Vietnam

We travelled from Indonesia straight over to Vietnam for the next leg of our travels. I have already been here ~5 years ago however it's all new to Jodie.

We started in Hanoi which is the main city in the North, really cool place with lots of French colonial influence. Interesting to see very European style houses and architecture in SouthEast Asia. We spent a couple of days here and then headed north with a friend we met to do the Ha Giang Loop. The 8 hour journey to Ha Giang was luckily actually quite comfortable in our 'VIP' sleeper bus, you get your own private pod with a bed, charging station, reading light and private shutter all for £10. I have been taken motion sickness patches (all natural) which seem to be working really well. We didn't arrive to Ha Giang until 4am and then had a 8am start in the morning.

I had already done the loop before but it was interesting to see how much more popular it had become since my last time. Way more organised tours and far less tourists actually driving their own bike, most go on the back of one of the vietnamese tour guides. I'd read online that joining on to a big group can be annoyingly slow as you need to wait for everyone to take pictures along the way. So we (me, jodie and new american friend) got a private guide to take us round the loop but I was driving with Jodie on the back. We went for the 3 day option. Last time I did it, we had no guide at all and just drove ourselves no problem, it's become trickier to do this though as it's now more popular which means more police checks for drivers without the proper international biking license (which I don't have). We ended up having to pay a £30 'fine' (bribe) between us but only had to do this once. Our guide managed to get the bribe amount down for us.

Loop itself was amazing, just as good as I remembered. Some of the roads are a bit windy but really fun to drive! The weather on day 1 was a bit rainy (hence the luminous green power ranger jacket) but this did mean lots of low clouds rolling over the hills which added a nice atmosphere. Days 2 and 3 we had nice sunny weather and some amazing views. After each day of driving we stopped at homestays and enjoyed dinner and rice wine (called happy water by the locals) with other loopers and vietnamese guides.

Currently we are in Cat Ba and resting as I've finally managed to catch food poisoning, but I'll make a separate post on Cat Ba and what we've been up to for the past few days.Read more