Ba Be National Park

Ba Be National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Ba Be is a lake among limestone mountains in the far north of Vietnam, in what was until the provincial mergers of 2025 the province of Bac Kan, about 230 kilometres and five hours by road from Hanoi, and it is the centrepiece of a national park that offers, in a small compass, boating, caves, waterfalls, forest and nights in the wooden stilt houses of the Tay people. Public buses from Hanoi reach the district town of Cho Ra, eighteen kilometres short of the lake, from which one continues by motorbike taxi, but most visitors come with a car and driver or on a tour of two or three days from Hanoi, and many include Ba Be in a longer circuit of the north-east with the Ban Gioc waterfall and the mountains of Cao Bang. An entrance fee is paid at the park gate.

Nearly everyone stays in one of the family homestays in the villages on the southern shore, Pac Ngoi, the largest and best known, Bo Lu and Coc Toc, in large houses on stilts with mattresses under mosquito nets on the floor of the main room or in simple private rooms, and with meals of lake fish, river shrimp, forest vegetables, sticky rice and home-distilled maize spirit taken with the family. The essential excursion is a day on the water, in one of the long, narrow steel boats with a canopy and a small engine that are hired, with a boatman, at the jetties: the usual circuit of five or six hours goes the length of the lake, past the Fairy pond and the little island of An Ma with its temple, out by the Nang river through the Puong cave, and on to the Dau Dang rapids, with a walk at the far end and lunch at a riverside house. Kayaks can be hired for quieter exploration, the homestays arrange guided walks of a few hours or a day through the forest to villages of the Dao and Hmong higher up, and the Hua Ma cave, with steps and lighting, lies near the road in.

Visiting Ba Be National Park: what you will see

Ba Be was made a national park in 1992, covers about a hundred square kilometres, was recognised as an ASEAN heritage park in 2004 and listed under the Ramsar convention in 2011. Its name, in the Tay language, means three lakes, Pe Lam, Pe Lu and Pe Leng, which are in fact three broad basins of a single body of water, joined by narrows, some eight kilometres long and up to eight hundred metres wide, lying at an altitude of about 150 metres and reaching nearly thirty metres in depth; it is the largest natural freshwater lake in Vietnam, and one of very few natural lakes in the world to lie in limestone country, where water normally drains away underground, which it owes to a lining of clay on its bed. It is fed by three rivers from the south and drains northwards into the Nang, a tributary of the Gam, and its level rises by several metres in the summer rains, when the water turns from jade green to brown. The mountains round it, of limestone some 450 million years old, rising to more than 1,500 metres, are cut into towers, cliffs and sinkholes and covered with evergreen forest on limestone, one of the best preserved examples of this type in the country, with more than a thousand species of plants, among them many orchids and a bamboo that grows only on these cliffs.

At the Puong cave the Nang river flows straight through a mountain, by a tunnel three hundred metres long and thirty high, hung with stalactites, in whose roof roost tens of thousands of bats of eighteen species, and through which the boats pass; below it, where the river squeezes between two walls of rock, it falls in three steps over a kilometre of rapids, called the Dau Dang waterfall, where a rare catfish of great size lives. The park's animals include Francois' langur, a black leaf monkey with white whiskers, several macaques, the slow loris, the Owston's civet, the Vietnamese salamander, more than two hundred species of birds, and over a hundred species of fish in the lake. The Tay, the largest of Vietnam's ethnic minorities, have lived here for more than two thousand years, growing wet rice in the valley bottoms and fishing from dugout canoes hollowed from a single trunk, some of which are still in use. Their legend explains the lake: an old beggar woman, turned away by everyone at a Buddhist festival except a poor widow and her son, revealed herself as a spirit, gave the widow a grain of rice husk, and warned her of a flood; that night water burst from the ground and drowned the valley, the husk became a boat in which the widow saved others, and the islet in the middle of the lake is called the Widow's mound. At the spring festival of Long Tong, on the tenth day of the first lunar month, there are boat races, wrestling and songs.

Ba Be National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park can be visited all year. The dry season, from October to April, is the most reliable: the lake is clear and green, the trails are firm and the air is cool, though December and January can be cold, damp and misty, with temperatures falling to ten degrees or lower, and the homestays are unheated. Spring, from late February to April, with blossom and the festival, and autumn, in October and November, when the rice on the terraces has been harvested and the skies are clear, are the best times.

The summer, from May to September, is hot and humid, with heavy rain, above all in July and August, when the lake is high and turbid, the waterfall is at its most powerful, trails are slippery with leeches about, and the roads into the mountains are occasionally blocked by landslides; it is also the Vietnamese holiday season, and weekends are busy. Bring a warm layer in winter, repellent, a torch and cash, since there are no banks. Allow two nights. Cao Bang and the Ban Gioc waterfall are four to six hours further north-east.