There are two ways to ride Vietnam. One is to stay on the national highways, take lunch where the tour coaches park, and shoot your photograph from the spot everyone else shoots theirs. The other is to turn off that road the moment you can. We take the second — and that is the whole reason MotoTours Asia exists.
Why We Leave the Highway
Highways are built to get you there quickly. But a rider rarely needs quick. What you want is a road with rhythm, corners that make you lean, and something on either side worth stopping for.
Small roads give you all of that. The commune road that traces a mountainside, the single-lane concrete strip running between rice terraces, the dirt track after harvest – that is where Vietnam still looks like itself. You travel slower, and you see many times more.
The Crowded Place Isn’t Always the One Worth Reaching
Tuan Anh Nguyen, founder of MotoTours Asia, once put the difference to a foreign journalist like this: “The problem is that in Sa Pa people are used to tourists and are no longer interested in making friends. But in Dong Van it is different.”
That sentence is our routing policy in one line. A village with no souvenir stall gives you a very different evening from a town that has learned to receive visitors. The host invites you to sit down not because you paid, but because you have just come a distance that even they consider far.
The Routes We Ride Most
The northern mountains are our home ground. A few names that recur in our itineraries:
- Ha Giang – Cao Bang: the Ma Pi Leng pass, Dong Van, Lung Cu and the Ban Gioc waterfall – but reached on the small branch roads, away from the tourist traffic.
- The border patrol route: hugging the frontier, thinly populated, with the surface changing under you all day.
- The northwest in golden season: Tu Le, Khau Pha and Mu Cang Chai timed to the ripening rice.
- Ba Be: the lake, primary forest, the Puong cave and a night in a Tay family’s house.
- Dien Bien – Lai Chau: the farthest corner of the northwest, rideable even over Tet.
Riding Slowly Is a Deliberate Choice
We do not build tours around collecting as many sights as possible. A good day is one where you can stop three times without regretting any of them: once for the light, once for a roadside tea stall, once because somebody waved you in.
Bikes are chosen for the terrain, not for the look of them. Every group rides with a leader who knows both the road and the people on it. And if the weather turns, we change the route – because small roads always give you another way through.
If You Are Considering It
You do not need to be a hard rider to come with us. You only need to accept that the finest road is rarely the widest one, and that the place you will remember is rarely on anybody’s must-see list.
MotoTours Asia is a brand of Hidden Horizons Odyssey Co., Ltd.
