Ha Giang Loop Day One: Heaven's Gate to Dong Van on a Honda Wave

(Linda, writing.)

Four things you should know about starting the Ha Giang Loop.

How do you get from Hanoi to Ha Giang?

The Daiichi sleeper bus from Hanoi airport to Ha Giang leaves at 16:45 and arrives at Ha Giang Riverside Hostel at 21:55. It cost us £17.41 between us for two beds (£8.70 each). The beds are laid out in three narrow columns, roughly coffin-shaped, and the driver overtakes lorries on blind corners at 90kph. I am Luxembourgish and normally unflappable. I held Alexander's hand for the last hour.

The Phoenix Hotel Ha Giang is where we stored our main bags for the duration of the loop. One night for £51.60, a guesthouse with Wi-Fi, a lobby smelling of incense, and a lockable luggage room. Expect a guesthouse, not the Mandarin Oriental.

Should you do the Ha Giang Loop with an Easy Rider or ride yourself?

We rode ourselves. Alexander's view, which I've heard ten times now, is that if you're going to do the loop you do the work, you ride the thing yourself, and you earn the experience. I agree with him. We hired our own bikes, a semi-automatic Honda Wave each, from one of the dozen places in town for around £10 a day with helmets included. The hostel arranged it and gave us a fifteen-minute lesson in the car park. Alexander passed. I passed too, in the sense that I did not crash, though I did stall eight times trying to pull away with a full pannier behind me.

If you can ride, ride yourself. The loop is one of the great roads on earth and the whole point is earning the view at Ma Pi Leng.

What's the weather like on the Ha Giang Loop?

This was mid-May, and the forecast was lying. It promised cloud and 24 degrees. What we got was a 15-degree morning, a wall of fog on the first pass, and a rainstorm so heavy at 2pm that we pulled over in a village and sat under a tarpaulin drinking cà phê sữa đá with six men playing cờ tướng. That coffee stop, with the rain hammering the tarpaulin and a man who never stopped laughing teaching me cờ tướng (I lost in nine moves), was one of the highlights of the week.

What do you see on Day 1 of the Ha Giang Loop?

The plan for Day One was simple on paper: 3.5 hours from Ha Giang to Dong Van, north through the karst plateau. What Google Maps calls 3.5 hours takes you seven, because you will stop every fifteen minutes to look at something.

Bac Sum Pass is twenty minutes out of Ha Giang, where the road starts to climb properly and the limestone towers on the horizon announce themselves. There's a concrete sign welcoming you to the Dong Van Karst Plateau UNESCO Geopark. Everyone stops for the photo. You will too.

Heaven's Gate (Quan Ba) is twenty minutes further, with the Fairy Mountains view. The two hills at the foot of the pass are known locally as the Twin Mountains of Co Tien, and from the viewpoint at the top they look like green breasts (Vietnamese tourism literature says this out loud, we didn't invent it). There's a small café at the viewpoint selling tea and pineapple. We bought both and stood there for fifteen minutes watching the valley fill with cloud.

Nam Dam village is ninety minutes from Ha Giang, a Dao ethnic minority village where you can walk through the rice terraces for as long as you can stand. We spent fifteen minutes there because we were behind schedule. We regretted it.

Lunch in Yen Minh was at a local place the hostel had circled on our paper map. Phở gà for 60,000 VND a bowl (£2), white noodles in clear broth with poached chicken and a pile of herbs on the side. The best pho of the trip.

Tham Ma Pass after lunch is famous for its nine hairpins stacking up the mountainside. There's a viewpoint at the top where local Hmong children pose for tips. The etiquette is: if you take a photo, you tip 10,000 VND (30p). If you don't tip, don't take a photo.

Sung La valley is forty minutes further, with the classic Hmong villages of rammed-earth walls and tiled roofs. Pao's House is a tourist stop, an old Hmong compound used as the set for a famous Vietnamese film, and you pay 10,000 VND (30p) to wander through the courtyards.

We skipped Lung Cu flag tower because it was raining. It's an out-and-back extra 40km off the main route that only makes sense on a good-weather day. People who did it said it was worth it.

We arrived in Dong Van at about 7pm, soaking and euphoric. Lam Tung Hotel (£22 for the room). Dong Van old quarter is a low-slung grid of wooden shopfronts with yellow-painted beams and a narrow square that fills up with market stalls and bia hơi tables after dark. Dinner was at a family-run place a block off the square: a hotpot of beef and wild mushrooms, a plate of fried pork belly with pickled mustard, morning glory, and a bottle of Hà Nội beer each. About £12 between us.

And then we slept for eleven hours.

How much does Day 1 of the Ha Giang Loop cost?