Short version: ride yourself if you already ride, hold a licence that is valid here, and want the road as much as the view. Take an Easy Rider if any of those is a maybe. Neither choice is the brave one.
An Easy Rider is a local driver who rides the bike while you sit behind with a camera and nothing to do but look. It is not a compromise. On the second day, when the road opens out above the Nho Que river, the person riding is watching the surface and the person behind is watching Ha Giang. We have taken both seats and we know which one sees more.
Ride yourself if
- You ride at home, on a manual bike, regularly — not once on a scooter in Bali.
- You hold a licence that covers motorcycles and is valid in Vietnam. That means a 1968-convention international driving permit with the A category on it, carried with your home licence. It is worth checking before you fly.
- You are comfortable on wet tarmac, gravel, and a road with no barrier and a long drop.
- You want to stop where you want to stop.
Take an Easy Rider if
- Your licence is not valid here. This is the common one, and it matters more than people expect — riding without a valid licence also voids most travel insurance.
- You have not ridden a manual bike in years.
- You want to take photographs, or drink a beer at lunch, or arrive without your hands aching.
- You are on the four-day tour and would rather spend the extra day looking around than concentrating.
What the road is actually like
Better than its reputation, and worse in places than the photographs suggest. The Happiness Road is sealed and in decent condition for most of the loop. What catches people out is not the surface but everything else on it: buffalo, dogs, children, trucks taking the whole road through a blind bend, and mist that can drop visibility to twenty metres on Quan Ba without warning.
There is also the small stuff. Loose gravel on the inside of a hairpin. A wet manhole cover. Mud washed across the road after rain. Nothing that a rider with real experience cannot handle, and quite a lot that an occasional rider will not see coming.
Riding pillion is not sitting still
If you take an Easy Rider, you are still on a motorbike on a mountain road for three days. Wear the knee and elbow guards we give you. Keep your feet on the pegs at all times, including when you are stopped. Lean with the bike, not against it — the instinct to sit upright through a bend is the one thing new passengers get wrong.
How we handle it
Our riders are local, they have ridden this road for years, and they are not paid to go fast. If your guide judges after the practice ride that you are not safe to ride yourself, you will travel as a passenger instead. That is not us being difficult. The road does not care how much you wanted to ride it.
You can also change your mind. People start on their own bike and move to the back seat on day two more often than the other way round, and there is nothing embarrassing about it.
