My hostel kindly allowed me check in at 5am when my bus arrived so I could head back to bed for a few hours. The next day was spent recovering from the horrendous night bus but the hostel staff were the nicest Vietnamese people I'd met so far which made it somewhat easier. They invited me to join them for their family lunch which was a delicious spread of dishes of vegetables and tofu. In the afternoon I headed out for a walk and spotted a temple on a hilltop overlooking the town so I made my way up there and found some Vietnamese friends en route.

The next morning I set off with a motorbike to do the Ha Giang Loop with a few people I had met in the hostel. The Ha Giang Loop is a wild 320-kilometre motorbike circuit along a series of divine mountain switchbacks, connecting the villages of Tam Son, Yen Minh, Dong Van, Meo Vac and Du Gia. Vietnam's northernmost corner is a place of misty landscapes strewn with conical limestone crags, deep gorges and mountain tribes who have made these ancestral highlands their barren homeland. Within a few kilometers of setting off from Ha Giang's town limits, the road immediately started climbing through forested hills until the Dong Van Geo Park. The cliff road continued to rise flanked by deep mountain gorges. The main highlight of the first day was Heavens Gate Pass, where the views of Dong Van plateau are breathtaking. We had lunch in the village of Tam Son deep in the valley before we sped off to Yen Minh, our final destination for the day. As the road rose again, the horizon broke into a forest of limestone peaks extending all the way to China. We stayed at Tom's Homestay that night where we met a couple of other bikers, all equally exhausted from the days adventure. After a huge family dinner and plenty of rice wine we collapsed into bed.

The next morning was possibly better, the scenery reminding me of a classical Chinese painting, with all the stereotypical mist, cone-shaped rock pinnacles, green moss, and the odd lonely villager standing alone atop gravity-defying limestone corners. However the road quality here varied with some interesting rocky sections where they were doing construction work. Because it's the only road connecting the two towns, often a digger had just opened up a section of the road and we had no other option but wait until they had filled it back in again. At one point where they had just put down some tarmac, we figured it would be faster to help the construction work so we grabbed a bucket each and helped spread the gravel. The work was grueling and we were glad to jump back on the bikes again. After the war most of the government jobs were given to men. It wasn't uncommon in the countryside to see women doing backbreaking jobs such as crushing rocks at construction sites and carrying heavy baskets. Shortly after this we ended up taking the wrong road and ended up at an unguarded unofficial border with China. As we arrived a couple of Chinese men hiked over the mountain pass, laughing at us struggling with the bikes. Back on the road again we found our way and rocked into Dong Van as the sun started to set. We stayed in a little wooden homestay on the edge of the town with simple mattresses on the floor, thankful for our individual mosquito nets.

The next morning the first 30km was the most beautiful views I'd seen in all of Vietnam - the Ma Pi Leng Pass. The cliff plunges for a couple of hundred metres to a deep river valley and towering above were huge rock faces of limestone pinacles. Like Halong Bay, it's dizzying to think of the forces of nature that carved out these incredible towers. Today was a slow journey, partly becuase of the road quality but mainly because we stopped so often to soak in the views of the journey. We landed in Du Gia, a sleepy village in the afternoon and headed to their local waterfall for a dip with all the locals.

Our last day on the bike was tough as the supposedly sleepy village of Du Gia awoke at 5am with their weekly market. Music flooded the streets and every family from each ethnic community group gathered to buy and sell their local produce. Women and children were dressed in incredible costumes, hand embroidered in creative patterns. The family we stayed with were part of the Tay people, who are the largest of local hill tribes. They wore distinctive indigo-blue and black clothing. By the time we finally set off, at 10 am the market was finished and they had better sense than us as the rain came pouring down for the next hour. We winded our way back over the valley and the sun came back just as we came to a part of the road that had recently been washed away in a landslide leaving only a rubble of rocks for us to slowly traverse across. We slowly made our way back through little villages, the local children running out to high five us as we zoomed pass. Back in Ha Giang again I said goodbye to my friends as they headed onto the next stop and I stayed put for another few days.