Accommodation: homestay
+8:00 am: Our guides will pick you up at your hotel, or you can meet up with us at our tour office to get ready for our Offroad Vietnam Motorbike Tours.
+9:30 am: We’ll head along about 20 km of urban roads to get out of the city. Soon enough, we’ll be riding through bumpy dirt-road running across rice fields, village ponds, and quaint earth dams. You will get to see the quiet, lovely everyday farmer life in rural northern Vietnam motorbike tour today.
+ 10:30 am: We’ll reach the intersection with the Ho Chi Minh trail. After riding 5 km along National Highway 6, we’ll make our first stop at a road-side café before setting off on our next off-road route. Instead of continuing on National Highway 6 or the Safe Zone road, we’ll head off via a small road along Luong Son stream. After 20 minutes of riding through Muong villages, we’ll arrive at the start of our off-road ride. This route only stretches for 25 km, but it is rather challenging. If it rains, you will most probably fall once or twice during the ride! We’ll cross 9 small creaks and 7 quiet Tay villages to break out into the Safe Zone road (normally it’d take us roughly 1 hour to get here, but it might take up to 2 hours if it rains.) From here on, we’ll hug a stream for about 5 km before turning right through a hill to continue on a small road towards Kim Boi fork.
+1:00 pm: We’ll have lunch at a local restaurant with local specialties that put this area on the map.
+2:30 pm: We’ll take on another challenging off-road route in the afternoon. We’ll ride along the stream that runs through Bai Chao (during dry season). This is a fun and exciting 5 km ride. It could take us up to half an hour to conquer this relatively short yet difficult route. Once we’d had our fun, we’ll head back to National Highway 6, and instead of taking the big road, we’ll head straight for the top of Cao Phong’s orange and tangerine hills.
+3:20 pm: We’ll pass hills after hills of one of the best oranges and tangerines in Vietnam, cross a large stream, and head towards that which is probably the most impressive off-road route on our trip thus far. This will be a gruesome 5 km ride. If it’s sunny and dry out, we’ll climb steep hills and roll off the other side. But if it rains, we’ll definitely be pushing and pulling our bikes up the slope, and breaking with all the breaks our bikes have plus one leg going down! I don’t know about you, but to me this makes one hell of a starting day!
+4:40 pm: Heading back to road 12B, we’ll hug it for 15km then switch to another 15km of off-road riding to reach small Mu Waterfall.
We’ll end our impressive first day at a homestay by the fall, and rest for the rest of the day: well-earned rewards after a long eventful start of our off-road Vietnam motorbike tour!
