a Grab (price shown up front), a reputable fixed-price airport taxi or minibus, or a pre-booked transfer with a driver waiting. Agree the fare or use the app — some airport taxis run rigged meters or quote inflated flat fares.

Watch for the “your hotel has closed / moved / changed name” scam, where a driver (or a fake same-name hotel) tries to take you somewhere else on commission. Have your hotel’s exact address and phone number, and call them if a driver insists otherwise.

A Vietnam eSIM set up before you fly gets you online on arrival — useful for Grab, maps and calling your hotel. Vietnam has fast, cheap mobile data and good city coverage. An eSIM saves haggling at an airport SIM stand while jet-lagged.

Vietnam is largely cash-based, and the dong has a lot of zeros — notes run into the hundreds of thousands, so it’s easy to confuse the 20,000 and 500,000 notes (they’re different colours; check carefully). Carry cash for street food, markets and small shops; hotels and bigger restaurants take cards. Use ATMs attached to banks, and choose dong, not your home currency.

Grab (both cars and motorbike taxis, price up front) is the easy, cheap way around Hanoi. The Old Quarter is best on foot — and that means learning to cross the road, where the motorbike traffic never really stops. The technique every visitor learns: step off the kerb steadily, walk slowly and predictably without stopping or darting, and let the bikes flow around you. Sudden stops are what cause problems.

Vietnam has no laws against same-sex relationships and attitudes have grown noticeably more open, especially among younger people. Hanoi is quieter and more traditional than Ho Chi Minh City, but LGBTQ+ travellers visit comfortably with ordinary discretion.

Hanoi has fast, cheap wifi and a lovely café-working culture — the Vietnamese coffee shops are great places to settle in with a laptop, and co-working spaces are growing, especially around the Old Quarter and West Lake.

Vietnam’s sockets commonly take both flat and round two-pin plugs on a 220V supply (see the verified plug card below); a power bank is handy for long days and the heat.

A neat Hanoi trick: when you head off on an overnight Halong Bay cruise, your Old Quarter hotel will almost always store your main luggage for free — just take an overnight bag. For the arrival or late-flight gap, Noi Bai (HAN) has storage, hotels hold bags, and storage shops plus apps like Radical Storage cover the Old Quarter.

The big trip from Hanoi is Halong Bay (or quieter Lan Ha Bay), usually as an overnight cruise — and quality ranges enormously, from cramped budget boats to excellent small ships. This is one to book through a reputable operator with recent reviews rather than the cheapest street deal; for an overnight on the water, the boat’s safety and standards genuinely matter. Ninh Binh (“Halong Bay on land”) is a great day-trip alternative.