The Ha Giang loop, five days

At a glance

Duration

5 days, 4 nights

Party size

2 to 8, private

Starts

Hanoi, from your hotel on the morning of Day 1

Ends

Hanoi, Noi Bai airport or a city hotel

Effort

Moderate — the effort is road hours, not walking

From

USD 1,390 per person

Who this is for

People who want the road north of Ha Giang city and are content to look out of the window rather than over a set of handlebars. That road climbs onto a limestone plateau that stands between about 1,000 and 1,600 metres, carries Hmong, Tay, Dao and Lo Lo villages on ground that is mostly bare rock, and ends at a pass with the Nho Que river several hundred metres directly below it. Five days is the honest minimum: two of them are largely driving, and the plateau is 300 km from Hanoi with no airport and no train.

The trip suits travellers who have already seen one or two of the standard northern places and want something with fewer visitors in it, and it suits photographers, because a private vehicle can stop at a bend for ten minutes without twelve other people waiting. It does not suit anyone in a hurry. If you want the plateau plus a Sunday hill market and a second highland province, take the six-day Bac Ha and Ha Giang route; if you want to walk rather than ride, the nine-day northwest trek covers the same kind of country on foot.

This is a private car with a driver, not a motorbike tour

We say this early because most of what is sold under the name Ha Giang loop is a motorbike, either ridden by you or ridden by a local driver with you on the back. We do neither. Your party travels in an air-conditioned vehicle with a driver who runs these passes most weeks of the year, and a guide in the same car. You will get out at every viewpoint the riders stop at, and you will get out at several they pass because there is nowhere to park a bike safely.

The reasons we decline the motorbike version are practical rather than moral. Riding here legally requires a licence Vietnam recognises, and whether a foreign licence or an international permit counts depends on which convention issued it — a great many visitors arrive holding one that does not. Where the licence is not valid, the insurance behind it usually is not either, and a hospital in Ha Giang city will still expect payment. On top of that there is the road itself: single-carriageway limestone with blind bends, quarry lorries, loose gravel after rain, and long unfenced sections above the Nho Que. Fog sits on the plateau for days at a time between December and February.

And there is the point of the trip. On a bike, for hours at a stretch, you look at the next thirty metres of tarmac; the plateau goes past behind your own concentration. In a car you look at the plateau. If riding is the whole reason you want to come, we are the wrong company and we will say so on the phone rather than take a deposit — go to a specialist rider outfit that does nothing else.

Day by day

Day 1

Hanoi to Ha Giang city

Collected from your Hanoi hotel at 07:00. The run north is 300 km and six hours, expressway for the first half and then two-lane road along the Lo river, with a lunch stop and two shorter ones. This day is a transfer and we do not dress it up as sightseeing; what it buys is a night at the foot of the plateau instead of a departure from Hanoi at four in the morning.

You arrive in Ha Giang city in the middle of the afternoon. It is a working provincial town of markets, motorbike shops and a river promenade, not a destination, and two hours on foot with your guide covers it. This is also where the border area permit is collected — see the section below; if we have filed it in advance, all that happens is that your guide hands you a sheet of paper and asks you to keep it with your passport for the next three days.

StaySmall city hotel, Ha Giang, river sideMealsBreakfast, lunchTravel6 hrs, 300 km from HanoiOn foot2 km around the town in the late afternoon

Day 2

Onto the plateau: Quan Ba, Yen Minh, Dong Van

The Quan Ba viewpoint before the day tour traffic arrives from the city

Away at 08:00. The road climbs almost immediately to the Quan Ba pass, where a viewpoint looks down on the Tam Son basin and the pair of symmetrical hills that every photograph of this district contains. From there the surface stays good and the gradient stays serious for most of the day: roughly 150 km to Dong Van, but five to six hours of driving because of the bends, and closer to eight hours door to door once the stops are counted.

The stops are the day. A stretch of pine forest above Yen Minh that looks nothing like the rest of the province; a hamlet of Hmong houses with rammed-earth walls and stone field boundaries built by hand across bare karst; and, before Dong Van, the village of Lung Cam, where a house used in the film Pao’s Story receives visitors and the other twenty do not. Dong Van itself has a small French-period market square and an old quarter of two-storey clay houses; the market fills it on Sunday mornings and is quiet the rest of the week. Dinner is local: buckwheat cake, thang co if you are curious, and grilled pork with mac khen pepper if you are not.

StayHotel or restored clay house, Dong Van old quarterMealsBreakfast, lunch, dinnerTravel5 to 6 hrs of driving, roughly 150 kmOn foot3 km across the day, in short stretches at viewpoints and in villages

Day 3

Lung Cu, the Ma Pi Leng pass and the Nho Que river

The Nho Que boat into the Tu San gorge, mid-afternoon

North first, about 25 km each way, to the flag tower at Lung Cu, which stands on a hill a few kilometres short of the Chinese border and is climbed by a staircase inside the tower. The interest is less the tower than the ground around it: Lo Lo villages, and maize growing in soil that has been carried up and packed into gaps in the rock by hand.

The afternoon is the reason people come. The Ma Pi Leng road runs about 20 km from Dong Van to Meo Vac, cut into the cliff face above the Nho Que, and for several kilometres there is nothing between the outside wheel and a drop of several hundred metres but a low parapet with gaps in it. We stop three times. Below the pass, a boat runs into the Tu San gorge, about an hour on green water between rock walls that close to a slot overhead — a shared boat by default, private on request. You reach Meo Vac in the early evening. It is a smaller and plainer town than Dong Van and its market, on Sunday mornings, is the largest livestock market on the plateau.

StaySimple hotel or stilt-house lodge, Meo VacMealsBreakfast, lunch, dinnerTravelRoughly 90 km across the day, 3 to 4 hrsOn foot2 km, plus the staircase inside the Lung Cu tower and the steps to the boat

Day 4

Meo Vac, then the long road back to Hanoi

If it is a Sunday, be at the Meo Vac market by 06:30, before the buffalo and the crowd sort themselves out; on any other day we walk the town and the terraces above it for an hour instead. Then the drive, and this is the hardest day of the trip: roughly 450 km and nine to ten hours to Hanoi, back over the plateau to Ha Giang city and then south. We break it three times, lunch properly, and you are in your Hanoi hotel in the evening.

We put that number in writing because some operators do not. Nine hours in a car after three days of mountain roads is a real cost, and there are two ways to avoid it: add a night in Ha Giang city and travel back over two easier days, which makes this a six-day trip, or accept it and use the day to sleep. Whichever you choose, the last night is in Hanoi rather than at the airport, so a delay on the road costs you dinner rather than a flight.

StayBoutique hotel, HanoiMealsBreakfast, lunchTravel9 to 10 hrs, roughly 450 km, with three stopsOn foot2 km in Meo Vac in the morning

Day 5

Hanoi, and home

Nothing is scheduled before 10:00 on purpose. If you want the morning, your guide takes you out on foot for two hours: the Old Quarter before the shops fill, coffee, and one thing you missed on the way through. If you want to sleep, sleep.

The transfer to Noi Bai is 45 minutes and 25 km, and we allow three hours before an international departure. Rooms are held to midday and we arrange a late checkout or a shower room for evening flights. Anyone continuing south rather than flying home leaves from the same hotel, and we hand you over to the guide taking the next leg in person.

Stay—MealsBreakfastTravel45 minutes, 25 km to Noi BaiOn foot2 km if you take the optional morning walk

What it costs

The columns buy rooms, and on this route the range is narrow because the plateau has no luxury hotels. Comfortable is a clean two or three-star town hotel with hot water; Excellent is the better end of the same, plus a restored clay house in Dong Van; Exceptional adds the best rooms on the plateau, which are a timber lodge with underfloor heating and a valley view, and a genuinely good hotel for the Hanoi night. Anyone selling you five-star accommodation in Meo Vac is selling you something that does not exist.

What you are mostly paying for here is the vehicle, the driver and the hours. This trip covers around 1,100 km, most of it on mountain roads, and the driver stays with your party the whole time. That is also why party size moves the price so hard: two people carry one vehicle between them, eight carry the same one. See what a Vietnam trip costs for the breakdown, and how to book for deposits, permit lead time and cancellation terms.

Included and not included

Pictures from this route

Who this trip is not for

This route says no to more people than anything else we sell. Five honest reasons.

• Anyone who suffers badly from motion sickness. Days 2 and 3 are almost continuous bends at altitude, and Day 4 is nine to ten hours of the same before the road flattens. Tablets and the front seat help; if a two-hour coach ride is already a problem, this is five days of that problem.
• Anyone frightened of heights in a vehicle. On the Ma Pi Leng pass the drop to the Nho Que is several hundred metres, the road is narrow, and the parapet is low and broken in places. Passengers who cannot look out of the window on that stretch spend the best hour of the trip staring at the seat in front.
• Travellers who want to ride the loop themselves. We do not rent motorbikes, we do not run a pillion service, and we will not put a bike in front of the car for photographs. That is a different product from a different kind of company.
• Anyone with only three or four days. The drive from Hanoi is six hours each way with no flight or train alternative, so a shorter trip is two travel days and one day on the plateau. We would rather send you to Ninh Binh and Pu Luong.
• Parties who need the view guaranteed. From December to February the plateau can sit under fog for two or three days together, at 5 to 10 degrees. The villages and the markets are unaffected and, to some tastes, better; the long views are simply not there, and no refund clause can produce them.

The permit you must carry

Since June 2026 every foreign passport holder travelling this route must hold a border area permit. It is not a formality aimed at the border crossing alone: the requirement covers the districts of Quan Ba, Yen Minh, Dong Van and Meo Vac, which is the whole plateau and every night of this itinerary except the first and the last.

What this means in practice is that we need clear scans of the passport page and the visa or e-visa of every traveller well before departure — the same documents the office wants to see. Send them late and the permit becomes an errand on Day 1 in a government office that keeps its own hours, which is a poor use of the only afternoon you have in Ha Giang city. Carry the permit with your passport for the whole of Days 2, 3 and 4; there are checkpoints, they do stop vehicles, and the guide cannot hold it on your behalf.

One piece of administrative housekeeping that most sites have not caught up with. Since the provincial merger of 1 July 2025, Ha Giang is no longer a province: its territory now forms the northern part of Tuyen Quang province. The road, the passes and the towns are unchanged, the route is still called the Ha Giang loop by everyone including us, and the permit office is still in Ha Giang city — but paperwork issued to you may say Tuyen Quang, and that is correct rather than a mistake. Our page on Ha Giang sets out what else the merger changed, and when to go covers the fog and the cold months in more detail.