There is no shortage of beautiful country in northern Vietnam. The real question is not whether Ha Giang is beautiful — it is what makes Ha Giang different.
A UNESCO geopark, and you ride straight through the middle of it
The Dong Van Karst Plateau covers 2,356 km² across the four districts of Quan Ba, Yen Minh, Dong Van and Meo Vac, at 1,000 to 1,600 metres above sea level. UNESCO recognised it as a Global Geopark in 2010.
What matters is not the title. This is not an attraction with a gate and a ticket office; it is the whole landscape you ride through for days on end. Stone is everywhere: stone walls, stone field boundaries, stone packed so tightly that the H’Mong plant their maize in pockets of soil the size of a hand. Nothing about it has been set up as a backdrop.
The Happiness Road
Highway 4C, which links Ha Giang city to Dong Van and Meo Vac, was cut between 1959 and 1965, largely by hand: tens of thousands of young volunteers from many provinces, working with hammers and chisels, roped to the cliff face on the Ma Pi Leng section. They called it the Happiness Road.
Today you ride it in a few hours. But standing at the top of Ma Pi Leng, looking down at the jade-green Nho Que river at the bottom of the Tu San gorge, it is hard to think of it as merely a road.
Seventeen ethnic groups, among them the smallest in Vietnam
Seventeen peoples live on the karst plateau. Alongside the H’Mong, who are the most numerous, are the Lo Lo, Pu Peo, Bo Y and Co Lao — communities of only a few thousand people, and found almost nowhere else.
Which means that in a week in Ha Giang you do not pass through “highland culture” in general. You pass the rammed-earth houses of the H’Mong at Sa Phin, the yin-yang tiled roofs of the Lo Lo at Lung Cu, market days where the dress of four or five different peoples crowds into one square. Every valley is its own place.
Here the road is the reason to go, not the way to get there
That is why Ha Giang belongs to people on two wheels rather than to coaches. Pass follows pass, hairpin follows hairpin, and some of the border tracks are barely wide enough for one vehicle. There are stretches where you will not meet a single car all morning.
It is also why Ha Giang does not forgive carelessness. Fog comes down in ten minutes, wet limestone is as slick as soap, and help is a long way off. Riding Ha Giang properly means having someone with you who knows where to ride and where to stop.
Every season has its reason
- October – November: buckwheat in flower, and the clearest skies of the year.
- January – March: peach, plum and mustard blossom on the terraces; cold, with frost on the summits some years.
- April – June: the water season and the transplanting of rice; the Khau Vai love market falls on the 27th day of the third lunar month.
- September: ripe rice on the terraces of Hoang Su Phi.
July and August are the rainy season, with frequent landslides. We run almost no tours in those two months — and if someone offers to take you across the karst plateau in the middle of the rains, ask them why.
And what Ha Giang does not have
No airport. No cable car to the summit. No enclosed resort where you can spend a week without meeting anyone. If you want to sleep on the karst plateau, you sleep in a village, eat at your host’s table and wash with water heated over a wood fire.
For many travellers that is the drawback. For the ones we hope to welcome, it is the entire point.
Ha Giang Experts is based in Ha Giang. Our guides are local, and Ha Giang Hub and the homestays we build with landowning families are how most of the value of your trip stays in the place that produced it.