Motorbike to Ha Giang Loop on your own : is that safe or not to do

Is that safe to do motorbike on our own to Ha Giang Loop?

Working as a sale executive in Golden Holiday Travel (which provides many useful travel information about Ha Giang region), we are sometimes asked the questions by our customers whether it is safe to do their own adventure on motorbike to Ha Giang Loop? It is a question that I would like to share the answer on this blog about my Ha Giang exploration experience on motorbike, the road challenges in Ha Giang Loop & notes when doing the moped adventure to this challenging loop so you can get a reference and plan your trip ahead on your own way.

Motorbike trip to Ha Giang in Ma Pi Leng Pass

Beautiful Ha Giang Loop & its challenging passes

Ha Giang Loop covers the bordering areas of Dong Van, Quan Ba, Meo Vac & Yen Minh districts –the main area of Global Dong Van Geopark geologically formed 500 million years ago. Ha Giang loop offers breathtaking landscapes of Dong Van Geopark with rocky mountains & deep chasms, surely that you will have a great exposure to pristine natures, beautiful photograph of your lifetime,and interesting interaction with friendly local tribes.It is the trip that you should do if you‘d love to explore less frequent tourist place & authentic local cultures when planning a trip to Vietnam.

A part of the steep & winding Ma Pi Leng Pass

The loop is so stunning with scenery but is characterized by many steep & winding passes up along the mountain ranges & facing up deep valleys on the other side. The typical ones I must mention are Quan Ba Heaven Gate ( the top point in Quan Ba district),  Ma Pi Leng Pass – the king of pass in Vietnam -22km long between Dong Van & Meo Vac, Chin Khoang ( Nine Loops between Dong Van & Yen Minh), Bac Sum, M letter Pass….

M letter Pass between Meo Vac & Yen Minh

Our motorbike adventure on Ha Giang loop.

Though being quite experienced in driving motorbikes in my daily life, I was really scared & socked when controlling a moped with my company partner on our recent adventure to Ha Giang’s nothern districts ( Quan Ba, Yen Minh, Lung Cu, Dong Van & Meo Vac).The fears were constantly available when facing dangerous passes without experienced skills of driving up the steep & curving passes on the small roads (especially careless truck drivers driving fast occupied our lane oppositely).

Challenge Pass in Ha Giang Loop

Another constant worry was that the motorbike may get the brake problems or flat type in the middle of nowhere (no repaired motorbike shop around to get the support).In fact, not much experience in driving motorbike on mountain terrain, I did use the brakes & gears unproperly, leading to some dangerous situations when driving down the pass, the moped did not stop as we wanted due to not using the brake & gears correctly.Luckily,we could stop the motorbike by our legs safely, calmed ourselves (after this mistake with a good lession of connecting the gears & brake well) and continued our journey to Ha Giang for our lifetime experiences.

Beautiful Dong Van Geopark

For the safe journey, we tried to drive as slowly as possible to make sure the safety & enjoy the landscapes during the adventure. The speed limit for one hour is about 20km and it took us the whole day travelling from Ha Giang city to Dong Van town and in three day expedition exploring this amazing loop.

In deed, this trip gives us the feeling of scare ( at the beginning),conqueration & courage when jumping over the challenge of 380km ( two way  journey from Ha Giang city- Quan Ba – Yen Minh- Lung Cu- Dong Van- Meo Vac, back to Yen Minh by another route- Quan Ba – Ha Giang. You can read about Ha Giang exploration with motorbike adventure in my previous blog.

The view of Dong Van Geopark from Don Cao bunker

As a foreign tourist, you can consider whether to do this Ha Giang adventure trip by mopeds on your own or you go on the tours organized by travel companies (by the motorbike with driver or by private car with driver)

Notes on doing motorbike adventure on your own to Ha Giang Loop.

If you do the adventure driving the motorbike, you should put some of this information into consideration

–          Get a permit in Ha Giang’s police station to entry Ha Giang’s northern districts.

–          Ha Giang Loop is high up along the mountains with some main towns – 50km far from eachother ( Tam Son, Yen Minh, Quan Ba, Meo Vac) where are available with motorbike repair shops & petro stations, hospitals & hotels.So when you commit this adventure, make sure that the brakes are well operated and fill up the fuels for your motorbike during the journey.

–           Most of people are local hill tribes and many of them can’t speak Vietnamese well.You should arm yourselves a local sim card with internet data uploaded on it which can be useul to use Google Map or translate English into Vietnamese when requesting for the local people’s support.

–          Get the contacts of the motorbike rental company.In case, the motorbike is unluckily broken on the way, you can call for the assistance to get someone coming to repair or getting your motorbike back to Ha Giang (In fact, some of foreign travelers, they rent a motorbike from Ha Giang city, did the adventure from Ha Giang to Quan Ba ( 50km), feeling nervous & scared, they gave up the motorbike trip and rang us to arrange the private car with driver for them to continue the journey.The motorbike they had to send the public bus to Ha Giang city again)

–          Motorbike accidents happened among oversea travellers to Ha Giang Loop on their motorbike trip in the last few years.Just Google Search “ Ha Giang loop accidents", you can get the reference of the bad traffic accident information.

Ma Pi Leng Pass -Ha Giang 

Ha Giang Loop exploration with Golden Holiday Travel

We hope that this answer to the question “is this safe to travel on motorbike to Ha Gaing loop on your own?”is a good reference for your coming trip to Ha Giang. We wish you all will have the same journey of lifetime as we had a year ago ! In need of local travel support for private Ha Giang adventure tours from Hanoi or car hire Hanoi to Ha Giang loop, feel free to drop us an email to [email protected] or contact us at +84.988451530 (viber, whatsapp), our travel consultants will reply you back as soon as possible !

Have a safe & enjoyable trip in Ha Giang !

Golden Holiday Travel Team