海云岭：两城之间的海岸
Da Nang · Hai Van Pass · Lang Co · Hue
地区或交通示意照片，不代表承诺的停留点。 ©
Give the pass a full day, with a long pause around Lang Co before the final approach to Hue. The ride is about changing coastlines as much as the famous summit bend.
A wall between two Vietnams
Hải Vân means ‘sea of clouds’, and the name is literal: the ridge is a spur of the Annamite range that runs straight into the sea, and the mist that rolls up its flanks can swallow the road in minutes. For most of history it was a border. In 1306 the Cham king Chế Mân gave the land north of the pass to Đại Việt as a wedding gift for the princess Huyền Trân, and for the next century and a half the summit marked the line between the Vietnamese and Champa. It still marks a line — the climatic one. In winter the north side, towards Huế, is often grey and wet while Da Nang on the south side is warm and dry; you will feel the change on your skin as you crest the pass. The road climbs to 496 metres over roughly 21 kilometres and passes under the 1,172-metre Ải Vân Sơn peak, which is why the summit gate stands in a saddle rather than on the top of anything.
The gate on the summit
The stone gate at the top, Hải Vân Quan, was rebuilt under Emperor Minh Mạng in 1826 on a site fortified since the Trần dynasty. One tablet over the gate reads ‘Hải Vân Quan’; the other reads ‘the first and mightiest gate under heaven’, a title tradition attributes to Emperor Lê Thánh Tông, who halted his army here in 1470. The court thought enough of the place to have it engraved on one of the nine bronze urns in the Huế citadel. Later occupants added their own layers: the French built bunkers beside the Nguyễn walls in 1926 and handed them on to the Americans, and in 1966 US Navy engineers widened the road so that convoys no longer had to wait at checkpoints at Lăng Cô, the summit and Liên Chiểu to cross in one direction at a time. The 2005 tunnel, 6.28 kilometres long, took the trucks away; motorcycles are not allowed in it, which is why the old road over the top became ours.
Lăng Cô and the lagoon of oysters
Down the north side the road unwinds onto a sandbar between the sea and Lập An lagoon. The town of Lăng Cô sits on that bar: a fishing settlement of about eleven thousand people that lives from the sea, the lagoon and, increasingly, the resorts along its eight kilometres of beach. The lagoon behind it — about 16 square kilometres of brackish water fed by mountain streams and the tide — is the biggest oyster ground in the bay; the wooden platforms you see from the road are oyster farms, and the shacks along the lagoon shore grill the harvest to order. Local memory says the place was ‘Làng Cò’, stork village, before French officials wrote it down as Lăng Cô. This is where we stop for a long lunch, because the light on the lagoon is best in early afternoon and the next stretch of Highway 1 is the least interesting of the day.
Bạch Mã, the French hill station
West of the lagoon the mountains rise again to Bạch Mã, a granite massif at about 1,250 metres that is one of the wettest places in Vietnam. In 1932 a French engineer chose its summit for a hill station for the colonial administration in Huế; by 1937 there were 139 villas, a post office, a market and a hospital, and people called it the Đà Lạt of the centre. The wars emptied it, the forest took the villas back, and in 1986 the area became a national park of 220 square kilometres. The park road is 19 kilometres of steep bends to the ruins and the summit trails; the gate at Cầu Hai issues tickets and, on many days, requires the park’s own vehicle for the upper section. We list it as an optional detour: two hours if you only ride to the gate and walk a short trail, a full day if you go up.
Into the old capital
Huế was the seat of the Nguyễn lords from the seventeenth century and, from 1802, the capital of a united Vietnam under Emperor Gia Long; the citadel and the Imperial City inside it were begun in 1803–1804 on the model of Beijing’s Forbidden City and finished in 1832. The last emperor, Bảo Đại, abdicated there on 30 August 1945. The complex was listed by UNESCO in 1993 and is still being restored after the damage of the wars. We come into the city the quiet way, through the rice fields of Thủy Thanh and past the tile-roofed Thanh Toàn bridge of 1776, rather than down the truck lane of Highway 1. Plan a night in Huế: the citadel deserves a morning, and Thiên Mụ pagoda on the Perfume River — founded in 1601, its seven-storey tower the emblem of the city — is a short ride upstream the next day.
这段旅程由我们亲自带队。
向导来自我们的团队，路线我们亲自骑过，整个行程您只需与我们一个对话。
- 来自我们团队的向导
- 我们亲自骑过的路线
- 我们在 5 座城市设有维修点，另有合作维修站
- 整个行程只需与我们一个对话
- 16
- 座城市
- 24
- 条旅行线路
- 71
- 条路线
- 6
- 家维修点