How do I get from one city to the next?
Short answer
Three ways, and one piece of geography behind all of them. The country is a single 2,600 km track averaging 40 km/h, so the train from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City takes 36 hours. Sleeper buses cover the same ground overnight; a flight does it in one to two. Choose per leg, not once for the trip.
Why the train is slow, and why people take it anyway
Vietnam runs on one 2,600 km line from north to south, and it averages around 40 km/h. Stay on the Reunification Express the whole way and the journey is 36 hours. Five services leave each end daily, at 7:30pm, 10pm, 6am, 9am and 1:10pm, stopping at Hue, Danang, Nha Trang and Phan Thiet for Mui Ne along the way.
Four classes are sold: hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper and soft sleeper. Children over five pay the adult fare. Most people who ride it are buying one segment at a time — the overnight legs — rather than the whole 36 hours.
Sleeper buses do the same job differently
Open-tour buses run the major routes between the big cities and the coast, and most of them are sleeper buses or have deep reclining seats rather than upright ones.
Booking a day or two ahead is normally enough. Around Vietnamese holidays the tourism board's own advice jumps to at least two weeks, which is the kind of gap that catches people who assume they can turn up.
Flights collapse the map
A national carrier and low-cost operators fly the same corridor, and a city-to-city hop takes one to two hours against the train's day and a half.
Which makes the useful rule a mixed one: fly the long jumps, take the train or a sleeper bus for the overnight legs where arriving in the morning is the point.
Good to know
- One 2,600 km track, about 40 km/h average
- Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City is 36 hours end to end
- Five departures a day from each end: 7:30pm, 10pm, 6am, 9am, 1:10pm
- Book buses two weeks ahead around Vietnamese holidays
