Search for the Ho Chi Minh Trail and you will mostly find photographs of a smooth two-lane highway curling through green mountains, usually with a motorbike on it.
The road everyone photographs is not the trail
That is the Ho Chi Minh Road: a modern highway network built to run the length of Vietnam from north to south. It is a fine road and a genuinely beautiful ride. It is also about fifty years younger than the thing it is named after.
The original Ho Chi Minh Trail was not a road at all. It was a shifting network of jungle tracks, footpaths, river crossings and supply routes threading through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the war, built to be hard to see from the air, constantly rerouted, and never a single line on a map. Much of it has since been reclaimed by forest. Some sections were absorbed into the modern road. Others are simply gone.
Riding the Ho Chi Minh Trail today means riding a mixture: stretches of the modern road, and quieter fragments where the old routes ran. Knowing which is which is most of what separates a good week here from a scenic one.
Where the riding is
The section that matters for a cyclist is in Quang Nam province, in the Truong Son mountains, the range that forms the spine of central Vietnam and the border with Laos. On most maps in English it is called the Annamites.
This is not a corner of Vietnam that sees many visitors. The coast around Hoi An is busy, and Hue draws its own crowds, but the country between them, inland and upward, is quiet in a way that surprises people who thought they knew Vietnam.
On our Vietnam Adventure the mountains arrive on Day 7, after five days of coast and river valley. The numbers give some idea of the change: Day 7 is 44 km with 1,208 m of climbing, Day 8 is 70 km with 1,421 m. Short days by distance, long days by everything else.
If those figures do not mean much on their own, the difficulty grades set out what a day of that size actually asks for, and how it compares with the rest of what we run.
The animal nobody has seen since 2013
Somewhere in the forest either side of this road lives, or lived, the saola.
It was first documented by science in 1992, when a joint survey by WWF and Vietnam's Ministry of Forestry found a skull with unusual horns in a hunter's house. It was the first large mammal new to science in more than fifty years. An antelope-like wild ox with long straight horns, it earned the nickname Asian unicorn less for the horns than for how rarely anyone has managed to see one.
The last confirmed sighting in the wild was a camera-trap photograph taken in September 2013, in Quang Nam province. That is the province this route rides through. In the thirteen years since, despite eDNA sampling of forest streams, sniffer dogs, structured interviews with local hunters and a concerted international search running through 2024 and 2025, there has been no confirmed sighting. None exist in captivity. The species is listed as critically endangered, and conservationists are honest that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: the terrain is dense enough, and the animal cryptic enough, that it could persist unseen.
The threat is not hunters after saola. It is snares, set in the forest for deer and civet, that catch whatever walks into them. That is why you will pass signs from the forest department along this road asking people to protect what is left.
You will not see one. Nobody has for thirteen years. But there is something worth sitting with in riding through the last place on earth where a large mammal was photographed alive, past signs asking people to leave it alone.
What to ride it on
This is not a road bike route. The mix of tarmac, concrete and dirt asks for a hardtail mountain bike or a gravel bike with 40 mm tyres or wider. That surprises riders who associate Vietnam with flat coastal spinning, and it is worth taking seriously.
If you would rather not fly with a bike, hardtails with disc brakes are available through our local partner in Hoi An. Numbers are limited and they need reserving well ahead, which is worth doing early rather than on arrival.
Riders coming from India ask the same two questions in the same order: what the bike costs to fly, and how many connections it has to survive. Both are covered on our page for riders flying out of India.
When to go
Late February and early March are the best of it. Daytime temperatures run 22 to 30 degrees on the coast, cooler in the mountains, and humidity is lower than the summer months. Mornings and evenings in the hills are noticeably cold by comparison with the coast, so a light rain jacket and a wind vest earn their place.
The honest version
Most cycling in central Vietnam is sold on Hoi An: a lantern-lit old town, a nine kilometre ride through rice paddies, a cooking class in the afternoon. It is lovely and there is nothing wrong with it.
This is a different thing. It is eight riding days from Hoi An to Hue, 438 km and 5,791 m, with the hardest riding in the last three days and several nights in simple accommodation a long way from anywhere.
It is also worth saying who it does not suit. Much of the experience is the ride itself, and parts of the route involve ferry crossings and private boat transfers that a support vehicle cannot follow, so this is not a tour we recommend bringing a non-riding companion on. The days are long, with time spent at waterfalls, over lunch and waiting for ferries, and there is little of the afternoon left for sightseeing afterwards.
If that sounds like the week you want, the full day-by-day is on the Vietnam Adventure page, including what is included, what it costs and when the next departure runs.
Written by Barnowl Adventures.
