Ba Vi, the mountain Hanoi drives into the cloud for

Ba Vi is the mountain Hanoi escapes to when the city is unbearable. Three peaks an hour and a half west, forest to the top, and a French hill station rotting quietly under the trees.

Why is it almost always in cloud?

The massif stands alone on a flat delta, and moist air rising against it condenses. Ba Vi is the first high ground west of Hanoi. The cloud that forms on it sits at roughly 600 to 1,000 m for much of the year.

The cloud is why the photographs all look the same: a road disappearing into white, trees dripping, a temperature ten degrees below the city. Come expecting fog and the mountain delivers. Come for a view over the Red River delta and you will get one perhaps one day in four.

What is left of the hill station?

The French laid out a hill station here in the 1930s, and the forest has been taking it back since 1945. What survives is roofless. Villas with window openings and no glass, an officers' house, a church with a nave full of ferns, and a military prison whose cells are still legible.

Strangler figs have grown through several of them, which is what draws photographers up from the city at weekends. The ruins are signposted and scattered between about 600 and 800 m, reachable on foot from the park road in twenty minutes each.

What is the temple at the top?

Vua peak, at 1,296 m, carries a temple to Ho Chi Minh built in 1999. The walk to it is a long flight of stone steps from the upper car park. It takes about twenty minutes of climbing and the last section is exposed to the wind.

Tan Vien, the second peak, holds the shrine to Son Tinh, the mountain god of the flood legend every Vietnamese schoolchild learns. The massif is his in the story, and the two summits are why a mountain this small matters more here than its height suggests.

When do the sunflowers come out?

The wild sunflowers come out in November, and they are the busiest three weeks of the Ba Vi year. Dã quỳ grows along the park road in a yellow band, the same flowering that fills the highlands around Pleiku at the same time of year.

April to September is warm, green and wet in the afternoons. December to February is cold and damp, and the ruins in winter fog are the version photographers want. The month-by-month guide covers how the northern year runs.

Which peak do you actually climb?

The two peaks are not a climb in the usual sense. The park road carries a car or a bike to about 1,100 m, and both summits are then a staircase of a few hundred steps rather than a walk of any length.

Vua is the busier and the higher at 1,296 m. Tan Vien, at 1,227 m, takes half the traffic and has the older shrine. Doing both in one visit takes about two hours including the drive between the two car parks, and the ground between them is forest with no path worth the name.

What does it cost, and how do you get in?

Park entry is a ticket in the tens of thousands of dong per person, with a smaller charge for a motorbike, paid at the gate. Inside, the road climbs to about 1,100 m and everything else is on foot.

From Hanoi it is roughly 50 km and an hour and a half by car or bike. There is no train, and the public bus to Son Tay leaves you well short of the gate. A car for the day or a rented motorbike is the practical answer, and the day trips page ranks this against the alternatives.

What else is on the same road?

Duong Lam, the laterite village, sits about 20 km short of the park on the same drive out of Hanoi. The two make one good day rather than two thin ones. The village in the morning, the mountain after lunch, back before dark.

Several large resorts sit on the lower slopes with pools and hot springs, aimed at Hanoi families rather than at visitors. They are perfectly comfortable and have nothing to do with the mountain above them.