Twelve days in northern Vietnam: Hanoi, Ninh Binh and the Ha Giang loop

What to take away

• Book the Ha Giang loop and the bus to it first. Everything else in the north is flexible.
• Ninh Binh does what a Ha Long day trip promises, for a fraction of the day.
• Take an easy rider unless you ride at home. The passes are not the place to learn.
• Sleeper buses are genuinely comfortable and genuinely 190 cm long. Plan accordingly.
• Leave one flat day at the end. Twelve days of this pace without one is a mistake.

The loop is the trip. Book it before the flights are cold.

Ha Giang is the reason most people go north, and it is the one element of a Vietnam itinerary with real supply limits. In high season the good easy rider outfits are full a week or two out, the sleeper buses from Hanoi sell their good seats first, and the homestays on the second night of the standard route fill up.

The standard loop is three days and two nights, roughly 350 kilometres, running Ha Giang to Yen Minh, Dong Van, the Ma Pi Leng Pass, Meo Vac and back. Four days exists and adds the Du Gia side, which is quieter and where the road gets worse in a way most people enjoy.

You have three options: ride yourself, ride pillion with an easy rider, or take a car with a driver. Ride yourself only if you ride at home and have the licence for it, because the Ma Pi Leng is a shelf road with a several hundred metre drop, gravel patches and lorries. Two of us went pillion, one drove her own bike, and the fourth took the car for a day when her knee gave out and rejoined at Dong Van.

• Three days and two nights is the standard. Four adds Du Gia and is quieter.
• Easy rider with homestays, food and fuel ran us roughly 3.5 to 4.5 million dong each.
• Helmets provided are legal minimum. Bring a better one if you are riding yourself.
• The Nho Que river boat under the pass is worth the detour and the queue.

Ninh Binh is what the Ha Long day trip is trying to be

Ha Long Bay is real and spectacular and, as a day trip from Hanoi, is mostly a bus. Four hours out, three hours on a boat sharing a bay with a hundred other boats, four hours back. If you want the water, sleep on it: an overnight in Lan Ha Bay, the quieter section next to Ha Long, is a completely different experience for about the same money once you count the day you did not lose.

Ninh Binh is the same karst landscape, two hours from Hanoi by train or bus, with the mountains rising out of rice fields instead of the sea. The Trang An boat route is rowed by a woman who has done it ten thousand times, takes two to three hours, and passes through cave tunnels you have to duck for.

Do the boat in the morning and Mua Cave in the late afternoon: about five hundred steps up a limestone spire for the view over Tam Coc, and hot enough at midday that people give up halfway. Two nights in Ninh Binh with a rented bicycle is one of the better decisions available in the north.

Hanoi, and the train street question

Hanoi is best treated as two cities. The Old Quarter is dense, loud, and where you will spend evenings on a plastic stool drinking bia hoi for around 10,000 dong a glass. The French Quarter and the area around West Lake are where you go when you need the volume turned down.

Train street has been closed, reopened and closed again more times than any guide can track. Cafes along the tracks get shut by the police, then quietly operate again. Treat it as a maybe rather than an anchor of your plan, and do not build a day around it.

The things that reliably deliver: egg coffee in a hidden upstairs cafe, the Temple of Literature early, the Vietnamese Women's Museum, bun cha for lunch somewhere with a queue of office workers, and an evening walking the lake. Museums close at lunchtime here more often than anywhere else we have planned for, which is the single most common reason a Hanoi day falls apart.

Sleeper buses, trains and the moving parts

Vietnamese sleeper buses are better than they sound. Reclined pods, a blanket, shoes in a bag by the door, and a curtain. They are also built for a body around 170 cm, so if you are tall, book the back row or the limousine variant with fewer, larger beds.

Hanoi to Ha Giang is roughly six to seven hours and is usually done overnight, arriving at five or six in the morning, which is exactly when the loop wants to start. Hanoi to Ninh Binh is easier by train, two hours and cheap, and the station in Ninh Binh is a ten-minute ride from the homestays.

Grab works in Hanoi for both cars and bikes, and a Grab bike is the fastest and cheapest way across the Old Quarter by a large margin. Cash still runs most small transactions outside the cities, though QR payment has spread fast enough that the ratio flipped in the last two years.

Four people, one shared wallet and a lot of small notes

The costs in northern Vietnam are small and constant. A bowl of pho for 40,000 dong, a coffee for 25,000, a homestay bed for 150,000, a park ticket for 250,000, all paid by whoever has notes at that moment. Over twelve days it adds up to real money and to a genuinely unreconstructable mess.

The loop makes it worse, because the easy rider package gets paid as one lump by one person and then everyone owes a share of it, and the entrance fees and lunches along the way are paid by whoever is standing at the front.

We ran one shared kitty for the loop and logged everything else as it happened. Total for twelve days, excluding flights, came to around 620 euros a head including the loop, the boat night and every meal. Settling took one round of transfers on the last morning.

Questions travellers ask

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