Ha Giang Experts is a travel company based in Ha Giang. We run journeys of discovery by motorbike and by car — across the Dong Van karst plateau, along the border road, through the mountain provinces of northern Vietnam, and further out into Laos, China, Central Asia and long cross-border expeditions.
Where we come from
The founder of Ha Giang Experts has thirty years in expedition travel, in Vietnam and in a number of other countries, much of it on routes nobody was selling as a tour at the time. Those thirty years left two things behind: a file of routes you will not find on any website, and a list of mistakes that must not be repeated.
Both of them are built into the way we work today.
Your guide is from here
Ha Giang Experts’ guides come from the local ethnic minority communities, born and raised in the very areas the tours cross. We recruit them in the villages, train them in the profession and in leading a group safely, then send them into the field alongside more experienced guides for a long time before they lead a group on their own.
That is different from hiring a guide up from Hanoi. Someone from here knows which house has a death in the family and should not be visited, knows what leafy branches hung at a village gate mean, knows what the head of the household likes to be asked about. And when you sit down to eat in a rammed-earth house, you are not a stranger who turned up — you are the guest of someone they know.
What we sell
- Ha Giang tours — the karst plateau, the border road, Ma Pi Leng and the Nho Que river, the villages of the H’Mong, Dao and Lo Lo.
- Northeast and Northwest tours — Cao Bang, Ba Be, Dien Bien, Lai Chau, Son La, the Da river.
- Cross-border tours — Laos, China, and long expeditions into Central Asia, Europe and South America.
- Tailor-made trips — built around your dates, your group, the machine you want to ride and the level of difficulty you are after.
We do not run scheduled mass departures with strangers thrown together. Every trip is built for one particular group, and the number of groups we take in a season is limited.
Safety is not a paragraph in a brochure
Our tours go into high mountains, border areas and roads with no rescue service. So:
- Every programme is surveyed, test-ridden and adjusted before it goes on sale. On the same axis we hold several route options at different levels of difficulty.
- All our staff, without exception, are trained in safe group leadership and first aid, and go back to it every month.
- We avoid busy highways in favour of village tracks and border roads — safer, and better.
- July and August are the landslide season; we run almost no tours then and use the time for surveying new routes and for training.
- Insurance is taken at the highest level available for each type of tour.
For how we organise safety, the levels of our guides and the training programme, see Safety first.
What we give back
Tourism here lives off the beauty of the landscape and the culture of the people who belong to it. We think that creates a debt, and we pay it in specific work rather than in a line of commitment.
A share of our revenue goes back into projects in the very villages our tours pass through: paths within the hamlet, water tanks, household sanitation, kindergarten classrooms, and the recovery of songs and dances that had been slipping away. We do it with the community and with local partners, and every project is costed item by item, so that a traveller or a partner who wants to contribute knows exactly where their money goes. See Community development projects.
How we price
We do not compete on price. The price of a trip is what it actually costs to do what we promised: the right machine, a guide who is genuinely qualified, accommodation we have checked, insurance at the proper level, and an operations team following the group 24/7 for the length of the journey.
If you are looking for the cheapest ride in Ha Giang, there are people who do that better than we do. If you want to know exactly what you are buying, we can talk.
Ha Giang Experts — info@hagiangexperts.com