Hai Phong, still written Haiphong on plenty of maps and airline boards, is Vietnam's third largest city and the country's most important northern port. Most travelers experience about forty minutes of it, through the window of a minibus running between Hanoi and the Cat Ba ferry, and that's the whole of it. That's a mistake, and a specific one. This is a city with a food culture nowhere else in Vietnam can copy, a French colonial center that never got the tourist treatment, a beach it should be honest about, and a World Heritage listing that changed in 2023 without most guidebooks catching up. Here's what the place actually is, how to reach Cat Ba properly, and how much of your trip it deserves.
Hai Phong Today: A Third City That Just Got Bigger
Hai Phong is a working port and industrial city on the Cam River, and as of last year it's a different place on paper. On June 30, 2025, Vietnam launched a two-tier administration here that merged the entire province of Hai Duong into the city and abolished the district level outright. The expanded city covers more than 3,194 square kilometers, holds over 4.66 million residents, and runs through 114 commune-level units (Vietnam Law and Legal Forum).
Read that carefully, because it's easy to get wrong in both directions. Hai Duong did not become part of Hai Phong's downtown. It joined the same administrative city, and the core you'll visit is exactly the size it was. What changed is the map, and the city's standing as one of six centrally governed cities in Vietnam. That status isn't ceremonial: Hai Phong handles the container traffic for the whole of the north, including the deep-water berths at Lach Huyen that take the largest ships calling anywhere in the country.
⚠️ Maps and addresses are still catching up with the merger. Anything written before mid-2025 uses district names like Le Chan and Ngo Quyen that no longer exist as units, though everyone still says them out loud. Give a driver a street number and a landmark, not a district.
Getting There: Expressway, Train, and Cat Bi Airport
The road is how nearly everyone arrives. The Hanoi to Hai Phong expressway is a modern toll motorway of about 105 kilometers, and in normal conditions it puts the two cities roughly ninety minutes apart. Shared limousine minibuses run it all day from the Hanoi Old Quarter and are the default for independent travelers.
The train is slower and better company. The line is a single-track metre-gauge railway of about 102 kilometers, and the trip takes between two and a half and three hours through rice fields and back gardens. Departures are few, fares are trivially cheap, and the station drops you in the colonial center rather than at a bus park on the ring road. Our guide to train travel in Vietnam explains how booking works.
Cat Bi International Airport sits about ten kilometers out. Its domestic network is strong, with frequent flights to Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang, Nha Trang and Phu Quoc. The international side is thin: a handful of routes to Seoul, Bangkok and several cities in southern China, some seasonal. Almost nobody flies long haul into Hai Phong, so you'll land at Hanoi and come overland, and our notes on getting around Vietnam cover the connections. One paperwork point: the entry point you name on your eVisa application has to match where you physically arrive.
Cat Ba and Ha Long Bay: The Listing Most Guides Missed
Here's the fact that reshapes this corner of the country, and that a startling number of guides still have wrong. Ha Long Bay was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1994. In September 2023 the property was extended to take in the Cat Ba archipelago, which belongs to Hai Phong rather than to neighboring Quang Ninh province, and the site is now formally called Ha Long Bay - Cat Ba Archipelago. It's the first World Heritage property in Vietnam to span two provincial governments.
Why that matters to you rather than to a committee: it settles a decade-old argument about whether Cat Ba is the cheap version of Ha Long Bay. It isn't. Same karst seascape, same geology, same listing. What differs is the traffic. Boats out of Ha Long City work a heavily used stretch of water on the Quang Ninh side. Boats out of Cat Ba work Lan Ha Bay, along the island's southern edge, which spreads across roughly 7,000 hectares and takes in close to 400 limestone islands, with far fewer hulls in your photographs. Pick Lan Ha if you want to paddle into a cave, swim off the boat, or see a floating village that still fishes. Our comparison of Ha Long Bay cruises sets out what the money buys on each side.
Cat Ba itself is a proper island, with a national park over roughly half of it. The park holds the last wild population of the Cat Ba langur, a golden-headed monkey found nowhere else on earth and counted in the low hundreds. Don't plan a day around a sighting, but it explains why much of the island stays undeveloped.
Getting to Cat Ba: Ferry, Bus, and a Record Breaking Cable Car
There's no single obvious way to cross, which is why so many travelers hand the problem to a through-bus.
| How You Cross | Typical Time | Lands You At | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boat from Ben Binh | 45 minutes | Cat Ba town pier | Foot passengers |
| Got to Cai Vieng ferry | 15 to 20 minutes afloat | North of the island | Bikes and cars |
| Cable car from Cat Hai | Minutes, plus a transfer | Phu Long, in the north | The view |
| Through-bus from Hanoi | 4 to 5.5 hours | Cat Ba town | Skipping the city |
The car ferry between Got and Cai Vieng is the workhorse: drive out to Got over the Tan Vu to Lach Huyen bridge, cross in about twenty minutes, then cover 25 kilometers of island road into Cat Ba town. The boat from Ben Binh in the city center is simpler on foot, running direct in about three quarters of an hour.
The cable car deserves its reputation. The line from Cat Hai to Phu Long runs 3,955 meters over open water on a three-rope system and hangs from a tower 214.8 meters high, which Guinness World Records recognized as the tallest cable car tower anywhere (Vietnam National Administration of Tourism). It opened in June 2020 and is worth doing once for the view down onto the container terminals.
⚠️ Summer weekends are the wrong time to improvise this crossing. July and August are Vietnamese domestic holiday season, and the Got ferry backs up with cars and motorbikes for hours on a Saturday morning. Go midweek, cross early, or take the passenger boat instead.
The Colonial Center: Opera House, Lake, and Red Trees in May
The French built Hai Phong as a port, and the center still reads like one: a compact grid of broad streets, shaded pavements and tall shuttered buildings between the river and the railway station. It has never been prettified for visitors, which is precisely what makes it worth an hour on foot. The Opera House on the central square is the set piece, a neoclassical theatre from the same colonial impulse that produced the ones in Hanoi and Saigon, and unlike them it stands in a square ordinary people use in the evening.
Tam Bac Lake runs through the old quarter, with a flower market along one side and the city museum in a dark red colonial pile nearby. Walk up from the station along Dien Bien Phu street and you'll pass most of it inside twenty minutes, ending at the statue of Le Chan, the woman general who founded the settlement that became this city.
Then there are the trees. Hai Phong calls itself the city of red flamboyants, and it isn't a marketing line: the royal poinciana is planted along the boulevards in serious numbers. They flower in May, turning whole streets scarlet, and the city runs a Red Flamboyant Flower Festival each May around the anniversary of its liberation on May 13, 1955 (Nhan Dan). Outside that window, they're just trees.
Temples and Battlefields: Du Hang, Elephant Mountain, Bach Dang
Chua Du Hang, on the street of the same name in the old Le Chan district, is the city's most important Buddhist site and the easiest to fit into a half day. Its origins are traced back more than a thousand years, though what stands now is largely a later rebuilding, with a tiered bell tower, an old bronze bell and a courtyard that is genuinely quiet a few minutes from heavy traffic. It's an active place of worship, so cover your shoulders and knees.
About 20 kilometers southwest of the center, Elephant Mountain is the outdoor half day. The limestone ridge is riddled with caves and carries Chua Long Hoa, founded in the Ly dynasty, plus a temple to Le Chan and the old wooden communal house at Chi Lai. French researchers digging here in 1930 turned up stone and bronze tools of the Dong Son culture, evidence of more than two thousand years of settlement (Hai Phong City News).
Northeast of the city, where the Bach Dang River meets the sea at Trang Kenh, is the site every Vietnamese schoolchild knows. Three times, in 938, 981 and 1288, Vietnamese commanders drove ironwood stakes into the riverbed at low tide and let the falling water impale invading fleets on them. Ngo Quyen won the first and ended a thousand years of northern rule. The relic complex at Bach Dang Giang gathers shrines to Ngo Quyen, Le Hoan and Tran Hung Dao around a display of recovered stakes. There's almost no English signage, so read up first.
Do Son: An Honest Assessment of the City Beach
Do Son is the peninsula about 20 kilometers southeast of the center, and it has been Hai Phong's seaside resort since the French built villas on the headland. It has a real hill-station atmosphere, a former imperial villa associated with Bao Dai on the high ground, pine trees, a casino, and a line of seafood restaurants where the city comes to eat crab on a Sunday.
What it does not have is good swimming. The Red River delta empties an enormous load of silt into this stretch of coast, and the water at Do Son is brown year round, more so after rain. That's sediment rather than pollution, but the effect is the same: this is not a tropical beach and no amount of optimistic photography will make it one. Vietnamese visitors know that and come anyway, for the air, the sunset and the seafood, sold by weight at the shacks along the front. If white sand is the point of your trip, our roundup of the best beaches in Vietnam points at the coasts that deliver it. Do Son's other draw is the buffalo fighting festival, held in the eighth lunar month and usually falling in September.
⚠️ Treat Do Son as an evening trip, not a beach day. Arrive late afternoon, walk the headland while the light is good, eat crab at a seafront place, then go back into the city. Booking two nights here on the strength of the word "beach" is the most common mistake visitors make in Hai Phong.
Food in Hai Phong: The Real Reason to Get Off the Bus
If you take one thing from this guide, take this. Hai Phong has the most distinctive regional cooking of any Vietnamese city outside Hue, and unlike Hue it has barely been exported. Eating here isn't a side benefit of a stopover. For a lot of travelers it's the whole justification.
Banh Da Cua: The Dish That Belongs to This City
Banh da cua is the signature, and it belongs to Hai Phong in a way pho does not belong to Hanoi. The base is banh da, a broad rice noodle sun-dried to a deep reddish brown, chewier and more assertive than the soft white noodles used elsewhere, traditionally made at Cau Dat. The broth comes from paddy crab pounded shell and all, strained, then cooked until the protein sets into soft rafts on the surface. Into the bowl go those crab curds, fried fish cake, betel leaf, water spinach stems, herbs and a spoonful of chili. Every neighborhood has a counter that opens at dawn and sells out by mid-morning, and Cau Dat and Lach Tray are where locals will send you.
Nem Cua Be: Square Rolls, Not Round Ones
Everywhere else in Vietnam the fried spring roll is a cylinder. In Hai Phong it's a flat square parcel the size of a coaster, packed with sea crab meat, minced pork, egg, wood ear mushroom, carrot and vermicelli, deep-fried and cut into blocks. It's eaten with bun and a dipping sauce made from Cat Hai fish sauce, from the island you cross on the way to Cat Ba. Longstanding places sit at 87 Cat Cut street and 372 Lach Tray street (Viet Nam News).
Banh Mi Cay: A Baguette the Size of Your Finger
This one exists nowhere else and costs almost nothing. Banh mi cay, also called banh mi que, is a baguette about the width of two fingers, brushed with oil and baked over charcoal until it shatters, filled with homemade pork liver pate and finished with chi chuong, the local chili sauce built from chili, tomato, garlic and salt. They sell for a few thousand dong each, roughly ten to the dollar, and nobody buys one. You buy five and eat them walking. The shop known as Ba Gia on Le Loi street is usually credited with starting the trend, and there are well-known stalls on Dinh Tien Hoang street and around the Cot Den crossroads.
Oc: The Evening Sport
After dark the city eats sea snails. Oc stalls set out low plastic stools and you order by species and cooking method: steamed with lemongrass, stir-fried in garlic butter, grilled with scallion oil, or done with tamarind. It arrives with a pin to pick the meat out, a sauce sharpened with ginger and chili, and beer. To understand how northern cooking differs from the center and the south, our Vietnamese food guide breaks it down region by region.
Where to Stay: The City, Do Son, or Cat Ba
Stay in the city center if you want the food, the colonial streets and an early ferry. Hotels here are business-grade rather than boutique, built for engineers and shipping agents, which means reliable air conditioning, fast internet, breakfast that stops at nine, and rates well below Hanoi. The area around the Opera House and Tam Bac Lake is walking distance from most of what's worth seeing.
Do Son is a different proposition. Resorts on the headland are quiet and breezy, aimed at domestic weekenders, and out of season near empty. Pleasant to sleep in, bad to base yourself in, because you're 20 kilometers from the food and on the wrong side of the city for the ferry. Cat Ba is where your nights should actually go: the town runs from hostel dorms to sea-view hotels, and Lan Ha Bay has floating and shore-based options for people who want to wake up on the water. Our guide to where to stay in Vietnam covers how the northern coast compares with the rest of the country.
The Verdict: One Night in the City, Two on Cat Ba
Straight answer: Hai Phong is worth stopping for on its own merits, but only just, and only for one night. The food alone justifies it. The colonial center, the Opera House square and Chua Du Hang fill a pleasant half day. Elephant Mountain and Bach Dang Giang are rewarding if you have a car and an interest in Vietnamese history. That's a night and a day, not a week.
What changes the calculation is Cat Ba. If you were going to see Ha Long Bay anyway, the Cat Ba side gets you the same World Heritage seascape with fewer boats, a national park to walk in, and a city with a serious kitchen at the end of the ferry. Travelers who bus straight through from Hanoi and back have made a defensible choice about time and a poor one about food.
So: one night in the city, two on the island, and take the train in at least one direction. Hai Phong doesn't perform for visitors, and people who like that about a place tend to like this one.