North West Aggressive dual sport 4 to 7 days
Tour Pictures & Video
Summary
This tour is a fairly ambitious route that will take you a long way from civilization and into areas where locals have never seen a foreigner before, apart from Tigit Tours.
As you drive by, you will be met with wide-eyed amazement, cheers, and shouts from local kids and adults.
This is rural Vietnam, and it is unbelievably beautiful, but coming with that is hard driving and a lot of cliff edges.
Our tour is aimed at intermediate to experienced riders, but we can cater to fairly new riders, providing your attitude is good.
The tour goes through remote terrain, so we will have variable lunch hours or no lunches at all on occasion. The terrain is also very difficult to escape when things go wrong, such as if a bike has a breakdown. Therefore, fit and healthy adventure seekers with a good appetite for dealing with difficult situations is a must.
The reward is some of the best offroad riding in the world, some of the best scenery in the world, and, without a doubt, witnessing some of the funniest and best cultures in the world.
This is a tour you will never forget.
Watch the following video on our recommended motorbike choices and why we really don’t like 250cc+ motorbikes for this journey!
Tour Highlights
- Beautiful terrain, some of the best in the country
- Dinosaur backbone, walk it or drive it (if you are crazy enough)
- Plenty of cliff edges
- Hot Spring swimming
- River swimming if you like
- Offroad, more offroad and terrain you will have never seen before
Who this tour is for
Tour Guide Giang
With tour guide Giang, the route can be made relatively casual, and Giang combines a mixture of culture, swimming, scenic spots, and offroad into one tour. He is a master of manipulating routes to the client’s level and creating fun-filled action packed days.
Tour guide Ben
With tour guide Ben, the focus is on driving, and you will be pushed to your limits. Ben is a retired MX rider, and he will be teaching you along the way. Ben will also thoroughly entertain you with tricks, tips, and crazy stunts. He is very fun to watch when local villages and children go wild at his antics!
Needless to say, you will exit this tour 10 x the rider that you were when you entered. Ben teaches many driving techniques, and just watching his riding style will make you a better driver.
Learning to drive in one of the most beautiful places on earth whilst being deep in the wilderness is one amazing experience!
Tour Itinerary
Hanoi to Phù Yên
Mild offroad
- Meet at Tigit 8:00 and depart by 8:30am
- No escaping the reality that we must do some road to escape Hanoi
- We can offroad through Ba Vi National park
- We meander through road based national parks
- Hopefully an early lunch
- Afternoon filled with offroading, including one trail that has spectacular sunsets
- Hotel with softmatress and a BBQ style restaurant
Phu Yen to Ta Xua
Mild offroad to optional very hard offroad
- There is an area called Ta Xua, which is popular for Vietnamese tourism
- For beginner to intermediate riders we will do a loop that goes near to Ta Xua but doesn’t quite make it. We will then loop around to Ta Xua by road. The scenery regardless, is stunning.
- For intermediate riders to experienced riders, we will take a cliff edge oriented trail on a backway into Ta Xua. Doesn’t matter how much riding you have done around the world, this route will frighten you. The views are unreal!
- We stay in a town at the bottom of Ta Xua and eat at a local Vietnamese restaurant.
Ta Xua to Tam Tau
Beginner offroad, intermediate offroad or advanced offroad
- We start off the day with the Dinosaur backbone. Most people walk it, but some are crazy enough to drive it.
- From there we can do road to our hotel, and drop off the bag. We have trails that loop for hours around the hotel in beautiful terrain.
- More ambitious riders can go way off into the wilderness for views that make your mouth water. Although not massively difficult, it is so far from civilisation that the clients need to be good riders, fit, and healthy. There is very little out there, so if something goes wrong, the tour guide needs some support to get out of the wilderness.
- We finish the day in an amazing homestay with stunning views.
- We walk or drive down to the local hot springs for a swim. A perfect end to the day.
Tram Tau to Hanoi
Beginner, intermediate, advanced and the dam right insane
- For clients who are exhausted or newer to riding we can continue to do loops around the homestay before heading back to Hanoi.
- For intermediate riders we go hunting for a waterfall that requires some cliff edges to get to. Mostly tarmac, but still fairly knarly stuff.
- For the dam right insane, there are hiking trails through the mountains that kids use to commute between villages and schools. These go on for miles and miles, and very few riders have the skillset to tackle them. Even Tigit Jon has failed twice!
The drive back to Hanoi is a 4.5 hour grind into the city. There is no pleasant way back into Hanoi city.
Alternatively, we can arrange a truck (2.500.000vnd) and a taxi (2.500.000), totaling 5.000.000vnd.
Please note that this transition from bike to taxi is a quick one. We stop at the side of the road, change into the cleanest gear we have and jump in the taxi. There is no shower or other luxuries that take place with this system.
Extra days
The tour is standard, with 4 days. Full of exciting offroad that will test your abilities and show you some of the greatest scenery in the country.
Adding an optional day 5, day 6 day 7 we explain what extras it provides.
A five day tour will include an optional extra loop around the town of Phu Yen.
Tour guides very clearly label it as “epic dual sport,” which means nothing challenging, just an amazing day of casual off-road riding. The wonderful thing about loops that start and stop at the same hotel, is that you don’t need to carry luggage.
It also takes the pressure off needing to complete an ambitious ride to get to a new destination.
A six day tour will include venturing further West to a town called Muong La. Unless you study maps for fun, like we do, you probably won’t quite grasp just how far from civilization we are going here. Most of the towns we pass through would only have been connected to the world by roads within the last 10 years. There is no chance of bumping into another tour group, let alone another white guy. We can pretty much give a money-back guarantee on that statement!
We also get to see corn fields, which are not actually a common site in Vietnam, and in many ways a different sort of beauty to the very common (but stunning) rice paddies.
And, of course, for advanced riders out there, this route has some truly death-defying cliff edges that Tigit Jon has said are “too dangerous for customers.” Will leave that one up to you at the time!
For everyone else, we have alternates to get around the ledges! Also labeled on our map as “epic dual sport.” We are very creative with words at Tigit.
A seven-day tour will include the town of Tram Tau, which is the hub of off-roading at Tigit and where we spend most of our time during the four-day version of this tour. It also happens to have hot springs, which is perfect for celebrating the survival of this fairly knarly route.
Tour Map
Tour Prices
Please read our full Tour Guide Disclaimer which describes all our terms and conditions for motorbike tours.
- Prices are in USD
- This is an all-inclusive tour
Duration : 3 day option, 4 day option (most popular), 5 day option.
Yamaha WR 155: All inclusive: 175 USD per person per day.
Minimum 2 riders per tour. For 1 rider, please read the rent a-guide section.
Trucks and taxi (optional)
If you wish to save the last day of driving back into Hanoi. We can arrange a truck (2.500.000vnd) and a taxi (2.500.000), totaling 5.000.000vnd.
Tour Info
Includes
- Motorbike Rental and Gas
- English Speaking Guide (1 guide for every 5 clients)
- Hot spring entrance ticket if we do this activity
- Private accommodation and no budget options
- All food
- Drinks (+ 1 welcome hotel beer and 4 beers at dinner)
- MX boots, Full Face Helmet, Water Bladder, Knee and Elbow Pads
- Damage Waiver (crashing the motorbike)
Excludes
- Personal Insurance
The Motorbikes we use
We use Yamaha WR 155 motorbike
- Weighing in at 134KG, they are lighter and have better power-to-weight ratios than 250cc dual sports.
- Rear tubliss tires equipped with Enduro tires for running at 0 PSI
- These motorbikes are the next best thing to a KTM. (not really a joke, the suspension actually works)
- Tigit sold off all our CRF 250’s as they were not good enough for Vietnam’s offroad terrain. The WR 155 is the right bike for this aggressive dual sport itinerary.
