Ha Giang Loop

Xin chào, you little darlings!

This post is going to be a bit long again, but I couldn't summarize the impressions of the last few days any more briefly. So, grab a cup of tea (beer is fine too), make yourself comfortable and enjoy reading.

We planned to do the Ha Giang Loop in the north of Vietnam. The Ha Giang Loop is a route through the mountains that you can drive on a rented scooter over several days. Some people hire a local driver to drive the tour with them. We decided to drive the loop on our own, despite the risk of being stopped by the police and having to pay huge amounts of money (spoiler... we weren't stopped 😇). After a night in a hostel, we set off early in the morning. We left Ha Giang behind us and drove anti-clockwise in the loop, as we had read that most police checkpoints were in the other direction. Huge mountains, decorated with dense, tropical forest, soon towered up in front of us. Our first stop would actually have been a waterfall, but experience has shown us that we should probably skip the waterfalls, because we didn't get to the waterfall this time either. We drove for hours and hours on terrible roads that consisted only of construction sites and went steadily uphill. It was a struggle. All the while, the mountains got higher and higher, the gorges deeper and deeper, and the atmosphere more and more breathtaking. We saw mountains towering above us like giants, changing their appearance between green hobbit hills and sharp dwarf mountains made of black rock. We saw beautiful rice terraces in the valleys and flowering trees in the gorges. The landscape was so beautiful that my imagination ran wild and I kept imagining dragons flying through the gorges or up to the mountain peaks hanging in the clouds. After 7 hours of driving, we arrived at our hostel dirty from head to toe and with sore bottoms. The next day we didn't leave until the afternoon. Our destination was the northernmost point of Vietnam. We drove higher and higher into the mountains. More and more often, the smell of coniferous wood and resin filled our noses, reminding me of home... of walks with mom through the forest next to our house and the warm summer nights when I walked home through the forest. Strange what memories such smells can awaken in you. I am always fascinated by it. From the northernmost point we could see as far as the Chinese border and experienced a wonderful sunset on the tower. It took us almost another hour to get to our next hostel, which was a bit of a challenge in the dark. Many of the streets have no guard rails and you could easily fall down one of the steep slopes, but Julian brought us slowly and safely to our destination. (Pat on the back to him). We spent the next two days in the hostel because I had become a little ill again and we liked the small town anyway. The people here in the mountains are admirable. Since the terrain there is very impassable, we kept seeing small fields between the sharp rocks that protruded from the ground. The people here hardly use machines for farming, but rather cows or water buffalo, since it would be difficult to get machines between the rocks. You kept seeing lonely scooters parked on the road and if you looked closely you could see the women in their colorful robes working somewhere on the steep mountain slopes. At some point Julian noticed that it was mostly the younger people who drove the scooters, while the older ones were more likely to be the passenger, which is probably due to their increasingly poor eyesight, as we rarely saw anyone wearing glasses. At least that was our theory. However, the downside of the beautiful views and magical landscapes here were the children. We saw many children working in the fields or begging on the streets with the words "Money" or "Food". In restaurants we were sometimes only served by the owners' children, which often felt very strange. Another striking feature was the young girls or women who were repeatedly seen walking around with small children in their arms. It was difficult to say whether they were their own children or their younger siblings... However, studies or reports on this topic are hard to find, as sexual violence is an extremely sensitive issue in Vietnam. On our last day we drove back towards Ha Giang. But we wouldn't be the Chaos travel group if something hadn't gone wrong this time too, because shortly after we set off we noticed that we hardly had any gas left in the tank and were close to running out of reserve. We panicked briefly when we realised that we hardly had any money left. We were very lucky that we had to drive downhill a lot and just about made it to the next town, which was an hour away. There we filled our wallets and our tank and drove on. The closer we got to Ha Giang, the smaller the mountains and valleys became. The fields and meadows stretched out more and more and the sharp rocks that protruded from the ground eventually disappeared. We passed through a beautiful pine forest and drove along a wide river that meandered between the mountains. When we arrived in Ha Giang, we drove (with some stress) to our homestay and had a delicious dinner there before we fell exhausted into bed.

There are actually so many little things, experiences and impressions to tell about what we experienced in the last few days, but that would go beyond the scope here. 🙈

Next our journey goes to Sapa.

Until then.

it's ok🐑