Shopping Inside and Outside Hanoi

Arrive in Hanoi. Greeted by your guide at the airport. Transfer to your hotel in the city centre for check-in. Dinner with a 6-century-old specialties of Hanoi: rice vermicelli served with grilled fish and peanut.

You must visit at least a museum in Hanoi before heading to the local shops. Historical Museum, Fine Arts Museum and Museum of Ethnology are highly recommended. The tour will be continued by a cyclo tour for 2 hours for sightseeing and shopping in the old quarter of Hanoi. After lunch the tour guide will escort you to go along the Red River to visit Bat Trang ceramic village, the home of pottery artisans who have been wellknown since 15th century for their superb crackle, celadon and other types of porcelain. 40km from Bat Trang is Dong Ky wooden furniture village, where you can view hundreds of talented carpenters making wooden products from precious ebony, rose wood, sandal and pine wood with mother-of-pearl and marble inlays.The products of either Bat Trang or Dong Ky are diversified and easy to carry or ship. Back to Hanoi in late afternoon for dinner and O/N.

Let's be busy with your shopping bags today. The galleries in Hanoi are featured by lacquer ware and lacquered pictures, oil paintings, silk paintings and traditional paintings drawn or woodblock-printed on "giay do", a special kind of paper made traditionally from rice powder, shell, straw and other ingredients. The Craft and Boutique Shops, especially in the Old Quarter, offer refined collections of Vietnamese and Chinese silks and linen, handicrafts and decorative fabrics of the hill tribal people, embroidery and beading products, counterfeit antiques and normal utensils made of traditional materials including silver, bamboo, wood and rattan.

Certainly, you need time to pack the results of your shopping tour until your tour guide arrive and accompany you to Noi Bai airport for the onward flight. End of the tour.