First Day of the Ha Giang Loop

In the morning, I walked down for breakfast (noodles - ah, I’m not getting used to that so early in the morning. I miss my avocado/egg sourdough).

Then I signed a waiver for the tour - which was basically two pages telling you that riding on a motorbike comes with an inherent risk, that there’s lots to go wrong, not even pertaining to the vehicle. They even mentioned possible animal attacks. 😁

They’re boilerplate, those things, but they never instil you with a modicum of faith.
But! My host brought me a free T-shirt saying I completed the loop and that made me so happy, I stopped worrying. 😁

Of course, I can’t yet wear it, having not even started the activity. 😁

My driver arrived by then and together, he and my host started dressing me. 😁

They started with protectors for knees and elbows. Since it was pouring outside, they also put several layers of plastic bags on me and my backpack. All I had to do was sit there and stretch out my limbs. 😁

Then I got the helmet and hopped on the bike. My host was so happy sending me off, she even took pictures of me the whole time for posterity. It was really precious, actually. 😁
The bike was surprisingly small - hard to believe it was going to carry two people plus three backpacks. The driver’s in the front, mine strapped to the back, and my drybag on my shoulders (the downside: it’s rather uncomfortable).

I was also puzzled by the bike only having one single mirror. Is that normal? Is the second one optional? As many times as the people here engage in risky overtaking manoeuvres, they should have more than six mirrors…

While my driver seems nice, he does occasionally drive one-handed because the other hand is texting someone on his phone or taking phone calls on the bike.

Also, I specifically booked an English tour and if you remember, the company’s reasoning for having a male driver is because they speak English. (And because they are better drivers than women, according to them…). I even signed the waiver/contract which listed an English-speaking driver as a service I had booked.

Now, guess which language my driver doesn’t speak. I dare you.

Yes. Correct. He doesn’t speak Spanish. I was fine with that. But not with him not knowing English.

He was supposed to be a guide and tell me about things. Forget about it! The very, very few words he did know, he often mispronounced entirely. Understanding him is incredibly hard - especially with some Auditory Processing Disorder in the mix.

It’s frankly exhausting.

I was also the only person to book that tour, so there’s no one else around.

It gets quite lonely.

There’s plenty of others doing the loop - driving past you or having a rest at one of the countless roadside cafes. But you don’t generally talk to them.

At every stop, I usually took photos and was ready to leave again. Enjoying the scenery is all good, but not with a crowd of noisy tourists nearby and my beloved smokers.

Whenever we stopped for something, I was never told why.

For the scenery? To take photos? To get a drink? Would we be having lunch? Or to explore the area?

The “guide” just always looked at me expectantly. That actually got rather annoying.
We went to a weathered remnant of a castle and again, I was just looked at.

Apparently, my driver expected me to go and look at it by myself. Contractually, I was supposed to be given a tour. But who cares.

I looked around and was ready to leave again - I’m generally not a fan of just looking at buildings or going to museums.

My “guide” found that odd. 😁

Also, while there were information boards at the castle, all of them were in Vietnamese - which I don’t speak. Hence the idea of having a guide.

We eventually arrived at the hostel for the night, where I was put in a dorm with three other people on a similar tour.

I befriended them and we made our way downstairs to have dinner.

We were told by the staff to sit down at the main table - already featuring a buffet.

Soon, my driver arrived and waved at me, looking like he wanted to say something. I was confused and waved back. He left.

Then he reappeared. He said (in very broken English) not to sit down with the others - why would I do that? And did I not understand that he was waving me over to talk?

He was literally waving at me (oddly, granted, but I’ve seen people wave like that).

It appears that beckoning someone over has a different gesture in Vietnam. There, it’s done with the hand facing down - the opposite of what we do in the West. So what looked like a wave to me was actually “come here.”

I was utterly confused.

He used Google Translate to explain that I would have to eat with him and the others would eat with their tour guides.

It kept being lonely.

After dinner, the others asked me to join their card game, which I gladly accepted.
There was a kerfuffle about everyone’s different rules for the same game (people seemed mortally offended when one rule was collectively voted against 😁).

But it was a fun interlude.

Being all very tired and exhausted from the day, we went to bed.Read more