Hanoi's main sight is shut until 3 November. Four days built around what is open.

Hanoi rewards a plan more than most cities its size, and not because it is hard to get around. It is because so much of it keeps short hours. The mausoleum opens on five mornings a week and only until half past ten. The lake turns into a pedestrian zone at seven on Friday evening and back into a road at midnight on Sunday. The water puppet theatre runs five fixed slots a day and the evening ones go first.

Right now there is one more constraint on top of that. The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum has been closed since 4 September for its periodic maintenance and reopens on 3 November. Fly for Diwali, which falls on Sunday 8 November, and you are fine. Go in October and the building at the centre of every Hanoi itinerary is a lawn you look at from behind a barrier.

Four days is the right length. Three if you skip Halong, which is a reasonable thing to do. Here is how I would arrange them.

The dates that decide the trip

Write these down before you book anything. The mausoleum is shut on Mondays and Fridays all year, and open mornings only on the other five days: half past seven to half past ten from April to October, eight to eleven from November to March, with an extra half hour at weekends and on public holidays. Entry is 25,000 dong, about ₹92. Knees and shoulders covered, no photography inside, and professional cameras do not get through the bag check.

Ba Dinh Square itself stays open while the mausoleum is closed, and so do the Presidential Palace grounds and the Ho Chi Minh Museum next door, which keep their own hours. The Temple of Literature is open eight to five daily at 70,000 dong, around ₹258, free for under sixteens. Its evening version with the projection show runs Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday from half past six to half past ten and costs 199,000 dong, about ₹734.

If your trip is short enough that getting the sequence wrong costs you a whole morning, buy the guided day and let somebody else solve the timetable.

At ₹2,644 the full-day city tour is the most expensive single booking on this list, and it earns its money on a two or three day trip, where one wasted morning is a tenth of the holiday. On four days or more, skip it. Hanoi's centre is walkable, the museums are cheap at the door, and you will see more on your own feet.

Day one: land, then follow somebody who knows which stalls moved

Most flights from India land in the evening, which suits Hanoi. Drop your bags in the Old Quarter and go out on foot for three hours. The difficulty is that the good food here comes from unmarked doorways where somebody has stood for thirty years, and from carts that are in a different spot every week. A list on your phone gets you to neither.

Two food walks, same idea, different pace. Both take small groups through the Old Quarter at dinner time.

The small-group street food walk at ₹1,591 is the one I would book for a first night, because a smaller group gets served faster at a stall with eight stools. Food on Foot at ₹1,826 is the join-in daily departure, so it goes whether or not four other people signed up, and that reliability is worth the extra ₹235 when your dates cannot move.

If you are vegetarian, say so when you book and again on the night. Vietnamese broth is usually built on pork or beef, fish sauce goes into almost everything, and a dish described as vegetable has often met one of the two. The Old Quarter has a cluster of Indian restaurants that deliver free inside the quarter, and for strict Jain food Ram Krishna will cook without onion and garlic if you call four to six hours ahead. That lead time is not a formality. Walking in and asking does not work.

Day two: Ba Dinh before ten, the lake after seven

Start at Ba Dinh at seven. It sounds unreasonable and it is the only way to see the complex without queueing. Walk from there to the One Pillar Pagoda and the museum, take a Grab to the Temple of Literature for an hour, and give the afternoon to Hoa Lo Prison and the French Quarter. Eat late. Then put the evening somewhere specific.

On a Friday, Saturday or Sunday the answer is the lake. Twenty-six streets around Hoan Kiem close to traffic from seven on Friday evening until midnight on Sunday, and the result is the only part of central Hanoi where you can stand still. Buskers, children on scooters, old men playing board games on the paving, long queues for ice cream. It costs nothing.

Midweek the lake is a roundabout and the evening needs a ticket. The water puppet theatre is at 57B Dinh Tien Hoang on the east side of the lake, with shows at three, ten past four, twenty past five, half past six and eight.

₹489 for fifty minutes of puppetry in a water tank, played to a live folk orchestra. It is a tourist show and it knows that. It is also the best fifty minutes you will spend on a wet evening in Hanoi, and children sit through it without complaining. Book the twenty past five slot rather than the eight o'clock. Same show, and it leaves you an evening afterwards.

Day three: Halong is a thirteen hour day

The distance is 152 km and the expressway covers it in a little over two hours on paper, by the Hanoi to Hai Phong road and then the Bach Dang bridge. Door to door in a shared van, with the morning pickups around Hanoi, it is three to three and a half hours each way. Budget twelve to thirteen hours, out at about half past six and back around eight. There is no train. Passenger services to Halong stopped in 2021 and the timetables still circulating online are recycled from 2019. A high-speed line broke ground in April 2026 with 2028 in mind, which does nothing for this trip.

What the bus buys you is four hours on the water, a cave, a kayak and lunch.

At ₹2,934 with the transfer and a seafood lunch in it, this is the best value in the Hanoi list, and comfortably under what the same day costs bought locally in dollars. Take it if you have four days and want the bay once. Do not take it if you are travelling with parents who cannot sit in a van for seven hours, or with a toddler. For them the honest options are an overnight cruise at three or four times the money, or skipping the bay and keeping the day in Hanoi. A day trip that ends in a bad mood at eight in the evening is not a saving.

Day four: the indoor options, and the edge of the city

Keep the last day loose. October brings roughly 155 mm of rain spread over eleven days and one of them may be yours. Three bookings cover both the weather and the age range in most family groups.

Mega Grand World at ₹716 sits in Ocean City, 20 to 30 km east of the centre and 45 to 60 minutes by road. It is an evening place rather than a day out: the Venice and K-Town districts are free to walk, the gondola costs 150,000 dong on top, and the Grand Voyage show starts between eight and half past. Going on a weekday afternoon is how people come away unimpressed. The Lotte World Aquarium at ₹1,071 is the one to hold back for rain with children under ten, and nothing else. Lotte Hanoi Sky at ₹868 puts you on the 65th floor of a 272 metre tower with a glass walkway, and the only hour worth paying for is between half past four and seven, when one ticket gets you the city in daylight, the sun going down over West Lake, and the lights coming on.

Getting in, and getting around once you land

Mumbai has two nonstop options this autumn. Akasa Air began four flights a week on 4 September, about five hours on a 737 MAX 8, and IndiGo starts a daily service on 25 October. From any other Indian city you connect, usually through Bangkok, Singapore or Kuala Lumpur.

• Indians need an e-visa. US$25 single entry, US$50 multiple, up to 90 days, from evisa.gov.vn and nowhere else, three to seven working days. The dates are printed on the document, so count your stay from the visa rather than from your flight.
• The pre-arrival QR code that caught people out this year applies to Tan Son Nhat in Ho Chi Minh City. Landing at Noi Bai, you do nothing.
• Noi Bai is 35 to 45 km out, 30 to 60 minutes depending on the hour. Bus 86 is 45,000 dong and runs every 25 to 45 minutes. Grab quotes 250,000 to 350,000 and fixes the price before you get in, which is the reason to use it. The metered taxis at that airport have a long history of creative routing.
• The metro is clean, cheap at 8,000 to 15,000 dong a trip or 30,000 for a day, and close to useless for a visitor. Two lines, neither reaching the Old Quarter or the airport. Cat Linh station is about a fifteen minute walk from the edge of the quarter.
• October and November are the two best months, around 30 and 26 degrees by day, and November gets about 61 mm of rain against October's 155. They are also when the air turns. Rice straw burning peaks now and the winter inversion sets in from November, so check the AQI the night before any long walk and carry a mask if somebody in the group struggles with bad air.

One cheap trick for a jet-lagged first afternoon.

₹513 for the hop-on bus, which I would not usually recommend anywhere, except that Hanoi's traffic makes walking an unfamiliar grid exhausting on day one, and the loop shows you where the lake sits in relation to Ba Dinh and the French Quarter. Ride it once from the top deck, then abandon it.

If you have more than four days, fly south

Hanoi does not need a week. Da Nang is an hour and a quarter by domestic flight and gives you a coastline, a kinder October climate and Hoi An half an hour down the road.

The Marble Mountain and Hoi An day tour at ₹1,735 is the efficient one, caves in the morning and the old town for the lanterns after dark. The Hoi An walking tour with banh mi and coffee at ₹1,983 is the better booking if you are already sleeping in Hoi An, because it moves slowly and the town is the whole point. Hue at ₹3,512 is a long day over the Hai Van pass, and it pays off only if the citadel and the royal tombs genuinely interest you. If they do not, it is four hours in a vehicle for a photograph of a gate.

A city with short opening hours does not need more days. It needs the days in the right order.

Build the four days backwards from the two fixed points, which are the mausoleum's mornings and the weekend on the lake. The rest of Hanoi will wait for you. Then book the food walk for the first night, because arriving hungry in a city where the best cooking has no sign on the door is the one problem money solves cleanly.

Hours, fees and dates here come from the mausoleum command's closure announcement, the Temple of Literature and Lotte Center listings, Hanoi's pedestrian zone rules, the two airlines' own announcements and Vietnamese transport reporting, read in the last week of September 2026. Dong is converted at about 271 to the rupee, which moves. Prices come from the live catalogue, and operators do shift the fixed-slot bookings, so trust the time printed on your voucher over this page.