China to Vietnam overland, by Yunnan's rice terraces

Most travellers who visit both China and Vietnam fly between them. But the two countries share a long land border through the mountains of the south-west, and crossing it on the ground gives a far better sense of how they connect. The Red River rises in Yunnan, flows south-east into Vietnam and reaches the sea near Hanoi. Peoples, trade routes and armies have moved along its valley for centuries. Many of the hill peoples on either side of the border are closely related, and the landscapes change gradually rather than abruptly.

Yuanyang and the Hani terraces

In the mountains south of the Red River, in the Honghe prefecture of Yunnan, the Hani people have spent well over a thousand years carving the hillsides into rice terraces. They run from the valley floors almost to the mountain tops, thousands of them, some in staircases of hundreds of steps. They are fed by an intricate system of channels that carries water from the forested summits down through the villages and from terrace to terrace. The Honghe Hani Rice Terraces were inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2013, as a cultural landscape in which people, forest, water and fields work together.

The terraces of Yuanyang are at their most famous between December and early spring, after the harvest. The fields are flooded, and the water reflects the sky like hundreds of broken mirrors, turning gold and pink at sunrise and sunset. Fog often fills the valleys in the early morning, and the terraces appear and disappear as it lifts. In summer, they are green with growing rice, and in the autumn golden before the harvest.

Jianshui, on the way, is an old walled town with a well-preserved historic centre. It has one of the largest Confucian temples in China, the courtyards of a wealthy merchant family's mansion, and an elegant many-arched stone bridge over a river outside town.

The Hani are only one of many peoples in this corner of Yunnan, one of the most ethnically diverse regions of China. Markets in the hill towns draw people from villages across the mountains, and they are a good place to see the region's variety of dress and produce. Market days rotate between towns, so local guides are the best source of information on where to go.

Across the border to Sapa

The usual crossing is at Hekou on the Chinese side and Lào Cai on the Vietnamese side of the Red River, where a bridge joins the two towns. From Lào Cai, the road climbs into the mountains to Sapa. It is a hill town founded by the French in the early twentieth century as a cool retreat from the heat of the delta, set high above a valley of rice terraces, with Fansipan, the highest mountain in Indochina, rising above it.

The Muong Hoa valley below Sapa is home to Hmong and Dao communities, and to villages such as Tả Van among the terraces, where many visitors walk and some stay in homestays. Sapa itself has grown enormously and become very busy, and some of its charm has gone with the building boom. But the valleys below remain beautiful, and walking down into them with a local guide is the best way to see them.

From Sapa, it is a few hours by road or overnight train to Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital, with its old quarter, its lakes and its traffic.

The tours that cross

G Adventures' China to Vietnam: An Overland Adventure, six nights, is the most direct version: Yuanyang, Jianshui, Tả Van and Sapa, and Hanoi. It runs in winter and spring, when the terraces are flooded.

G Adventures' China and Vietnam: Chengdu to Hanoi, twelve nights in the same months, starts further north in Sichuan. Its places include Chengdu, Lijiang and the Bai village of Xizhou in Yunnan, then Jianshui, Yuanyang and Sapa before Hanoi. G Adventures' China and Vietnam: Beijing to Sapa Adventure, eighteen nights, makes the whole journey from Beijing, the Great Wall at Mutianyu, Xi'an and Chengdu, through Lijiang, Shaxi and Dali to Jianshui, Yuanyang, Sapa and Hanoi.

Overland journeys take longer than flights, but they show the landscape between the cities. This one has some of the most beautiful country in Asia on either side of the border.