Anyone can see a country through glass. Ride it instead.
What three days on the Ha Giang Loop really costs with a rider on the front. Which Saigon street-food run is worth the pillion seat. Where a 150cc can be hired without a licence argument. Reviews of the motorbike tours and rentals you can book today.
Four rides that explain what a motorbike tour actually is.
A loop through limestone towers, a coast pass ridden two-up, dinner eaten in four stops at scooter speed, and a chair bolted to a motorcycle in a European capital. What each costs and what riders said afterwards.
01The three-day loopHa Giang Loop 4 Days 3 Nights Motorbike Tour with easy RiderKarst towers, a rider on the front and a homestay every night. The one people come home talking about.
02The coast passEasy Rider private tour via Hai Van pass from Hue – Da Nang – Hoi An (1Way|Loop)Hue to Hoi An over the Hai Van with your bag sent ahead in the van. Sea on one side, jungle on the other.
03Dinner at 30km/hHo Chi Minh City Street Food Tour & Sightseeing By MotorbikeFour stops, a borrowed helmet and a driver who knows which alley the good bowl is down. Saigon eats standing up.
04The sidecar dayBarcelona Private Tour by Sidecar MotorcycleA chair bolted to a motorcycle, and a city you thought you had already seen from a bus.
Vietnam runs away with this, then Europe picks up the sidecars.
Six places where the bike is the whole point: a country with a rider for every road, two cities that eat on two wheels, an imperial capital at the foot of a pass, terraced hills in the far north, and a Spain of dust and chrome.
Northern Vietnam is a diagram of passes, and the Loop joins most of them.
Four hundred kilometres of Ha Giang: Ma Pi Leng above the Nho Que river, the climb out of Dong Van, cloud sitting in the valley until ten. Ride it yourself or take the back seat of a 150 and spend the day looking up instead of down.
Three-day loop, one-day pass, or a pillion seat for dinner. Pick the shape.
Almost every Vietnamese ride is one of three things, and they cost wildly different amounts. Here is what each one is, and the cheapest honest price we can find for it.
The rides more people take than anything else on two wheels.
Every motorbike tour we have reviewed →Thousands of riders and pillions have already been down these roads. Here is what they went for, and what it costs to follow them.
1
Hanoi Motorbike Tour: Food, Culture and Fun by Vintage Motorbike
Ride through Hanoi with an English-speaking guide and local motorbike driver. You’ll see Ba Dinh Square, Long Bien Bridge, Train Street, narrow backstreets, markets, and tucked-away neighborhoods, then finish with food and drinks at Hidden Gem Café. Morning, afternoon, and evening departures are available, with Old Quarter pickup.
From · $55
Read our review →
2
Saigon By Night and Street Food By Motorbike | Opt: Ao Dai Riders
from $37
3
Private Street Food Tour by Motorbike/Car with Local Students
from $45
4
Street Food Tasting & Sightseeing Tour by Motorbike
from $27
5
Top Notch Street Food Motorbike Tour In Ho Chi Minh City
from $29
6
Hanoi Motorbike Tours Led By Women: Hanoi By Night Foodie Motorbike Tours
from $69
7
Ho Chi Minh City Motorbike Tour with Student | Saigon Adventure
from $23
8
Ho Chi Minh Night Tour by Motorbikes with Female Rider | KissTour
from $39
Ho Chi Minh City is not walkable. That is the whole business model.
Nine million bikes and a kitchen on every corner. A food ride buys you a driver who knows which alley the good bowl is down, a helmet, and the nerve to cross Nguyen Hue at eight in the evening.
Every Saigon ride →
Hiring the bike is cheaper. It is also entirely your problem.
Every rental we have reviewed →
A week on a hired bike costs less than two guided days, and the freedom is the point. So is the paperwork: the licence question, the deposit, the scratch on the tank you did not put there. These three sort out which kind of hire you are signing.
Under 175cc, or a full A licence
Most Southeast Asian desks hand over a semi-automatic without blinking. European desks want an A licence and an international permit, and the bigger the bike the harder they look at it.
Hanoi to Saigon, dropped at the other end
The north-to-south run is the reason half these desks exist. One-way drop-off costs extra and is worth every dong, because nobody wants to ride the same thousand kilometres twice.
A cruiser, a coast road and a full tank
Harleys and BMWs are quoted per machine, not per head, and a pillion rides free. Book the bike, split the bill, and check whether the helmet is included before you turn up in a cap.
Countryside lane, night city, dirt track: the bike changes with the road.
A 110cc semi-automatic through rice fields and a 650 single across a lava field are not the same hobby. Sort by the kind of riding you actually want to do.
What a day on a bike actually costs, from pillion seat to private guide.
Every priced ride on the site, sorted by what you hand over. The cheap end is not the poor end: some of the best hours on two wheels cost less than a taxi to the airport.
City food runs, half-day countryside loops and a day on a hired semi-automatic.
The full-day standards: a coast pass ridden two-up, a countryside loop with lunch, a guided day out of town.
Multi-day loops with homestays, European sidecar charters and expedition weeks in the Himalaya.
Three things that only happen when the roof comes off.
Coaches go to the same viewpoints. None of them can stop on the shoulder of Ma Pi Leng, thread a lane too narrow for a car, or put your knee two feet from the tarmac of a Catalan roundabout.
Ma Pi Leng and the Nho Que
The road above the Nho Que river was cut by hand in the late fifties by young volunteers working on ropes, and it still feels improvised: a metre of tarmac, a low wall in places, a thousand feet of nothing. Riders stop at the top of the pass because everybody stops at the top of the pass. Go early, before the cloud lifts off the gorge and the day tours arrive from Dong Van.
- 1Ha Giang Loop 4 Days 3 Nights Motorbike Tour with easy Rider★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 972 reviews
- 2Ha giang loop 3days and 2nights with easy rider★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 718 reviews
- 33-Day Motorbike Ha Giang Loop with Easy Rider★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 501 reviews
Eating at the speed of traffic
Saigon food is not arranged for walkers. The good bowl is four kilometres away down an alley with no name, the bakery closes at nine, and the bridge with the view is across six lanes of scooters. Riding pillion collapses all of that into two hours, which is why the food rides here out-review every walking tour in the city several times over.
- 1Ho Chi Minh City Street Food Tour & Sightseeing By Motorbike★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 9,413 reviews
- 2Saigon By Night and Street Food By Motorbike | Opt: Ao Dai Riders★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 4,066 reviews
- 3Private Street Food Tour by Motorbike/Car with Local Students★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 3,950 reviews
The European sidecar
Ural and Dnepr outfits from the Soviet era, plus a fleet of restored Jawas and BMWs, run city tours in Paris, Lisbon, Barcelona, Prague and Oslo. You sit in the chair, roughly level with the wheel hubs, which is a genuinely different view of a street. Drivers wear the goggles because the chair has no windscreen and they know what the photographs look like.
- 1Barcelona Private Tour by Sidecar Motorcycle★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,750 reviews
- 2Paris Vintage Private City Tour on a Sidecar Motorcycle★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 417 reviews
- 3Paris Highlights city tour on a vintage Sidecar Motorcycle★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 168 reviews
Four rides that fill up before your plane lands.
Most of this can be arranged from a hostel desk the night before. These four cannot: small fleets, fixed departure days and a handful of riders everybody in town asks for by name.
- 01Ha Giang Loop 4 Days 3 Nights Motorbike Tour with easy RiderLoops leave Hanoi on set nights and fill first for weekends. The good riders are booked out well before the bikes are.
- 02Easy Rider private tour via Hai Van pass from Hue – Da Nang – Hoi An (1Way|Loop)One-way runs need a van to carry your bag to the other end, and the van seats are the bottleneck, not the bikes.
- 03Barcelona Private Tour by Sidecar MotorcycleA sidecar carries one passenger and a city rarely has more than a handful of restored outfits. Two couples on the same morning is already a problem.
- 04Himalayas: 11 Day Motorbike Expedition To Ladakh (North India)The high passes into Ladakh are open roughly June to September. Outside that window the road is under snow and nobody is riding it.
Half of Europe’s best motorbike days happen in a sidecar chair.
Barcelona, Lisbon, Paris and Oslo all run vintage outfits with a driver in goggles and a chair at kerb height, which is the correct altitude for looking at a city. Inland it changes character entirely: Alpujarra switchbacks, the Bardenas badlands, a Ducati on the Dalmatian coast.
- 1Barcelona Private Tour by Sidecar Motorcyclefrom $199
- 2Paris Vintage Private City Tour on a Sidecar Motorcyclefrom $171
- 32hr Retro Motorcycle Sidecar Oslo Highlights Tour
Licence, rain and what the helmet on the hook is actually worth.
Riding yourself needs paperwork that most travel insurance quietly depends on: the right licence class, and an international permit where the country asks for one. Pillion riding needs none of it. Then there is weather. Northern Vietnam is wet and cold from June to September and the mountains make their own fog, so the honest answer on a bad week is to take the back seat and let somebody who rides that road daily handle it.
By place - Vietnam, Europe and everywhere else with a hire desk
Hanoi, Ha Giang, Hue, Hoi An, Da Lat, Saigon: the run most riders end up doing.
Da LatStraight off the bike: the reviews we added last.
The rest of the new ones →
7 Day Best of Transylvania Motorcycle Tour from Cluj
Read our review →
Guided Electric Motorbike Tour inside Joshua Tree National Park
Read our review →
Ho Chi Minh City Backroads Private Motorbike Tour
Read our review →
Ninh Binh Motorcycle Rental (Automatic motorbike)
Read our review →
