North-west Loop

The day starts with the least enjoyable hour of the loop. From the Old Quarter, ride south-west along Ton Duc Thang, Tay Son and Nguyen Trai to Ha Dong: about 11 km of dense city traffic, at the end of which the road is QL6, and it stays QL6 all the way to the mountains. Between Ha Dong and Xuan Mai, about 22 km is being widened in a project due to finish in 2027. Through 2026 that meant narrowed lanes, long queues, dust in dry weather and slick mud in wet. The city's stated aim was to open the new carriageway around Tet 2027 and complete the rest in the months after; treat it as a building site until you see otherwise.

At Xuan Mai, 35 km out, the Ho Chi Minh Road crosses, the factories thin out and QL6 becomes a wide, rebuilt highway through Luong Son to Hoa Binh (71 km), a riverside town below the big hydroelectric dam on the Da River and the natural stop for lunch and fuel. Beyond it the road climbs the short, steep Cun slope, runs through the Muong farming country of Cao Phong and Tan Lac, then climbs again to Thung Khe Pass.

Thung Khe is also called White Rock Pass, after its pale limestone cuttings. By the map it tops out a little under 800 m (you will see 1,000 m quoted), but it makes its own weather: it is often sunny in the valley and thick cloud on top, where roadside stalls sell grilled corn to people warming their hands. Nine kilometres past the summit, at Tong Dau junction, turn left onto QL15 for the last 6 km down into Mai Chau: a flat green valley at about 170 m, ringed by hills, with the White Thai villages of Lac and Pom Coong a short walk from the little town.

Back at Tong Dau junction, QL6 gets down to business: it climbs from about 240 m to nearly 1,200 m in under 30 km, past the turnings for the Hmong villages of Hang Kia and Pa Co, and then stays above 1,000 m across the Van Ho uplands. This high stretch is known for dense fog in the cold months, and it can be clear at Mai Chau and near zero visibility here. Moc Chau, 63 km from Mai Chau, sits on a plateau at 800–1,000 m: tea in neat rows, dairy pasture, pine woods and, around the villages, the plum and peach orchards that turn the place white and pink in late winter. It is the obvious lunch stop, and a good place to break the day in two.

Beyond Moc Chau the road drops more than 500 m to the Yen Chau valley, which is noticeably warmer and known for its mangoes, then climbs again to Co Noi. This junction is where the supply lines to Dien Bien Phu came together in 1954, and it was bombed for weeks; a large memorial to the young volunteers who kept the road open stands beside it. From there QL6 runs through Hat Lot to Son La, the provincial capital, at about 600 m.

Son La's main sight is the old French prison on Khau Ca hill in the middle of town, built in 1908, where many of the communists who later led the country were held. Allow about an hour for it and the provincial museum on the same hill. As for the road: QL6 is the lifeline of the whole north-west, so trucks and sleeper buses run all day, and the commonest danger is one of them overtaking towards you on your side. Hold your line near the right-hand edge and let them have the room.

QL6 leaves Son La to the west and reaches Thuan Chau after 33 km: the last town, and the last fuel, before Pha Din Pass. The name comes from the Thai for "sky and earth", and the pass is usually counted as 32 km long. The road was rebuilt and widened between 2006 and 2009, which tamed the worst of the old hairpins, but it is still a serious climb: the final 13 km gain nearly 700 m, with ramps of up to about 10 per cent, to a high point of roughly 1,450 m by the map. (The 1,648 m often quoted is the top of the mountain, where a television mast stands.) In early 1954 this was the main supply road to Dien Bien Phu. Columns of porters, bicycle-pushers and trucks moved guns and rice over it by night under French bombing, and a memorial near the summit, among the viewpoints and tea stalls, records it.

The descent is longer than the climb: about 19 km and nearly 900 m down to Tuan Giao (80 km), a crossroads town with fuel and lunch. Here QL6 swings north towards Muong Lay; you take QL279 west. It is a calmer road: 37 km along a farmed valley to Muong Ang, a coffee-growing town, then over a pass of about 1,000 m and across a high plateau before the long drop into the Muong Thanh valley. This is the largest rice plain in the north-west, roughly 20 km long, and Dien Bien Phu sits in the middle of it. On the way in you pass Him Lam hill, which the French called Beatrice: the first of their strongpoints to fall, on 13 March 1954. The battle lasted 56 days and ended on 7 May.

The main sights are close together in the centre of town: the Victory Museum, with a huge circular painting of the battle; A1 Hill, a few steps away, with its trenches, bunker and the crater left by nearly a tonne of explosives tunnelled under it; the military cemetery; the command bunker of the French commander, de Castries, across the river; and the Victory Monument on D1 hill. The museum closes from 11 am to 1.30 pm and cost 100,000 VND (about US$4) at last report; the hill and the bunker charge much less. Give it a full day rather than a tired evening.

This is the day to take seriously. It is the longest of the loop and the most remote, and QL12 – the only direct road between the two provincial capitals – has had a hard few years. Floods and landslides damaged it badly in 2025; in July 2026 landslides cut it again in several places, and it reopened at first to smaller vehicles only. Repairs and resurfacing were listed along much of it in the second half of 2026. Riders in 2025 and 2026 describe good tarmac for long stretches, broken by landslide sections, gravel and roadworks. Ask at your hotel the evening before, and start early.

The road runs north up the valley through Muong Pon to Muong Cha (51 km), a small town with fuel and noodle shops, then climbs over a pass of about 960 m and makes a long descent to the Da River at Muong Lay (93 km), down at about 230 m. Until 2005 this was called Lai Chau and was once the provincial capital; most of the old town now lies under the reservoir of the Son La hydropower dam, and the new one was built on the slopes above around 2010. It is a quiet place of wide streets and still water, and the right spot for lunch. Leave it by the Hang Tom bridge.

North of the bridge, QL12 follows the Nam Na river for about 70 km through a deep, warm, thinly settled valley that never rises much above 290 m. It is one of the loneliest and loveliest stretches of the trip, with a scatter of villages and not much else. At Phong Tho, which locals call Pa So, turn right onto QL4D for the sting in the tail: a climb of some 800 m in 20 km before the road eases down into Lai Chau, a tidy, spread-out capital at about 900 m, built largely since 2004 beneath a row of limestone peaks.

This day is short on purpose. O Quy Ho – also called Tram Ton or Hoang Lien Pass – is generally reckoned the highest road pass in Vietnam, and you want to cross it rested, in the middle of the day, with time to wait if the top is in cloud. QL4D first climbs out of Lai Chau over a ridge at nearly 1,300 m, drops to Tam Duong (25 km), a market town with fuel, and reaches Binh Lu junction (31 km), where QL32 heads south towards Mu Cang Chai. From the junction the road does nothing but climb for 23 km, gaining about 1,250 m. The pass is counted as almost 50 km long, two-thirds of it on this Lai Chau side.

The top, at about 2,000 m, is the boundary between Lai Chau and Lao Cai provinces. Viewpoint stalls on the Lai Chau side, around the spot known as Heaven's Gate, ask 20,000–30,000 VND (about US$1) for the use of their platforms. On a clear day Fansipan, Vietnam's highest mountain at 3,143 m, fills the view to the south. The pass is also a weather divide. It is common to climb in sunshine and tip over the top into cold, wet fog on the Sapa side, where visibility can drop to a few metres in winter. The 15 km descent passes the Tram Ton ranger station, where the walking route up Fansipan begins, then Love Waterfall (a half-hour forest walk, small entry fee) and Silver Waterfall, which you can see from the road.

Two things to know. First, a road tunnel is being bored under the pass. Work began in December 2025 and drilling in August 2026, with a target of 2027, though projects of this size often run late. Until it opens, every truck and bus still goes over the top with you, and there is works traffic near both tunnel mouths. Second, Sapa is no longer a quiet hill station. It is a busy resort of large hotels and building sites, crowded at weekends and holidays. The setting is still magnificent, and the cure for the crowds is simple: take a rest day and spend it out in the Muong Hoa valley, among the Hmong and Giay villages of Lao Chai and Ta Van.

The only sensible road south from Sapa goes back over O Quy Ho: 15 km up to the top and 23 km down to Binh Lu. This is no hardship. A pass ridden the other way is a different road, and if your first crossing was in cloud you get a second chance at the view. The same rules apply as before: if the Sapa side is in fog, start later, not faster.

At Binh Lu junction turn left onto QL32, and the riding becomes the easiest of the whole loop: a broad valley between 500 and 800 m, with the wall of the Hoang Lien Son range on your left. Tan Uyen (60 km) is tea country, its plantations laid out in neat green stripes on either side of the road. Than Uyen (97 km) is the place for lunch and fuel. It stands on the Muong Than plain, third in the old saying that ranks the four great rice valleys of the north-west; you have already crossed the first, Muong Thanh at Dien Bien Phu, and tomorrow ends in the second, Muong Lo.

South of Than Uyen the road dips to about 450 m and then climbs steadily into what was Yen Bai province. The first rice terraces appear around Khao Mang, on slopes that also produce landslides most wet seasons. Mu Cang Chai is a small, strung-out town beside a stream at about 960 m, with Hmong villages on the hillsides all around. What you see from here on depends entirely on the month; see the note on February below.

The best of the terraces lie along the first 25 km east of town, in the communes of Che Cu Nha, De Xu Phinh and La Pan Tan. More than 2,000 hectares of hillside around Mu Cang Chai have been cut into steps by generations of Hmong farmers, and the finest part, in these three communes, has been a protected national heritage site since 2007. Near Nga Ba Kim (18 km), side roads climb into La Pan Tan and to the round, ringed hill known as Mam Xoi, "the tray of sticky rice", which is the picture on every poster; ask for the turning. The last part is a steep, narrow concrete track. Local riders run a shuttle up it, and in wet weather that is the wiser way to go. What you find depends on the month: flooded, mirror-bright steps in May and June, deep green in July and August, gold from about mid-September until the harvest in early to mid-October, and bare brown earth from November until the spring ploughing. The winter version is handsome in a severe way, but it is not the postcard.

From Nga Ba Kim, QL32 climbs 10 km to the top of Khau Pha Pass, at about 1,500 m. The name is Thai for "horn of heaven", and it is the last of the three great passes on this route. The descent is the memorable part: 18 km and 900 m down, with the Cao Pha valley and the villages of Lim Mong and Lim Thai spread out far below, and paragliders overhead in the harvest season. These slopes slide badly in the rains. In August 2025 half the road was carried away at one point, and repair crews were reported still at work a year later.

Tu Le (46 km), at the foot of the pass, is known for two things: its sticky rice, and the hot springs beside the stream where villagers bathe at the end of the day. Beyond it QL32 crosses one more ridge at about 870 m and then runs gently down for 30 km into Muong Lo, the wide rice plain around Nghia Lo. This is the Thai heartland of the old Yen Bai province and a stronghold of the xoe circle dance, which UNESCO added to its list of intangible heritage in 2021.

Navigation today could not be simpler: QL32 runs from Nghia Lo to the edge of central Hanoi, and you stay on it. The first 60 km wind through the low green hills of Van Chan, among tea gardens and orange groves, with nothing higher than about 400 m. At Ba Khe junction (30 km) QL37 joins for a few kilometres and leaves again; stay on QL32. The road crosses into Phu Tho province near Thu Cuc (62 km) and follows a river valley down through Tan Son to Thanh Son (105 km), a market town where the hills finally give out and lunch is easy to find.

From here it is flat. QL32 shares the Ho Chi Minh Road for the crossing of the Da River on the Trung Ha bridge (132 km) and enters Hanoi's rural western fringe, with the bulk of Ba Vi mountain to your right. Son Tay (152 km) is worth a pause: a small town built around a laterite citadel of 1822, with the old village of Duong Lam, all rust-coloured walls and tiled gateways, just off the road as you approach it.

The last 43 km are suburban: a busy road lined with shops through Phung and Nhon, with the elevated metro line overhead for the final stretch to Cau Giay, then Kim Ma street into the centre. Try to be in before the evening rush, which builds from about 4.30 pm. And give the last hour the same care as the first. Long trips tend to go wrong at the very end, when people are tired, pleased with themselves and thinking about a cold drink by Hoan Kiem Lake.