Ba Vì: về miền xanh từ Hà Nội
Hanoi · Son Tay · Ba Vi · Hanoi
Ảnh minh họa vùng hoặc phương tiện, không phải điểm dừng cam kết. ©
Leave early for a full day west of the capital. Use Son Tay as a food stop and keep the forest section flexible, with time for a walk before the return journey.
An old volcano an hour from the city
Ba Vì is the mountain Hanoi can see on a clear day, and it is an extinct volcano whose last activity was about two hundred million years ago. The range runs north-east to south-west with three peaks on it: đỉnh Vua at 1,296 metres, which is the highest ground in Hanoi, Tản Viên at 1,227 and Ngọc Hoa at 1,131. The national park was created by decision 17-CT on 16 January 1991 and covers 10,814.6 hectares across the city and Phú Thọ province, fifteen kilometres from Sơn Tây and fifty north-west of central Hanoi. For a piece of ground this close to six million people the counts are startling: forty-five mammals, a hundred and fifteen birds, sixty-one reptiles and twenty-seven amphibians, with more than a thousand plant species recorded and about two hundred of them medicinal. What you will actually notice is the temperature. At five to seven hundred metres the yearly average is nineteen or twenty degrees; at nine hundred to a thousand it is eighteen. And the fog, which covers this mountain almost all year round.
Muselier's road
Climbing Ba Vì was not a common thing to do, and there were few paths up it, until the colonial period. In 1902 Theodore Muselier, the French Resident at Sơn Tây, went up with a party to look. After that the French settled on Ba Vì as the hill station of the northern delta — the same role Sa Pa played in the north-west and Đà Lạt in the highlands — and the mountain filled up with buildings at particular heights. The ruins are still there and they are sorted by contour: the administration at the four-hundred-metre level, the military quarters and the French officers' houses between six and seven hundred, a church and an orphanage at eight hundred, and a prison at eleven hundred. Two of the old rest stations, at four hundred and six hundred metres, are where people still go. Muselier also had the Đền Thượng on the summit restored and a road built up to it, which is, in a roundabout way, why you can ride most of the way up this mountain today.
Sơn Tinh's mountain
Long before any of that, this was Tản Viên, the mountain where Sơn Tinh lived. He is Tản Viên Sơn Thánh, one of the four immortals of Vietnamese belief, and the country around the mountain holds nearly a hundred communal houses and temples dedicated to him — đền Trung, đền Hạ, đền Thượng, đền Đá Đen, đền Vật Lại, đền Măng Sơn and the rest. The third peak carries the other half of the story: Ngọc Hoa is named after the daughter of the eighteenth Hùng king, the princess Mi Nương, who by tradition was given to Sơn Tinh. The newest thing on the range belongs to a different century. On đỉnh Vua, the highest point in Hanoi, a temple to Hồ Chí Minh was built in 1999, and the walk up to it from the road is the last part of any day here. Two shrines, one mountain, seventeen hundred years apart, and the fog moving through both of them.
Laterite: the citadel and the old village
The other half of this day is built out of one material. In 1822, the third year of Minh Mạng, a citadel was raised at Sơn Tây on a Vauban plan but in laterite — sixteen hectares, a perimeter of 1,306.8 metres, walls 4.4 metres high, a moat running 1,792 metres round it, 26.8 wide and four deep, four gates of old brick and an eighteen-metre flagstaff inside. It is one of the few Minh Mạng citadels still standing, and it has been a national monument since 15 October 1994. Five kilometres west, Đường Lâm is made of the same stone: 956 traditional houses across the old villages, 441 of them in Đông Sàng, 350 in Mông Phụ and 165 in Cam Thịnh, all built from blocks of laterite. It was the first village in Vietnam to be given a national historical and cultural monument certificate, on 19 May 2006. It is usually called the land of two kings, for Phùng Hưng and Ngô Quyền — though scholars have argued at an international conference that the stone the claim rests on was fabricated, and that the Đường Lâm of the old histories may be somewhere else entirely.
How the day works
One long day and about a hundred and forty kilometres, most of it flat. Leave Hanoi early on Highway 32 — the citadel is about forty-two kilometres out — look at the walls, then ride the five kilometres to Đường Lâm and walk it rather than ride it. Then twenty-odd kilometres to the park gate and the climb: the road up is good tarmac in tight hairpins, the old hill station levels come one after another, and the last part to the temples is on foot. Two things to plan around. The mountain is in cloud far more often than it is clear, so treat the view as a bonus and the forest as the point. And start home early: the run back into the city is sixty kilometres and the last of it is Hanoi traffic. One more note, both practical and honest. In February 2016 the ministry ordered a stop to a four-star resort that had been built at the six-hundred-metre level inside the park after fifty-three hectares of forest were handed over for fifty years. It is a national park with a history of being treated as real estate. Ride like a guest.
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