Neighbourhoods

Four Hanois, in walking order

The city changes character every few hundred metres, and the changes are legible in the width of the street:

• The Old Quarter — narrow, medieval in plan, loud, and where most visitors stay. Everything is close and nothing is quiet.
• The French Quarter — wide, straight, tamarind-shaded, built from the 1880s. The pavements are actually walkable and the Opera House is at the end of the axis.
• Ba Đình — the government quarter west of the centre: boulevards, embassies, the mausoleum and the citadel. Formal, and largely empty on foot.
• Tây Hồ, on West Lake — lakeside, green, expensive, where much of the foreign community lives. Sunsets, and a completely different pace.

Where to stay, honestly

⭐ The Old Quarter if it is your first visit, because everything is a walk away and being in the noise is the experience. Ask for a room off the street; the tube houses are deep, and the back is another world from the front.

The French Quarter is the compromise: ten minutes from the lake, and you can sleep. Tây Hồ is lovely and is a car ride from everything on this site — a good second visit, a poor first one.

⚠️ The address is not always the address

Hanoi numbering runs in ngõ and ngách — alley, and alley off the alley — so "12 ngõ 34" is a real and common address that a driver finds by going into the lane. Have it written in Vietnamese with the diacritics, and expect the last thirty metres to be on foot.