SJourney luxury train Vietnam: 8 days from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City

Here’s the thing about Vietnam by train: the country is shaped like an S, 1,700 kilometers from Hanoi in the north to Ho Chi Minh City in the south, and the railway line that runs the whole length of it passes through some of the most scenically extraordinary parts of the country. Most people don’t think about doing the full length on a luxury train because most people don’t know that Vietnam now has one. SJourney — Vietnam’s first luxury train vacation product — launched and is doing exactly this: an 8-day itinerary from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City with daily off-train excursions, a cooking class, a BBQ dinner on a train station platform with a live violinist, fireworks in Hue, basket boat riding in Hoi An, and a tuna show at a restaurant in Phu Yen that I genuinely cannot explain better in a single sentence. Just go with it.

This is not the standard Vietnamese train experience. The standard Vietnamese Reunification Express is fine, it’s a train, it gets you there. SJourney is operating at the other end of the spectrum: proper cabin with actual design intention, curated excursions at each stop, meals that don’t come from a trolley, and the kind of organized chaos that happens when you put a group of people on a train through Vietnam for a week and throw interesting things at them every day. Eight days, eight provinces, Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. Here’s how it breaks down.

What SJourney actually is

SJourney operates as Vietnam’s first luxury train vacation product, running on the existing Vietnamese railway network but with its own dedicated carriages that are a significant step above the standard sleeper trains. The website is vietnamluxuryexpress.com and the 8-day Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City itinerary is the flagship product.

The structure is straightforward: you sleep on the train, you wake up at the next destination, you get off and do things, you get back on, you do it again. The excursions are organized and included. The meals are a combination of on-train dining and off-train lunches and dinners at local restaurants, garden houses, and the occasional train station platform setup that turns out to be more atmospheric than it has any right to be.

The cabin tour section covers what you’re actually sleeping in. It’s not a suite — this is a train — but it’s properly designed, genuinely comfortable, and significantly above the standard Vietnamese sleeper car. For eight nights on moving metal through multiple climates, the quality of the sleeping situation matters more than it does on a one-night train and SJourney has figured this out.

The route – what you’re actually seeing

The 8-day itinerary covers the length of Vietnam from north to south, stopping at eight provinces that between them give you a pretty comprehensive introduction to what the country is:

• Day 1 — Hanoi: boarding and welcome ceremony
• Day 2 — Ninh Binh: Hoa Lu Ancient Capital and Tràng An
• Day 3 — Quang Binh: Paradise Cave and Phong Nha Lake House Resort
• Day 4 — Hue: Imperial City, Incense Village, Tomb of Dục Đức, Royal Lunch
• Day 5 — Quang Nam: Hoi An Ancient Town, Thanh Ha Pottery Village, basket boat
• Day 6 — Phu Yen: Mang Lang Church, weaving village, DAKPHU Restaurant
• Day 7 — Phan Thiet: Tà Cú Mountain, Linh Son Pagoda, The Anam Cam Ranh, fish sauce museum
• Day 8 — Ho Chi Minh City: arrival and farewell

The geography this covers is remarkable — you’re going from the ancient kingdoms of the north through the cave systems of central Vietnam, through the imperial capital, through the ancient trading town of Hoi An, down the coastal provinces of the south, ending in the modern city that still calls itself Saigon. Eight days and you’ve done the whole country in a way that actually makes sense as a narrative rather than a series of disconnected flights.

Day 1 – Welcome ceremony and the cabin

The welcome ceremony runs nearly two minutes of footage and it’s the first indication that SJourney is doing something more intentional than a train with nicer seats. There’s a proper boarding ritual — welcome drinks, introductions, the kind of ceremony that marks the beginning of something rather than just getting on a vehicle. The train market section follows: a pop-up market on the platform before departure with local vendors and produce. It sets the tone for what the next eight days will be — every day has something happening that isn’t just the train moving.

The cabin tour runs nearly four minutes. The space is compact in the way that train cabins are compact, but the design makes the most of it: storage that works, beds that are actually comfortable for sleeping rather than just technically beds, and enough visual quality that you don’t feel like you’re camping. For eight nights of this, you need it to feel like a retreat between excursions rather than a vehicle between hotels, and it mostly succeeds at that.

Day 2 – Ninh Binh: the first kingdom

Hoa Lu was the capital of Vietnam’s first unified kingdom in the 10th century — temples, ancient citadel remains, the kind of historical site that would be crawling with tourists if it were in Europe and is instead relatively serene in northern Vietnam. The stone temple complexes dedicated to the Dinh and Le dynasties are genuinely impressive and the surrounding landscape — the karst limestone formations that run through this region — makes the approach to the site one of the more scenic morning arrivals of the trip.

Tràng An gets nearly eight minutes of coverage, which reflects how much is there. The boat trip through the Tràng An landscape complex — UNESCO World Heritage Site, limestone karsts, caves, grottoes, and the winding waterways between them — is one of those experiences that requires no hyperbole. You’re rowing through a landscape that looks prehistoric in the best possible way and the light on the water through the cave passages does things that photographs can’t quite capture. Budget the time here and don’t rush the boat route.

Day 3 – Quang Binh: caves and cooking

Paradise Cave — Thiên Đường Cave — is one of the longest dry caves in Asia at over 31 kilometers of mapped passage, and the section open to visitors is long enough to make the scale register properly. The stalactite and stalagmite formations here are on a different scale from the smaller cave systems elsewhere in Vietnam: cathedral-ceiling spaces, columns that took millions of years to form, lighting that’s sympathetic to the formations rather than turning them into a theme park. The coverage runs over a minute and a half but you need more than that inside — budget two to three hours for the cave visit itself.

Phong Nha Lake House Resort is the overnight stop and the cooking class here is one of the better activity moments of the trip — you’re learning to cook Vietnamese food in the region where Vietnamese cave cuisine has been a tradition for generations, with local ingredients from the surrounding area. The train station BBQ dinner that follows is the one that the coverage makes look better than it sounds: outdoor dinner on a station platform, long tables, live violin, the warm evening air of central Vietnam. It’s one of those improvised-feeling luxury moments that turns out to be one of the better dinners of the trip.

Day 4 – Hue: the last empire

Hue gets fireworks. Not metaphorically — actual fireworks, which apparently happen during the stay and which the footage covers at the 42:55 mark. When a Vietnamese imperial city provides its own pyrotechnic punctuation to your visit you just accept it and enjoy it.

The day starts with a cycle rickshaw ride through the city — the right pace for Hue, which is a city that rewards slow movement rather than efficient sightseeing. Hue Imperial City is the Forbidden Purple City, the imperial seat of the Nguyen dynasty that ruled Vietnam until 1945 — the walls, the moats, the ceremonial halls, the scale of the complex all reflect the ambition of the last Vietnamese imperial dynasty. The coverage runs nearly two minutes but you need three to four hours inside the complex to do it properly.

The Incense Village stop is one of those small-craft-industry visits that sounds like a tourist detour and turns out to be genuinely interesting — the production of Vietnamese incense sticks as a village craft industry, the colors of the drying incense arranged for photography that happens to be how they’re actually made. The Tomb of Dục Đức is quieter and less visited than the main imperial tombs, which makes it worth the stop for exactly that reason.

The Royal Lunch at Ancient Hue Garden Houses runs nearly five minutes and it’s the food highlight of the entire trip. These are private historic garden houses in the Hue style — traditional architecture, inner gardens, the domestic aesthetic of imperial-era Hue gentry — now hosting a royal lunch menu that draws on imperial Hue cuisine traditions. Imperial Hue food is one of the most elaborate regional cuisines in Vietnam: small, precisely prepared dishes, dozens of courses, the refinement that comes from centuries of cooking for royalty. Eating it in a historic garden house in Hue is the version of this experience that you can’t replicate anywhere else.

Day 5 – Quang Nam: Hoi An

The day starts with a war jeep ride, which is either your thing or it isn’t, but the Quang Nam province context for it — this is the former DMZ region — makes it more than just a novelty vehicle. Au Lac Wood Art covers traditional Vietnamese wood carving — you try it, it’s harder than it looks, the craftspeople are very patient about this — and Thanh Ha Pottery Village follows the same pattern: traditional craft, hands-on attempt, much more respect for the craft afterward.

The basket boat ride is three minutes of footage and it’s the activity that everyone ends up photographing but that’s also genuinely fun — the traditional circular woven bamboo boats that Vietnamese fishermen have used for centuries, which spin when paddled, which the local boatpeople navigate with complete ease and which tourists navigate with considerably less. Lunch at a local house follows and then Hội An Ancient Town at the golden hour when the lanterns are lit and the town looks exactly the way it does in every photograph of it, except you’re there.

Hoi An at night is the version that everyone talks about — the paper lanterns, the yellow-painted facades, the Thu Bon River reflecting the lights — and having it as a Day 5 stop rather than a rushed day trip means you can actually be in it rather than moving through it. The coverage runs nearly three minutes at 53:23 and the footage captures the atmosphere properly.

Day 6 – Phu Yen: the coast

Mang Lang Church is one of Vietnam’s oldest Catholic churches — built in the 19th century by French missionaries in a remote coastal province that most international tourists never reach. The church is beautiful and its survival in a province that changed hands multiple times through Vietnam’s turbulent 20th century is its own kind of remarkable. Phu Tan Mat Weaving Village continues the craft-industry visits that run through the trip as a consistent thread.

And then DAKPHU Restaurant and the tuna show. I’m going to explain this: Phu Yen is one of Vietnam’s main tuna fishing provinces, and DAKPHU does a preparation demonstration of the giant tuna that the local fishermen bring in — cutting, preparation, the whole fish broken down at the table as a culinary performance. It runs nearly three minutes and the scale of the fish involved makes it genuinely theatrical rather than just informative. The scenic train ride section that follows covers one of the most beautiful coastal stretches of the entire journey — the railway here runs directly along the cliff edge above the South China Sea and the footage at 1:02:23 makes the case for a window seat with more conviction than any description can.

Day 7 – Phan Thiet: the Cham culture

Tà Cú Mountain and Linh Son Truong Tho Pagoda are the morning — a cable car up through the jungle to a complex of Buddhist temples with a giant reclining Buddha and views over the coastal plain. Lunch at The Anam Cam Ranh is a proper resort lunch at one of the better hotels on the Cam Ranh coast — the coverage runs over two minutes and it’s the day’s culinary high point before the farewell dinner.

The Fish Sauce Museum (Bảo tàng nước mắm Làng Chài Xưa) is included because fish sauce is to Vietnamese cuisine what wine is to French cuisine and understanding it changes how you taste everything you ate for the previous six days. It’s brief but worth it for the context.

The farewell dinner runs over six minutes of footage — the longest single food section of the trip — and it’s a proper send-off. After seven days of daily excursions, cooking classes, royal lunches, and BBQ on train platforms, a farewell dinner that takes the same approach to ending the journey as the welcome ceremony took to beginning it makes sense. The ritual of it, which would feel excessive on a one-night train, feels exactly right on a week-long journey through the length of a country.

Day 8 – Ho Chi Minh City

Arrival into the city that’s still Saigon to everyone who lives there. Eight days, eight provinces, Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. The return to modern urban life after a week of ancient kingdoms, cave systems, imperial cities, fishing villages, and weaving communities lands differently than it would if you’d flown between them. The train’s pace — the country unfolding slowly through the window over days — gives the arrival in Ho Chi Minh City a sense of proportion that a flight can’t provide.

What this costs and how to book

SJourney pricing isn’t listed publicly in a standard per-night format — the 8-day itinerary is a package and the rate reflects all included excursions, meals, and on-train accommodation. Check current pricing directly at vietnamluxuryexpress.com as rates change seasonally and by cabin category.

Things worth knowing before booking:

• Best season: Vietnam’s climate varies dramatically north to south and the train passes through multiple climate zones in eight days. February to April is generally the safest window — Hanoi and the north are pleasantly warm, the central region (Hue, Hoi An) is in its dry season, and the south is pre-rainy season. October to December is when the central region gets heavy rain — Hue and Hoi An specifically flood regularly in November. Check the itinerary’s specific dates against the regional weather patterns before booking peak rain-season departures
• No loyalty program angles: SJourney is an independent operator, not a hotel chain. There are no Marriott or Hilton points here. It’s a direct booking with a Vietnamese train operator
• What’s included: excursions, on-train meals, and off-train dining at the listed venues. Confirm exact inclusions at booking as the package composition may vary by departure
• Physical demands: some days involve more walking and activity than others — Paradise Cave, Tràng An, and Hoi An on foot are all manageable but not passive. Tà Cú Mountain has a cable car option. Know your group’s mobility preferences before booking

The comparison to make is not with other Vietnamese train journeys — there’s nothing else doing this — but with a 8-day independent Vietnam itinerary cobbled together from flights, hotels, and individual tour bookings. SJourney removes all the logistics, hits the highlights, and adds the thread of the train journey as a narrative spine to the whole thing. For a first visit to Vietnam where you want to cover ground without spending half the trip figuring out connections, it’s a genuinely compelling product.

Frequently asked questions

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