Vung Tau: lighthouse and headlands
Front Beach · Lighthouse approach · Back Beach · Bai Dau
Illustrative regional or transport photo; not a promised stop. ©
A compact ride connects sea-facing roads on both sides of town. Take the hill section slowly, then trade the saddle for a long beach break and a late lunch.
Cap Saint Jacques
Vũng Tàu is a small peninsula with two hills on it, eighty-eight kilometres from Ho Chi Minh City, and since the 2025 reorganisation it is part of that city rather than a province of its own. People have been here a long time: excavations on Long Sơn island and on the slope above Bãi Dứa have turned up graves with human remains and grave goods of the Óc Eo–Funan period. The Nguyễn lords put a signal-fire post on the rock near today's white villa in 1788, and on 10 February 1859 — the eighth day of the lunar new year — the guns of the Phước Thắng fort, thirty metres up and a hundred metres back from Bãi Trước, opened fire on the French and Spanish squadron of Rigault de Genouilly. The French took it, renamed it Cap Saint Jacques and made it a seaside town: a pilots' sanatorium in 1870, the Grand Hotel in 1897, the Villa Blanche from 1896. It was briefly an autonomous city from 1 May 1895, lost the status in 1905, and grew from 5,690 people in 1901 to 29,390 in 1955 and 530,025 in 2022 — by then not a resort but the capital of the country's oil industry.
The oldest light on the coast
The French built a lighthouse on the small hill — Núi Nhỏ, also called Tao Phùng — in 1862, at 149 metres above the sea. In 1913 they rebuilt it and moved it higher, to 170 metres, and that is the tower standing now: a white cylinder eighteen metres tall and three across. It is one of the oldest lighthouses in Vietnam and in South-East Asia, and it is the thing the city puts on its own postcards. The road up to it is the reason it belongs in a motorcycle guide: a narrow, well-surfaced spiral around the hill with the whole bay opening up at every second bend, and at the top a platform that looks straight down on the fishing harbour, the front beach and the anchorage where the supply boats for the oil fields sit.
The white villa and the emperor in it
Minh Mạng had built the Phước Thắng fort on the headland above Bãi Trước to watch the Cần Giờ estuary. The colonial administration levelled it and put a summer residence for the Governors-General of Indochina in its place; Paul Doumer approved the plan and named the house Villa Blanche after his wife Blanche. Work began in 1898 and finished in 1902, and Doumer went home to France before he could use it. Its real tenant arrived in September 1907: the deposed emperor Thành Thái, held here under house arrest until 1916, when he and his son Duy Tân were deported to Réunion. Today the Bạch Dinh is a museum, and its collection is the point — Kangxi-period ceramics lifted from an old wreck off Hòn Cau in the Côn Đảo islands, bronze cannon, and finds from excavations around the province. It stands in its own park above the seafront and it is the coolest hour of the day.
Two hills full of temples
The north slope of the big hill was cleared around 1957 by a retired official, Lê Quang Vinh, who built a simple temple there to live in. In 1960 the Sri Lankan monk Narada Maha Thera came to preach, planted a bodhi tree grown from one at Anuradhapura — itself a cutting from Bodh Gaya — and suggested a stupa for relics; from early 1961 the Theravada sangha raised the money for it and for a garden of statues telling the Buddha's life, carved by Bùi Văn Thêm. The result, Thích Ca Phật Đài, covers twenty-eight hectares in three terraces rising from three to twenty-nine metres. On the small hill, facing the sea at Bãi Dứa, Thích Thiện Huệ built the Niết Bàn Tịnh Xá between 1969 and 1974 on donations: a twenty-one-metre tower of forty-two steps for the forty-two pages of scripture that first reached Vietnam in the second century, and a twelve-metre reclining Buddha on a plinth two and a half metres high. It became a national monument in December 1989. Above it all, on the southern end of the same hill, stands the Christ: thirty-two metres tall with an arm span of 18.4, begun in 1974, finished and inaugurated on 1 December 1994, with a spiral stair of 133 steps inside running from the plinth to the neck.
A short ride with a lot of stopping
Thirty kilometres will cover everything here, which is why this is a day of parking rather than riding. Take the two hills in order: the north side of the big hill first, while the morning is still on it, then the villa, then the lighthouse spiral, then round the small hill on the Hạ Long road past Bãi Dứa to the Nghinh Phong cape, and finish at Bãi Sau. Two things decide the day. The hill roads are narrow, steep in places and shared with coaches that cannot give way, so ride them early and slowly. And Hòn Bà, the rock off the cape with a shrine on it, is only reachable on foot when the tide uncovers the two-hundred-metre stone causeway — check the tide before you plan on it, and never start across on a rising one.
We lead this ride ourselves.
The guide is from our team, the route is one we have ridden, and you have one chat with us for the whole trip.
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