Putting a Motorcycle on a Vietnamese Train: How It Works

Vietnam is seventeen hundred kilometres long and about four hundred of them are worth riding twice. The railway will carry your motorcycle past the dull bit for the price of a decent dinner, and here is exactly how that works.

The problem with the shape of Vietnam

Look at the country on a map and the issue announces itself. Vietnam is a very long thin S, with the good stuff clustered at each end and in a few pockets along the coast, and a great deal of flat agricultural nothing in between.

The north has the karst plateaus, the Ha Giang loop, the passes around Sapa and Cao Bang. The centre has Hue, Hoi An and the Hai Van pass. The south has the Mekong delta and the coast road up to Mui Ne. Connecting them is Highway One, which runs the length of the country and which is, from a rider’s point of view, one of the least appealing roads in Southeast Asia: straight, hot, crowded, and carrying every truck in the country.

Riders solve this in one of three ways. They ride Highway One and endure it. They ride the Ho Chi Minh Road inland, which is a much better road and adds days. Or they put the bike on a train.

Why the train is the underrated answer

The North-South railway, the line everybody calls the Reunification Express, runs roughly seventeen hundred kilometres from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City and takes the better part of a day and a half end to end. It hugs the coast for long stretches and the section between Hue and Da Nang, over the Hai Van pass, is regularly listed among the more spectacular train journeys anywhere.

The relevant part for a rider is that Vietnam Railways will carry your motorcycle as freight. Not as a special favour, not as a negotiated arrangement, but as a routine service that thousands of Vietnamese use every year to move bikes around the country.

The cost is the part that surprises people. Hanoi to Da Nang for a motorbike runs somewhere around five hundred and thirty thousand dong, plus a small unloading fee, which comes to roughly twenty-five dollars. That is less than the fuel would cost you to ride the same distance, before you count two days of your life and a night in a Highway One motel.

How you actually do it

The first thing to know is that you do not go to the ticket office. Everybody’s first attempt involves queueing at the passenger counter and being politely redirected, because the passenger counter has nothing to do with freight.

What you want is the cargo yard, which at most large stations is round the side: an area where you will see motorbikes parked, boxes and sacks being loaded, and a small office with a great deal of paperwork in it. Walk the bike over there. Somebody will come out.

You hand over the bike and its registration papers, they fill in a form with the frame number and your details, they tag the machine, and you pay. In return you get a receipt, and that receipt is the only thing that will get the bike back at the other end, so treat it like a passport rather than shoving it in a pocket.

Not every station handles this. The service exists at the larger ones, which in practice means Hanoi, Da Nang, Nha Trang and Ho Chi Minh City, with a handful of others depending on the day and the staff. Turning up at a small provincial halt with a motorcycle and an optimistic expression will not work.

The bike and you travel separately

This is the detail that catches people out and it needs planning around. Your motorcycle does not ride on your train. It goes as freight, on whatever service has capacity, and it arrives when it arrives.

Same day is common. Next day is entirely normal. A day and a half is not unusual on a busy route. Which means the sensible plan is to send the bike a day before you travel, or to accept that you will spend your first day at the destination on foot, which in Hue or Hoi An is no hardship at all.

Build a buffer. A rider who ships the bike expecting it to be waiting on the platform when they step off, and who has a flight in two days, is setting themselves up for an anxious afternoon in a cargo office.

Preparing the machine

A few practical things that reduce the odds of a problem.

Run the tank low. Railways everywhere are unenthusiastic about a full tank of petrol in a freight wagon, and while enforcement in Vietnam is inconsistent, arriving with a nearly empty bike removes an argument and reduces the fire risk in a wagon that may spend a day in the sun. Take a small bottle with you or plan to push it to the nearest pump.

Take off or fold in anything that projects. Mirrors are the obvious one. A bike gets pushed, wedged and strapped in beside other bikes and crates, and a mirror is the first thing to go.

Photograph everything before you hand it over. All four sides, close-ups of any existing damage, the odometer. If something arrives bent, a photograph with a timestamp is the difference between a conversation and an argument.

Take everything off the bike. Panniers, tank bag, tools, documents, the lot. Assume that anything left attached may not be there at the other end. This is not a slur on Vietnamese railway staff; it is the same advice anybody would give about freight anywhere in the world.

What it costs against what it saves

Run the numbers honestly and the case is strong.

Hanoi to Hue or Da Nang by road is somewhere around seven hundred kilometres of Highway One, which is two hard days or one brutal one. Fuel, a night’s accommodation and food will cost more than the freight charge on its own. Add the wear on the bike and, more to the point, the two days you did not spend riding the Hai Van pass or the Ha Giang loop.

The counter-argument is that some people want to ride the whole country because riding the whole country is the point, and that is a completely legitimate position. If your trip is about the line on the map being continuous, take the Ho Chi Minh Road rather than Highway One and enjoy it; it is genuinely a good road through the mountains inland, with far fewer trucks and considerably better scenery.

But if your trip is about riding good roads rather than covering ground, the train is the tool that buys you more of them.

Riding as a passenger while your bike travels

Since you will be on a train anyway, it is worth doing it properly.

The classes run from hard seat, which is exactly what it sounds like and which nobody should attempt overnight, up through soft seat and hard sleeper to soft sleeper, which is a four-berth compartment with a door. For a night journey the soft sleeper is the one, and it costs a fraction of what an equivalent journey would cost anywhere in Europe.

The overnight Hanoi to Hue run is the classic. You board in the evening, the compartment fills up with a Vietnamese family who will offer you food within ten minutes, and you wake up somewhere near the coast with the sun coming up over rice paddies. Bring earplugs and something to read. Do not expect the sheets to be pristine.

The daytime Hue to Da Nang leg, which crosses the Hai Van pass by rail while the road climbs over the top of it, is the one photographers get on the train specifically to do. If you have a spare afternoon, ride the pass and take the train back.

The other option: a bus company will do it too

Worth knowing as a fallback. Several of the long-distance sleeper bus operators will carry a motorbike in the luggage bay or on a rack, for a price that is broadly comparable to the train and with the advantage that the bike travels with you and arrives when you do.

The trade is handling. A bus crew loading a motorcycle into a luggage bay at eleven at night is working faster and with less space than a railway freight team, and bikes come off buses with more scuffs than they come off trains. It is the right answer when you need the bike at the other end immediately and the wrong answer if you care about the paintwork.

What happens on a supported tour

On a guided tour the whole question is somebody else’s problem, and the way it gets solved is worth describing because it is a good illustration of what tour logistics actually involve.

On our thirty-day route through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, day fourteen runs from Ninh Binh to the night train to Hue. The group’s bikes go as freight, the riders go in sleepers, and everybody wakes up in central Vietnam ready to ride the Hai Van pass the next morning instead of grinding down Highway One for two days.

Doing that for twelve motorcycles at once is not the same operation as doing it for one. It means a relationship with the freight office, paperwork prepared in advance, somebody at both ends, and a plan for what happens if half the bikes come on the following service. It is entirely unglamorous and it is the sort of thing that separates an operator who has run a route thirty times from one who has read about it.

Documents, and the thing about ownership

Vietnam is particular about vehicle registration and the freight office will want to see the bike’s papers, the blue card, which should match the frame number on the machine.

This is straightforward if the bike is a rental with proper documentation or if it belongs to a licensed operator. It gets awkward if you are one of the many travellers riding a bike bought informally from another backpacker with paperwork in somebody else’s name, which is an enormous and long-standing grey area in Vietnam and which becomes visible precisely at moments like this.

If you are on that kind of bike, expect questions. Carry whatever documentation you do have, be polite, and accept that the answer may be no.

Timing, seasons and the practical calendar

Two periods to avoid if you can. Tet, the lunar new year, sees the entire country travelling at once and freight capacity vanishes while passenger demand triples. And the central coast typhoon season, roughly September to November, brings flooding that closes sections of the line as well as the road.

Outside those, the service is reliable in the way that a state railway that has been running for decades tends to be. Not fast, not luxurious, but it goes when it says it will and the bike turns up.

The Hai Van pass, which is what you are buying time for

It is worth naming the prize, because the whole logic of putting the bike on a train is to arrive with enough days left to ride the good roads properly.

The Hai Van pass runs over a spur of mountains between Hue and Da Nang, twenty-one kilometres of switchbacks climbing to around five hundred metres with the South China Sea on one side. It was historically the boundary between two kingdoms, it carries an old French fort and a set of American bunkers at the top, and it is regularly named among the great coastal roads anywhere.

Most traffic now goes through the tunnel underneath, which means the old road over the top is quiet, well surfaced and largely populated by riders. Cloud sits on the summit a good proportion of the time, which is part of the character: you climb out of humid coastal heat into grey mist and then drop out of it into sunshine on the other side.

Ride it northbound in the morning and southbound in the afternoon if you can choose, for the light. Stop at the top even though it is touristy, because the view back down the coast toward Lang Co is the photograph everyone wants and it is as good as advertised.

The train that carried your bike here goes round the seaward side of the same mountain at sea level, on a ledge above the water, which is why the rail journey is famous too. Doing one and then the other is one of the more satisfying days in Vietnam.

Whether any of this applies on a supported trip

Fair question, since on a big biking tour the freight office is somebody else’s problem entirely.

Two reasons it is still worth knowing. The first is that understanding the constraint explains the itinerary. When you look at a thirty-day route and wonder why day fourteen is a train rather than a ride, the answer is that the alternative is two days of Highway One and the route designer decided your holiday was better spent elsewhere. Knowing that turns a puzzling line on a schedule into a deliberate choice.

The second is that most people who do a supported trip in Vietnam come back and do something independent afterwards, whether that is a week in the north on their own or a longer run down the coast. The freight system is one of those pieces of local knowledge that is hard to find written down and completely straightforward once somebody has described it.

It is also a good illustration of a general principle in this part of the world: almost everything is possible, almost nothing is signposted, and the answer is usually round the side of the building where the men with the clipboards are.

Why this is worth knowing even if you never do it

The broader point is about how to think about a long country. There is a mindset in adventure riding that treats every kilometre as sacred and any assisted transport as cheating, and it produces trips where people spend forty percent of their holiday on a truck route because a line on a map had to be continuous.

The alternative is to treat transport as a tool. Fly over the boring bit, train the bike past it, put it on a boat, whatever gets you to the next good road with your enthusiasm intact. Nobody at the end of a motorcycle tour has ever regretted skipping two hundred kilometres of dual carriageway.

Vietnam happens to be the country where that logic is cheapest and easiest to act on, because somebody built a railway down the middle of it a hundred years ago and it still carries motorbikes for twenty-five dollars.

The Ho Chi Minh Road, if you would rather ride it

For completeness, because the train is not the only answer and for some riders it is the wrong one.

Running inland roughly parallel to Highway One, the Ho Chi Minh Road is the modern sealed highway built along the general line of the old wartime supply routes. It is longer, slower and vastly more enjoyable: mountains, forest, minority villages, almost no trucks, and long stretches where you will not see another vehicle for twenty minutes.

The western branch through the Truong Son range is the good one. Fuel is thinner than on the coast and you should fill at every opportunity, accommodation is basic in places, and sections get hit by landslides during and after the rains. None of that is a problem for a rider who has planned for it and all of it is a problem for one who has not.

The honest comparison is time. Hanoi to Hue on the Ho Chi Minh Road is three or four days of good riding. On the train it is one night and twenty-five dollars. If you have three weeks, ride it. If you have twelve days and you want the north and the centre both, the railway is what buys you that.

Plenty of riders do both across two trips, and most of them say the inland road is the better ride and the train is the better decision.

Riding Vietnam for real

Our ten-day Northern Vietnam ride is a loop out of Hanoi that spends all of its time in the good country: Ha Giang, Meo Vac, the Dong Van karst plateau, Ba Be lake and the Cao Bang mountains, with no Highway One at all. The twenty-day Vietnam, Laos and Thailand route adds the crossing into Laos and the run back to Chiang Mai, and the thirty-day Indochina route is the one that uses the night train to get from the north to the centre without wasting two days.

Maintained bikes, small group, road captain, mechanic, support vehicle and all the freight paperwork handled by somebody else. Have a look at the 10-day Northern Vietnam tour or the Vietnam motorbike tour page, and message us on WhatsApp if you want to talk through which route fits the time you actually have.