MOTORCYCLE TRAVEL IN Vietnam

Riding the Ha Giang Loop by motorcycle became, in barely over a decade, the near-automatic answer to any search about motorcycle travel in Vietnam — Hà Giang city used to see only a handful of tourists until word of mouth among backpackers and travel videos turned it into the country's most-ridden circuit.

The heart of the loop is Mã Pí Lèng by motorcycle, a stretch of just 20 km hand-carved between 1959 and 1965 into a cliff face 1,500 meters up, above the Nho Quế River canyon. The work was part of the so-called Đường Hạnh Phúc — the Happiness Road — a name Ho Chi Minh himself gave it in 1961, built by more than 2,300 workers from 16 different ethnic groups, many suspended by ropes to chisel the rock.

Below, the Nho Quế canyon — known locally as Tú Sản — is considered one of the deepest river gorges in Southeast Asia, and the whole Đồng Văn karst plateau holds UNESCO Global Geopark status.

Riding Hải Vân Pass by motorcycle means covering the stretch of road Jeremy Clarkson described in Top Gear's 2008 Vietnam Special as "a deserted ribbon of perfection" and one of the best coast roads in the world — the line that cemented this route on every international rider's map.

For centuries, the pass marked a real border between two kingdoms: it separated Champa from Đại Việt from 1306 until the Vietnamese conquest of 1471, and a 17th-century poem went so far as to call it Vietnam's most dangerous mountain.

Today it climbs to just 496 meters above sea level, but from the summit the whole Đà Nẵng bay opens up in a single view. Since the Hải Vân Tunnel — the longest in Southeast Asia — absorbed nearly all truck and bus traffic, the old road has emptied out, left almost entirely to motorcycles and cyclists.

Riding the Ho Chi Minh Trail by motorcycle means following, on modern, nearly traffic-free pavement, the corridor the U.S. National Security Agency once called "one of the great achievements of military engineering of the 20th century."

The original network — built starting in 1959 by the 559th Transportation Group under Colonel Võ Bẩm — crossed mountains between 500 and 2,400 meters high, under triple-canopy jungle, and eventually stretched over 2,000 km across Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to supply the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army. Over Laos alone, more than 433,000 tonnes of bombs fell in 1969 as Allied forces tried to cut it.

Today's Ho Chi Minh Road retraces much of that path as a nearly empty development highway, running through Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park — a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2003, home to Sơn Đoòng, the largest cave in the world — and passing near the former Khe Sanh Combat Base, in the demilitarized zone that once split North from South Vietnam.

Climbing Ô Quy Hồ Pass by motorcycle means riding Vietnam's longest mountain pass: nearly 50 km along National Route 4D, climbing the Hoàng Liên Sơn range to 1,991 meters, at a point Vietnamese themselves call Cổng Trời — Heaven's Gate.

It sits just a few kilometers from Fansipan, the highest peak in all of Indochina at 3,143 meters, and from the summit you can see both the Sa Pa valley on the Lào Cai side and the mountains of Lai Châu on the other — two-thirds of the pass falls within Lai Châu, the rest in Sa Pa.

Locals nickname it the "king of passes" of the northwest, and legend has it the name imitates the mournful cry of a bird searching for its lost mate in the fog. It's also the only spot in Vietnam where, deep in winter, frost or even snow can appear on the pavement.

Riding Khau Phạ Pass by motorcycle means crossing, between 1,200 and 1,500 meters of altitude, one of the four peaks Vietnamese themselves group together as Tứ Đại Đỉnh Đèo — the country's four great passes.

The road links the villages of La Pán Tẩn, Chế Cù Nha, Nậm Có and Tú Lệ, all part of Mù Cang Chải, Vietnam's most photographed rice-terrace region, carved over generations by the H'Mông and Thái communities.

Two-thirds of the road remains unpaved, on a red basaltic soil that crumbles easily and causes frequent landslides; before 1945, Vietnamese guerrilla fighters used the area's constant fog to ambush French military columns.

Climbing Pha Đin Pass by motorcycle means riding to 1,648 meters between Sơn La and Điện Biên provinces, on a road whose Thai-language name — Pha (sky) and Đin (earth) — sums up exactly what it feels like at the summit.

During the 1954 Điện Biên Phủ campaign, around 8,000 volunteers crossed this pass on foot and by bicycle carrying weapons and supplies for Vietnamese troops, while French general de Castries bombed it for 48 straight days trying to cut the supply line — without success.

Since a lower bypass was built between 2006 and 2009, some 200 to 400 meters below the original road, the old route has emptied out of trucks and buses, left today almost entirely to riders chasing the tight curves and the view over the valley.

Leaving Hanoi on the Mai Châu - Mộc Châu loop by motorcycle is the classic weekend trip for any rider based in the capital: it climbs National Route 6 over the Thung Khê Pass — locals also call it "heaven's gate" — before dropping into the Mai Châu valley.

There, the White Thai community lives in wood-and-bamboo stilt houses — Bản Lác village is the most visited — surrounded by rice paddies farmed the same way for generations.

Further on, the Mộc Châu plateau climbs to around 1,050 meters, where the cool climate allowed for tea plantations and Vietnam's first modern dairy farm, and where plum and peach trees both bloom every December. Anyone who adds the Pu Luông Nature Reserve on the way back finds the same rice terraces and karst formations of the north, just a day's ride from Hanoi.

Climbing up to Đà Lạt by motorcycle on National Route 20 means leaving the tropical heat of southern Vietnam behind to enter, within a few hours, a city that stays cool year-round at 1,500 meters above sea level, on the Lâm Viên Plateau.

Swiss-French doctor Alexandre Yersin discovered the area in 1893 while surveying the highlands for the Pasteur Institute, and from 1907 the French turned it into a hill station to escape Saigon's heat, with an Alpine-style urban plan of villas and boulevards designed by architect Ernest Hébrard.

The final stretch enters the city over Prenn Pass, through pine forest and waterfalls, and that steady climate — between 14 and 23 degrees year-round — earned it the nickname "the city of eternal spring."

Descending Ngoạn Mục Pass by motorcycle — its name literally means "spectacular" in Vietnamese — means dropping nearly 800 meters of altitude in just 18 km, on the steepest grade of any pass in southern Vietnam: over 9 degrees on average, resolved in four tight zigzagging hairpins.

The road follows the same route French captain Thouars mapped in 1897, four years after Yersin discovered Đà Lạt, when the pass was still called Bellevue. In 1917 the French built a cog railway up those same slopes to reach the highlands, one of only a few of its kind in the world at the time.

Today pavement has replaced most of the old track bed, but the landscape hasn't changed: it starts among palm trees and coastal heat near Phan Rang, and ends among pines and cool fog at the gates of D'Ran, on the way to Đà Lạt.

Riding the Quy Nhơn to Phú Yên coast by motorcycle means following the least-traveled shoreline of south-central Vietnam all the way to Gành Đá Đĩa, an outcrop of hexagonal basalt columns stacked like discs — hence its name, literally "reef of stone plates."

The formation dates back millions of years, when volcanic lava cooled and cracked into nearly uniform columns that the surf later carved into horizontal layers; geologically it's a close cousin of the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland and the Jusangjeolli cliffs on South Korea's Jeju Island.

The site was recognized as a national scenic landscape in 1997 and became a Special National Heritage site on December 31, 2020. In the nearby fishing village, a shrine to Nam Hải, the whale god, still stands, built in the mid-19th century during the reign of Tự Đức.