Bach Ma National Park one day tour

Overview

A nine-hour day from Da Nang into Bach Ma National Park: cloud forest, waterfall walks, a ridge viewpoint over the coast, and a mountain climate that bears no resemblance to the one you left at sea level.

What to expect

Roughly ninety minutes each way by road, then a long climb up the park road to the ridge, with guided walking between viewpoints. This is a nature day rather than a sightseeing one — the reward is what the forest is doing, not a list of monuments. Lunch, the park entrance and an English-speaking guide come with it.

A hill station the forest took back

Bach Ma was built in the 1930s as a French hill station, a retreat from the heat of the plain, and at its height it held well over a hundred villas along with a market, a post office and tennis courts. It was abandoned in the 1940s and wrecked in the wars that followed. What survives now is foundations, staircases and roofless walls with trees growing through them, disappearing a little more each year. You walk past the remains of somebody's summer without any sign telling you so.

The wettest place you are likely to visit

The summit stands at about 1,450 metres and receives an extraordinary amount of rain — among the highest annual totals recorded anywhere in Vietnam. It is also reliably several degrees cooler than the coast, and often inside cloud rather than under it. That combination is the whole reason the French came up here, and the reason the forest is as dense and dripping as it is. Bring a layer, and accept that a view can vanish in ten minutes and return in twenty.

Six hundred and eighty-nine steps

The park's largest waterfall drops roughly three hundred metres in stages, and a staircase runs down beside it — a little under seven hundred steps to the lower viewpoint, and the same number back up. Going down is optional and going up is not, so judge it honestly before you start.

An animal almost nobody has seen

These mountains are where the saola was found in 1992 — a horned forest bovine unknown to science until then, and one of the rarest large mammals on earth. Almost no biologist has ever seen a living one in the wild; the evidence is camera traps, and the last confirmed image is over a decade old. You will not see one. But you are walking through the forest it was found in, which is a different and stranger thing than a wildlife checklist.

Practicalities

Wear proper shoes and long socks — leeches are active on the trails after rain and are harmless but persistent. Take a waterproof layer whatever the forecast says at the coast. The upper road is steep and winding, which matters if you are prone to car sickness.