Getting from Hanoi to Sapa (and return)
· Updated · BootsnAll
Sapa sits in the far north of Vietnam near the Chinese border, a former French hill station at around 1,500 metres surrounded by terraced rice valleys and the country's highest mountain, Fansipan. Along with Halong Bay it is the side trip almost everyone takes out of Hanoi.
The way most people get there changed completely when the expressway opened, and a lot of what you will read online still describes the old arrangement.
What changed: the expressway
When we first wrote this up, the only sensible way north was the night train, because the road was a mountain road and took ten hours. Then the Hanoi to Lao Cai expressway, CT05, opened, and it cut the drive roughly in half.
So the bus is now the faster option, not the rough one. That is the opposite of what it used to be, and it is why so much of what you will read about this route online is out of date.
The limousine van, which is what most people take now
The route is dominated by nine-seat "limousine" vans, usually Mercedes Sprinters with reclining leather seats, USB sockets and wifi. They run door to door from the Old Quarter in about five and a half to six hours, all the way into Sapa town itself with no transfer at the end.
Fares run from around 280,000 dong for a standard sleeper seat to about 420,000 for a single VIP cabin and 720,000 for a double, which in dollars is roughly 11 to 29. Sapa Express and Interbus are among the operators that drop closest to the centre; many others stop at the bus station on Dien Bien Phu street, about 800 metres from the church square.
Night services exist and save you a hotel night, at the cost of arriving somewhere cold at six in the morning.
The night train, which is still worth it for some
Trains do not go to Sapa. They go to Lao Cai, a border town 35 to 38 km away, and you finish the journey by road.
The SP1 and SP3 night trains leave Hanoi between about 21:40 and 22:00 and reach Lao Cai between 05:30 and 06:10. From there a shared minibus to Sapa takes about an hour and costs a few dollars, and it is not included in your train ticket. Total door to door is nine or ten hours, so the train is slower even before you count the transfer.
Fares start around 500,000 dong, about 20 dollars, for a berth. Tourist operators attach their own carriages to these trains at higher prices and better fit-out.
Take the train if you sleep badly sitting up, if you would rather not spend six hours on winding mountain road, or if you simply want the experience of a Vietnamese sleeper. Take the van otherwise. For years the answer here was the train by default. It is not any more.
When to go
September and October for the rice terraces, when the crop is gold and about to be cut. March to May for the flowers and clearer skies. Sapa is properly cold in winter, occasionally to freezing with snow on Fansipan, and the summer is wet, with the heaviest rain in July and August, which is also when landslides close mountain roads.
Book ahead around Vietnamese public holidays and through the summer domestic season, when Sapa fills with Vietnamese visitors rather than foreign ones.