The second day is the Ba Đình morning, and it is a morning rather than a day because of one closing time. Done in the right order it is four sights in four hours, all within a few hundred metres of each other.
⛔ Check the mausoleum before you plan this at all. It is traditionally shut on Mondays and Fridays and it closes for several weeks most years while the body is maintained.
The plan
- Day 1 — As the one-day plan.
- Day 2, 07:30 — ⛔ Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum first, because it is the only thing here with a hard deadline. Shoulders and knees covered, no shorts, hands out of pockets, bags and cameras into the locker before you join the line.
- 09:00 — Straight on to the One Pillar Pagoda two minutes away, and the stilt house and gardens behind the presidential palace. Five minutes at the pagoda is genuinely enough — it is the size of a garden shed.
- 10:00 — The Imperial Citadel of Thăng Long: Đoan Môn, up on the gate, then ⭐ D67, the concrete command bunker in the gardens behind with the maps still on the table. ⚠️ Most visitors never cross the road to the excavation at 18 Hoàng Diệu, which is on the same ticket and is where the thousand years is visible.
- 12:00 — Lunch near the citadel, then fifteen minutes’ walk south.
- 13:30 — The Temple of Literature. Go straight through to the third courtyard for the eighty-two doctors’ stelae on their tortoises, and see Khuê Văn Các on the way back out — it is the building on the 100,000-dong note in your pocket.
- 15:30 — Walk or ride back east. Hoa Lo Prison is on the way and takes an hour and a half; ⚠️ it is heavy going and it is not a museum for small children.
- 18:00 — Back to the lake for the evening. Two days is enough to have earned a second bia hơi.
⚠️ Reverse this day and it fails. Everything except the mausoleum is open in the afternoon; the mausoleum is not, and no amount of walking faster fixes it.
What this plan is built around
Not a list of sights, but the constraints. ⛔ The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum is mornings only, is traditionally closed on Mondays and Fridays, and shuts altogether for several weeks most years — so it goes first in any day it appears in, or it does not appear at all. ⚠️ The food stalls sell out: breakfast before eight, lunch before one, and a famous bún chả at three in the afternoon is a shutter. ⭐ The Old Quarter core closes to traffic from Friday evening to Sunday night, which is the best evening of the week and the one to keep free. And everything else is walking — twenty-five minutes between clusters at eleven in the morning, an hour at half past five.
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Other lengths
Checked on 7 September 2026. Closing days, dress rules and journey times change — confirm before you travel. All sixteen sights, one page each, in Landmarks & Sights.