Hai Van Pass by Train: Which Side to Sit On, Times, Cost

Travelling north from Da Nang to Hue, sit on the right. Travelling south from Hue to Da Nang, sit on the left. The sea is on the east side of the line in both directions, so the side that faces it swaps with your direction of travel. The journey is 103km and takes two and a half to three hours, a soft seat costs 77,000 to 190,000 dong booked direct, and the daylight trains are the only ones worth taking.

Several of the pages ranking for this route give the sides the other way round. Check it against a map before you believe anyone, including this page: the railway runs up the eastern flank of the Hai Van headland with the East Sea below it, and when you are pointing north, east is on your right.

Why the train and not the bus

Buses do not cross the Hai Van Pass. They go under it, through the 6.28km Hai Van Tunnel, open since June 2005 and the longest road tunnel in Southeast Asia. It cuts 20km and up to an hour off the drive and it shows you a wall.

The railway uses neither. It has its own alignment cut into the seaward cliffs, looping around the headland through short tunnels at roughly sea level, which is why the carriage window sits a few metres above the water for long stretches. Motorbikes are banned from the road tunnel and take the old pass, which is the other good way to do this trip and a much wetter one in autumn.

So: the train is the only public transport on this route that sees the coast. That is the whole case for it.

Which trains run in daylight

Six or more services a day cover Da Nang to Hue and most of them are night trains running the Hanoi to Saigon route, which means the best two hours of railway in Vietnam pass in complete darkness. These are the ones to book. Both ends reward a night rather than a dash for the next connection.

The road climbs; the railway takes the cliff below it and sees more.

Times shift with the seasonal timetable and booking sites quote them up to fifteen minutes apart, so check the exact departure when you book. The southbound services run on a mirror-image schedule. SE2 and SE4 are the ones most people should take; the heritage trains are slower and more of an event, which suits some travellers and annoys others.

This is the stretch the road tunnel skips entirely.

Da Nang to Hue train ticket prices

A soft seat from Da Nang to Hue costs 77,000 to 190,000 dong depending on train and class, roughly 3 to 7 US dollars. Berths on the same stretch run 89,000 to 258,000 dong, and the only reason to book one for a two-hour daytime ride is the bigger window. Whichever way you go, Hue rewards two nights, not the afternoon most people give it.

Agency sites resell the identical seat for 14 to 15 US dollars. That is not a scam, it is a booking fee on a cheap ticket, but it is two to five times the fare. Prices checked September 2026.

Book direct at dsvn.vn and keep a fallback. Foreign cards fail there often enough that you should not leave it to the morning of the train, and an agency reselling the identical seat for fourteen dollars is a booking fee, not a scam.

How to book it

The official site is dsvn.vn, run by Vietnam Railways. It defaults to Vietnamese with an English toggle at the top right, it issues e-tickets with a QR code by email, and it is the cheapest way to buy.

The catch is payment. Foreign cards fail on dsvn.vn often enough that it should not be your only plan. If you are already in Vietnam, book there and use the pay-later option, which gives you 24 hours to pay at any station or post office. Otherwise ask your hotel to book it on a Vietnamese card, or accept a reseller's markup.

Buses take the 6.28km tunnel, which saves an hour and shows passengers a wall.

Book three to seven days ahead. Sea-side window seats sell out first on weekends and public holidays, and on this route the seat is the product.

What you see on the Hai Van Pass train

The first twenty minutes out of Da Nang are unremarkable: level crossings, back gardens, scrap yards. Then the line reaches the shore of Da Nang Bay and Da Nang's skyline appears across the water behind you on the right. If you have a morning spare at that end, the Da Nang beaches are a better use of it than the station cafe.

Every seat sees something. The sea side sees the pass.

Then the climb. The track clings to the cliff, dropping in and out of short tunnels, with the sea directly below the window and small beaches you cannot reach from any road. The Hai Van road pass runs somewhere above you at about 475 metres and you rarely see it. Over the top, the line drops to sea level at Lang Co, a fishing town on a sandbar between a lagoon and the ocean, where the heritage trains stop.

After that the last forty minutes are rice fields and wetland into Hue. Roughly 45 minutes of the journey is the good part. That is enough.

What to do at each end

Hue rewards two nights rather than one. The Imperial City takes half a day, the royal tombs along the Perfume River take another, and things to do in Hue covers which tombs are worth the entry and which are not. The Hue night walking street handles the evening.

Hue is the northern end of the line and worth two nights.

Da Nang is the better base for a beach and a city, and Da Nang caves at Marble Mountain are a half-day if you have one spare. Most people are really heading to Hoi An, thirty minutes further south, and things to do in Hoi An will take three days if you let them. If you want the coast road rather than the rails on that leg, Hue to Hoi An compares the options honestly.

Bach Ma National Park sits between the two ends of this line and is the obvious stop-off in principle. In practice, check the dates: the guided day tours there close for September, October and November and reopen on 1 December.

Carrying on north to Phong Nha

The same railway continues from Hue to Dong Hoi in about three hours, which puts the caves within a day of Da Nang without a single flight. Hue to Phong Nha covers the road alternative, which is faster door to door, and the Phong Nha train station guide explains why most people should get off at Dong Hoi instead. Running the route in reverse, Phong Nha to Hue is the same journey with the seat side flipped.

If you are going all the way to Hanoi, the Da Nang to Hanoi sleeper train passes the Hai Van section in the dark on most services, which is an argument for splitting the journey at Hue rather than riding it straight through.