Vietnam Tour Packages from Nepal

Four nights is enough for Hanoi, a day in Ninh Binh and a night on a Ha Long Bay cruise, and it fits into a week off once you count the travel days. That is the trip most first-time travellers from Nepal take. With five or six nights you can fly from Hanoi to Da Nang, about an hour and a quarter in the air, and add the Golden Bridge at Ba Na Hills, the beach and the old town of Hoi An.

Each extra region adds a flight inside Vietnam, which takes most of half a day with the transfers. Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City is two hours in the air. Seven nights or more leaves room for the north, the centre and the south in one trip, though many travellers prefer to see two regions and stay longer in each.

A Nepali passport needs a visa before the flight, and the e-visa is the one for a holiday. You apply for it yourself, or we do it for you, on the Vietnam Immigration Department's e-visa portal. There is no interview and nothing to hand in. The application needs a photo of your passport's data page and a recent portrait photo, and asks for your travel dates, the airport where you will enter Vietnam and your first hotel address.

The fee is USD 25 for a single entry, about NPR 3,900, or USD 50 for multiple entries, paid online with a dollar card. It is not refunded if the visa is refused. The visa allows a stay of up to 90 days within the dates you ask for, so ask for a period that starts a day or two before your flight and ends a few days after it, which costs nothing extra. Allow three to five working days for the result, and apply about two weeks before you fly.

The visa is issued for the entry airport you put on the form. Put the airport where your flight first lands in Vietnam, which is why we settle the route and the flights before we apply. The Vietnam Consulate in Kathmandu, on Rani Devi Marg in Lazimpat, helps with trips the e-visa does not suit, such as business visits.

Our article on the Vietnam visa for Nepalese goes through each document and each screen of the form.

Every foreign passenger fills in Vietnam's pre-arrival declaration in the three days before landing. It is free, takes a few minutes, and gives you a QR code to show at the immigration desk. Do it on the landing day's side of a long connection, not the day you leave Kathmandu, because it cannot be done more than three days ahead.

Only two addresses are official for the visa, evisa.gov.vn and thithucdientu.gov.vn, and only one for the arrival form. Search results are full of look-alike sites that charge several times the government fee for the same visa, or charge for the arrival form, which is free. If the address does not end in .gov.vn, you are not on the government's site.

There is no direct flight between Kathmandu and Vietnam. You change planes once, most often in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Delhi or Kolkata, and the journey takes between nine and fourteen hours each way depending on the wait. Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City all have international airports, and one e-visa lets you fly into one and out of another, which is how our north-to-south trips are planned.

Buy both flights on one ticket where you can. If the first flight is late and you miss the second, the airline then has to put you on the next one, and you stay inside the transit airport, where no visa is needed. With two separate tickets you may have to collect your bags and check in again, which means entering Thailand or Malaysia, and both ask a Nepali passport for a visa. Fares rise sharply around Dashain and Tihar, so book early for those weeks.

You cannot buy Vietnamese dong in Nepal, and you cannot change Nepali rupees in Vietnam. Nepal Rastra Bank's exchange rate list does not include the dong. Take US dollars, which a bank in Nepal sells you against your passport, ticket and visa, and change them at a bank or a licensed exchange counter in Vietnam. Crisp notes get a better rate than worn ones.

The dong comes in large numbers: one US dollar is about 26,000 dong, so a bowl of noodles costs tens of thousands. Count the zeros on every note, because the 10,000 and 100,000 notes look alike. Hotels, malls and larger restaurants take cards. Street food, markets, boat piers, taxis and entry gates take cash only. Nepal Rastra Bank caps what a Nepali card can spend abroad, and the visa fee comes out of that, so ask your bank how much of the limit you have left before you travel.

Distances look short and take time. Hanoi to Ha Long Bay is about two and a half hours by road, Hanoi to Ninh Binh about two hours, Da Nang to Hoi An 45 minutes, Da Nang to Ba Na Hills about an hour, and Ho Chi Minh City to the Cu Chi tunnels about an hour and a half. Our itineraries are planned around those times.

Cruises on Ha Long Bay are stopped by the port authority when a storm is forecast, most often between June and September, and when winter fog is thick. If that happens we move the cruise to another day of your stay, which is why we never plan it for the day before your flight home. The same goes for boats to the islands off Phu Quoc.

Pagodas and temples ask you to cover your shoulders and knees and to take your shoes off inside. Crossing a street in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City means walking slowly and steadily through the motorbikes, which go around you; do not run or stop suddenly. Use Grab or a metered taxi from the large companies rather than a taxi that approaches you.

The police number in Vietnam is 113, the ambulance 115. Hotels and cruise operators have an English-speaking person on duty, and your first call for a problem on tour is our WhatsApp number, which we answer around the clock while you are away.

Nepal has no embassy in Vietnam. The Embassy of Nepal in Bangkok covers it, so for a lost passport or anything else that needs your own government, contact Bangkok. Save the number before you fly, along with ours.