This colourful eight day trip starts with a tour of Hanoi, a city full of lakes, boulevards and Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum. There are three key elements to this tour: trekking in the far north, the famous Sapa market and a cruise on Halong Bay. Trekking, for up to five hours a day, is a great way to explore Vietnam near the Chinese border with its high mountain valleys laced with stunning rice terraces, forests, waterfalls and indigenous hill tribes who inhabit these isolated regions. The dominating Hoang Lien mountain range, the highest in South East Asia, will shadow your route as you trek these paths from one remote village to another. The people who live here are friendly but still unaccustomed to travellers who periodically show up. We will be eating fresh food, cooked over wooden fire pits and experience hill-tribe life that remains virtually uninfluenced by the outside world. We then return to Hanoi to cruise through the stunning limestone islets that have made Halong Bay a World Heritage site, staying overnight on a traditional junk.