Halong Bay/Tu Long Bay 3D/2N, Ninh Binh and/or Mai Chau are suggestions. Premier is excellent at packaging your trip up nicely including airport pickup and dropoff. Contact Premier through email or phone. See my recent review of Premier.

The tour we got with Huyen at Premier left around 8am on the morning of departure, and got back the following day around 5pm. You could possibly arrange a private trip however I think it would be pretty expensive and actually I quite enjoyed the "all in together" experience, it was pretty friendly and laid back. I've done two Ha Long cruises now and this most recent one was the best, the boat took fewer people, the cabins were excellent and the food was surprisingly good. The most important thing though, our cruise went to a section of the bay where only a limited number of boats are permitted to go. The main area of Ha Long Bay gets a couple of hundred boats a day! We did the Athena cruise, talk to Huyen and she will remember Mr Ben from Melbourne who works in Hanoi a lot - she will look after you! Have fun!

HI Mrquigley, We went there on last November and booked through online. They provide us pick up and drop from Hotels in Hanoi, We have booked through Hanoi brothers in and there service was excellent. There are several package to visit Ha Long Bay. You can stay one night on boat, you can stay another night on an island called, Catba island, which is also beautiful. Even you can visit one single day trip to Ha long Bay. However I think one night stay on boat will provide a different feeling. The price are almost same to all operator (around 100-150$). I can't paste here the link as tripadvisor rule. I can send you in mail if you want. Thanks & Regards, Hasan Rana