About Tac Tinh Waterfall (Thác Tác Tình)
The Tac Tinh Waterfall (Thác Tác Tình) was one of the taller, more impressive waterfalls that we’ve seen in Northern Vietnam.
It sported a 120m tall drop, which was easily seen from the road as it towered over the road we were driven on as we approached from the town of Tam Duong (see directions below).
In fact, our visit also happened to be during the tail end of Northern Vietnam’s Dry Season so it was not lost on us that this waterfall still had pretty good flow at a time when many other waterfalls would lose most of their vitality.
Even though this big waterfall was about a 90-minute drive from the touristy town of Sapa, I got the sense that it didn’t nearly get the notoriety that the attractions closer to Sapa would get.
The result was a more back-to-nature experience with no entry fees, a quiet hike in the forest, and no vendors or hawkers in or around the trail (as of our April 2025 visit).
The Meaning Behind The Tac Tinh Waterfall
According to our local guide in Sapa, she said the meaning of the name of this falls is “love”, but it’s not the same meaning as that of the other Love Waterfall in Sapa (Tinh Yeu Waterfall or Thác Tình Yêu).
I didn’t quite understand what she meant by the difference in their meaning (and their differing Vietnamese names for that matter), but the legend behind the Tac Tinh Waterfall had more of a tragic undertone to it.
It’s said that a Dao ethnic girl named Lo Lan fell in love with a poor, orphaned boy from the same village by the name of Ly Phan.
Even though they enjoyed their company together, their relationship was doomed by prejudice and harm from the community because of their disapproval of their intermingling across social classes.
At some point, things had gotten so bad that Lo Lan decided to show her devotion by leaping into the waterfall to her death.
Her distraught lover then followed her in a familiar Romeo and Juliet-style double suicide tragedy as a result of forbidden love.
In the end, this act of devotion all the way to the death impressed the villagers enough to name this waterfall as such to symbolize the couple’s eternal love for each other.
Experiencing The Tac Tinh Waterfall
From the signed trailhead leaving a narrow, ascending local road, we then immediately went onto a well-maintained concrete trail ascending into a lightly-shaded forest.
The trail continued to rise steeply uphill through a combination of concrete steps and uphill slopes as it went up a handful of switchbacks and steep grades for about 1km.
The ascent was sweat inducing and quite hot despite the shade from the trees (due to a combination of sunny weather and humidity even though it was less humid here than in the less mountainous areas of Vietnam).
However, eventually after about 30 minutes of this hike, the trees gave way to more open scenery revealing the impressive Tac Tinh Waterfall.
Looking in the opposite direction over the continuation of its downstream cascades (suggesting there’s more to this waterfall than what’s in the pictures on this page), we also got a panoramic view of rice terraces and local farms.
Indeed, this waterfall’s main drop was so tall that it was difficult to capture it in an entire frame without some wide angle aids.
So it was tempting to do a rather dicey, slippery scramble down towards the stream in order to access the plunge pool right at the base of the falls to cool off.
Since I had a bit of a slip and fall on my attempt, I opted to just be content with taking pictures and not take more risks than I needed to, especially with my injured knee and ankle at the time.
However, a group of younger Vietnamese visitors who showed up after us did make the scramble down to the stream (one guy did a baseball slide down) as they intended to linger here much longer than we did.
Our Sapa guide did mention that the villagers here don’t really see this waterfall as anything special since they see this every day and their focus is more on hustling, farming, and sustainment to make ends meet.
So that may have something to do with the understated feel of this place given the lack of touristy gimmicks and infrastructure that you’d more typically see closer to Sapa.
Once we had our fill of this waterfall, we then returned to the trailhead heading all downhill, which only took us about 15 minutes given that we had gravity working with us this time.
Authorities
The Tac Tinh Waterfall resides in the Binh Lu commune of the Tam Duong District in the Lai Chau Province, Vietnam. It’s situated between the cities of Lai Chau and Sapa. It may be administered by the the Tam Duong District government. To inquire about current conditions, you may want to try the Vietnam Tourism website.
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