Four days on the Hà Giang loop

The night bus from Hà Nội drops you in the dark, and the first thing you learn about the far north is that it is cold at four in the morning, even in September. I sat on a plastic stool outside a shuttered shop with my pack between my knees and waited for the rental place to open, listening to someone sweep a yard I couldn’t see.

I had four days, a semi-automatic Honda with a rack on the back, a tent, and no plan beyond the loop itself: north through Quản Bạ and Yên Minh, over to Đồng Văn, along the Mã Pí Lèng pass, and back down the long way. People ride it in three days. I wanted four, so that I would have to sit still somewhere.

The road leaves the town along the river and then simply starts to climb, as if it had been waiting. By mid-morning I was above the first cloud, and by noon I was inside the second. Heaven’s Gate at Quản Bạ is a viewpoint with a car park and a stall selling grilled corn, and it is also, when the cloud lifts for a minute, one of the most improbable views I know: two rounded hills in the valley below, green and perfectly matched, that everyone calls the Fairy Bosom and then looks embarrassed about.

I didn’t take a good photograph of them. I took a good photograph of the road, which is what I went on doing for four days.

Riding here is slower than the distances suggest. Forty kilometres can take two hours, not because the road is bad (most of it is good, newly surfaced, lined with little concrete markers) but because it never runs straight for long enough to settle, and because every third bend opens onto something that makes you stop. Buffalo on the road. A woman with a basket of greens on her back walking uphill faster than I was riding. Children waving from a doorway with the hand that wasn’t holding a younger brother.

I stopped for the night at a homestay near Yên Minh and asked, with more pointing than Vietnamese, whether I could pitch the tent in the corner of their field instead of taking a room. The grandmother thought this was very funny. She charged me for the room anyway, and then fed me as if I had taken it.

Wild camping on the loop is possible, rarely necessary, and not always welcome. Most of the land that looks empty belongs to someone: a slope of corn, a buckwheat field, a pasture for the family’s two cows. What works is what worked that first night. Ask at a homestay, offer to pay, and take whatever corner they give you. You get a flat pitch, a toilet, somewhere to fill your bottles, and usually a bowl of something hot.

Everyone who has ridden the loop tells you about Mã Pí Lèng, and everyone is right. The pass runs along the lip of a canyon between Đồng Văn and Mèo Vạc, and for kilometre after kilometre the road is a shelf cut into the rock, with the Nho Quế river a thin green thread hundreds of metres below. The first time you see it you laugh, out loud, inside your helmet.

I rode it twice: once in the late afternoon, into the sun, and again the next morning before the tour groups came up from Đồng Văn, when the canyon was still full of shadow and the river was the only bright thing in it. The second time I got off the bike and walked a stretch, which I would recommend to anyone. At walking pace the pass stops being a view and becomes a place: the wind coming up the gorge, a goat bell somewhere, the tick of the engine cooling behind me.

On the third night I camped above Mèo Vạc, at a family’s place at the end of a concrete track, on a terrace they used for drying corn. The son, who was about my age and spoke far better English than I speak Vietnamese, showed me the fire ring, a circle of river stones black on the inside, and brought over an armful of split wood without being asked.

I have made a lot of campfires. This is the one I think about. The sky went from blue to navy to black while I watched, the valley filled with the noise of insects, and somewhere below a motorbike climbed the switchbacks one gear change at a time until it reached a house and stopped. I didn’t write anything. I didn’t read. I fed the fire until the wood ran out.

In the morning his mother made coffee in a dented aluminium pot, strong enough to stand a spoon in, sweetened with condensed milk from a tin she opened with a knife. We drank it standing at the edge of the terrace, looking down at the cloud lying in the valley where the road would be.

I rode back the long way, through Du Già, on roads that were sometimes more river than road, and handed the bike back with a new scrape on the rack and most of a tank of fuel. Four days is not long enough. Nobody who rides the loop thinks it is long enough; that is part of what it is for.

What I brought home was less a set of photographs than a pace. For a week afterwards I wrote code more slowly, and better, and went to bed when it got dark. It wore off, as it always does. That is why I keep going back up.