Most of what you’ll read about the Ha Giang Loop was written by someone trying to sell you a tour who didn’t tell you that. We’re trying to sell you a tour too. The difference is we say it out loud, and we publish the things that make selling harder.
Why this site exists
Search “is the Ha Giang Loop safe” or “do I need a licence” and nearly every result on the first page belongs to a company that profits from your answer being yes. Some are dressed up as neutral guides — a “media” site here, a “loop trails” resource there — with a Book Now button two clicks away.
That matters more than usual here, because the questions people are really asking are not “which viewpoint is prettiest”. They’re asking whether the drivers were drinking last night. Whether their insurance pays out if they crash. Whether the group will be forty people doing karaoke until two in the morning. Those questions have uncomfortable answers, so most sites don’t answer them.
We do. That’s the whole idea.
Who writes this
My name is Nguyen Van Tuan. I was born in 1992, I’m from Ha Giang, and I run Jasmine Tours from here.
My wife and I started with a homestay. Then motorbike rental. Then guided riding. Then full tours. Each step happened because the one before it kept running into something we couldn’t fix from where we were standing.
Somewhere in the middle of that I split the route into two, three and four-day versions, because riders kept running out of daylight before Đồng Văn — and so did other people; the difference is we pushed ours until it wore into the shape most people ride now. I drew the first hand map for riders arriving with nothing: stops, homestays, restaurants, difficulty colour-coded. That was back when the highlands had no mobile signal and everyone navigated on Maps.me.
What I learned before tourism
I grew up in a working family. My childhood wasn’t romantic — plucking ducks, carrying trays, doing whatever needed doing. It taught me something no classroom did: good service is built out of small details, and you only notice those details if you’ve had to do the work yourself.
I studied at a sports university, and from my second year I taught swimming — riding 40 kilometres each way, every day, to get to the pool and back. Coaching gave me two things I’ve never put down: discipline, and responsibility for someone else’s safety.
Standing at the edge of a pool, there is no room for carelessness. Nobody drowns because the water suddenly got dangerous — they drown because someone stopped paying attention. I brought exactly that habit to these mountain passes, and it’s why this site talks about safety more than it talks about scenery.
Why I do it this way
When I started working in tourism here, I kept seeing the same pattern: hand over a motorbike, take the money, let the rider deal with whatever comes next. That model is still the norm on this road. It is also why people get hurt.
So we went the other way — mechanically checked bikes, guides who genuinely know the road, and an actual plan for the moment something goes wrong. It started in late 2017 with three second-hand Sirius 110cc motorbikes. By peak season it grew to handle up to 300 riders a day, with bookings coming through Booking.com, Hostelworld and other public booking platforms — places where one bad week shows up within days.
Operating at that scale changes what you know. You stop guessing which corners are dangerous, which months turn the road to grease, which homestay loses water in November. You find out — because it happens to your riders, and it lands on your desk.
The part I’d rather skip
I won’t give you a story that’s all upward curve, because that wouldn’t be true.
There was a stretch when three things arrived at once. The pandemic froze the industry. I found out how many holes were still in my own operation. And my father was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and died.
He left me a line I still carry: “An opportunity comes once. If you don’t take hold of it, it passes and never comes back.” So I used those frozen months to pull every process apart and rebuild it — bike inspections, driver training, what we do in the first ten minutes after a crash. Nearly every safety rule I’d defend today came out of that period.
His other line was simpler: “What you have in your head, you’ll have in your hands.” Applied here it means one thing — adventure travel should never mean gambling with a rider’s safety. The thrill belongs to the road and to the people who live along it, not to being underprepared.
About the insurance, because this is where sites get vague
We carry a Bao Viet policy for guests on our trips, with a 50,000,000₫ death benefit. You should know exactly what that is and what it isn’t.
It is a minimum-level policy, and it is not a substitute for travel insurance. Buy your own, and check in writing that it covers riding a motorbike in Vietnam — a great many policies exclude exactly that, and people find out at the worst possible moment. And where a bike is covered for damage, that cover is for the bike, not for you.
We’d rather write that plainly on our own About page than leave you to work it out in a clinic.
What we publish that others don’t
- Real costs, including what isn’t included — boat tickets, permits, private-room upgrades, driver tips, damage deposits. Every price carries the date we read it and the product it belongs to.
- Our own operating rules — maximum group size, our alcohol policy for drivers, how many hours a guide rides in a day.
- Road and weather detail from our own trips — which stretch turns to grease in which month, not a copied paragraph about “pleasant autumn”.
- What happens when things go wrong — nearest clinics, how a police report works, what insurers actually ask for.
- The advice that loses us the booking — including when the honest answer is not this month, not this bike, or not you.
Prices move here, and fast. Where a figure has a date on it, that date is the thing to check — if it’s months old, ask us before you budget around it.
How we make money
Ha Giang Local is written and run by the team at Jasmine Tours, a licensed tour operator based in Ha Giang. Our international tour operator licence is 02-028/2025/CDLQGVN-GP LHQT, issued by the Vietnam National Authority of Tourism.
So yes, we have an interest in you booking. Read everything here with that in mind — and hold us to it. If anything on this site turns out to be wrong or out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it and say what changed.
We run tours on the Ha Giang Loop. This site is where we explain them; the booking and the payment happen on our tour site, jasminehagiang.com. That’s our own tour — Jasmine Tours is the company behind this site.
What we won’t do
- Tell you the Loop is safe when it isn’t. People have died on this road, including foreign visitors. We’d rather lose a booking than gloss over that.
- Rank ourselves number one in a “best tour companies” list. Instead we give you the questions to ask any operator — and we answer them about ourselves.
- Put you on a bike you’re not ready for. Our motorbike trips suit riders roughly 20 to 35, and we turn down older guests for them rather than take the booking. The alternative we offer is a private SUV or jeep on the same route — which is usually the better trip for that guest anyway.
Where we fall short
Three things worth knowing before you decide about us.
- We are not the cheapest, and that is a decision. We pay tax in full and we keep drivers on through the low season. A price well below ours means something came off the road, not off the margin.
- Our guest mix is narrow. Mostly British and Australian. German, French, American and Singaporean guests are still a small share, so our sense of what a trip feels like is shaped by that.
- We grew faster than Ha Giang’s transport could carry. Through 2023 and 2024, on a handful of peak days, guests who had paid for a VIP bus rode an ordinary one. We apologised and refunded. Two things fixed it: many more coach operators on these routes, and traffic police enforcing passenger numbers hard enough that a photograph is enough to fine an operator.
— Nguyen Van Tuan, Director, Jasmine Tours