Arriving in Ha Giang: Illness, Trucks and Mountain Mist

Ha Giang was supposed to be the beginning of one of Vietnam’s great adventures.

The famous Ha Giang Loop. Limestone mountains, dramatic roads curling through clouds, and that slightly smug feeling of being the sort of travellers who still do things like this in our fifties.

Instead, we arrived and went straight to bed.

Not for a quick lie-down, either.

Three full days.

Whatever lurgy had followed us from Sapa had clearly decided it was now part of the travelling party. We spent the best part of seventy-two hours cocooned under blankets, coughing, sneezing, groaning, recovering, and making the sort of noises usually associated with old radiators.

The sort of cold that makes you lie in bed wondering if this is how great explorers felt before they quietly stopped exploring and took up knitting instead.

Craig, meanwhile, was still yakking away for most of it, hacking up whatever mountain souvenir Sapa had gifted him. By the end of the three days, though, the yakking had finally eased off, which felt less like recovery and more like the closing stages of a siege.

At one point I sneezed and discovered my pelvic floor muscles are not what they used to be, accompanied by the odd pip. Nothing humbles you faster than realising your internal scaffolding has clocked off early.

At that moment, any lingering fantasy that we were rugged adventurers vanished completely.

We were, quite clearly, two old codgers in a hotel room trying not to cough ourselves inside out.

So much for conquering the Ha Giang Loop.

Our only adventure in Ha Giang

What Ha Giang Felt Like From Our Hotel by the River

Truthfully, we didn’t see a huge amount of Ha Giang Town itself, but what we did see gave it the feel of a border town.

One main road seemed to run right through it, busy with endless trucks rumbling past, transporting goods from what we assume was China.

During the day, the place felt dead as a dodo, apart from the steady procession of trucks driving along a pot-holed road and blasting their air horns, which scared you half to death.

Most of the tourists had already disappeared onto the loop, leaving the town oddly quiet.

Our hotel, however, sat right on the river, and each morning we woke to the gentle sound of running water. Beyond it were lovely hills dotted with goats and misty mountains in the distance, soft and half-hidden, as if the landscape was teasing us with what we’d come to see.

It was beautiful in a muted, frustrating sort of way.

A Small Recovery by the Pool

By the third day we began to resemble human beings again.

Not fully restored, obviously. More “mobile but fragile.”

Feeling a little stronger, we ventured down to the hotel pool, which turned out to be the one genuinely cinematic moment of the entire Ha Giang stay.

It overlooked the river, with mountains rising behind it in soft layers of mist and green. The sort of view travel brochures love and real life occasionally delivers.

For a while, it actually felt as though the trip had turned a corner.

We sat there in the weak sunshine, taking in the silence, the water, and the mountains, quietly pretending that the previous three days hadn’t been spent sounding like a tuberculosis ward from the 1940s.

Then I made the fatal mistake of choosing a deckchair.

I don’t know whether it was too low, too soft, or whether my body had simply forgotten how joints work after three days in bed, but once I sat down, that was it.

I was in.

Properly in.

Getting back out of it required the sort of effort usually reserved for vehicle recovery. There was a lot of shifting, a certain amount of grunting, the odd pip, and one deeply undignified sideways roll that I prefer not to revisit.

Thankfully, Craig wasn’t there to witness any of this as he’d gone off to make coffee, which at least allowed me to preserve a small shred of dignity.

His own moment of humiliation was about to follow.

Craig Versus the Bathroom Tap

Craig went to wash the coffee cups and make a brew.

Our bathroom had a little drip from above. We think it was the boiler, and despite several visits from the maintenance man, the drip did one thing constantly: return.

Some hotel bathrooms have little quirks.

This one had a weapon.

Craig turned on the tap, expecting the usual gentle stream of water.

Instead, the thing erupted like a geothermal event.

A blast of steam shot upwards, accompanied by a surprising spray of muddy water. Craig, being Craig, tried to fix it like he’s fixed the majority of Vietnamese bathrooms we’ve had. But it wasn’t having any of it.

Craig himself, thankfully, escaped unscathed, but by the time he emerged, the bathroom looked like a Scandinavian sauna.

The kind where people sit in towels and talk about their feelings.

There was cursing and a few ffs.

It was, in its own way, one of the more memorable parts of Ha Giang.

Not quite the majestic mountain moments we had imagined, but memorable nonetheless.

I received my coffee a few hours later than planned but at least it gave me time to recovery from the deckchair saga.

The Ha Giang Loop IDP Problem and Our Options

Once we felt well enough to consider the loop properly, we headed out to hire a bike.

This was, after all, the entire reason we had come.

That was when reality arrived with all the grace of a traffic policeman.

Our International Driving Permit was the 1949 version.

Ha Giang, Vietnam requires the 1968 convention permit.

Some rental companies said outright no.

Others were rather more relaxed, happy to say yes, but only with a very heavily implied you’re on your own.

While we were discussing the options, one young Aussie in the queue cheerfully announced he was doing the loop anyway. He’d simply accepted he’d probably be slapped with at least a seven-million-dong fine and didn’t care about injury or what might happen if he wrote off the bike.

That’s the kind of youthful optimism we no longer possess.

We’re now at the stage of life where we read the small print, imagine the worst-case scenario, and then imagine it again just to be sure.

The hire company was perfectly happy to rent us a bike anyway, but only on the understanding that if we were stopped, we would be fined, and more importantly, any insurance or health cover would almost certainly be invalid.

In other words: if anything went wrong on one of Vietnam’s most famous mountain roads, we would be paying for the privilege ourselves.

The news brought out every emotion going.

First annoyance.

Then frustration.

Then that slow sinking feeling as it turned into disappointment and sadness.

Craig was more bitter about it than I was, feeling as though we had wasted three days being ill here, as well as the long journey, when we could just as easily have stayed in Sapa.

And if I’m honest, I understood exactly what he meant.

The Decision to Leave Ha Giang and Return to Hanoi

There was a moment when we were both trying to sort out a hotel in Hanoi on our phones and it all got a bit much.

It hit us in different ways.

We gave each other a little space.

Ultimately, though, we were both gutted.

There is adventurous, and then there is stupid.

We may occasionally flirt with the boundary, but this time even we could see where the line was.

So we did the least glamorous thing possible.

We said no.

No heroic photos on hairpin bends.

No triumphant tales from mountain villages.

No windswept selfies above the clouds.

Instead, we climbed onto the first bus back to Hanoi.

We sat there on the sleeper bus, scrunched up in the little cabin, watching the mountains disappear behind us.

Then, in perfect timing, Craig muttered, “For God’s sake, where did I put my friggin glasses?” For the third time this morning.

Which somehow felt like the perfect ending to our Ha Giang non-adventure.

The loop will still be there.

Preferably next time with the correct permit, functioning lungs, and deckchairs that release you I voluntarily

Tribute to Orla Wates

The day after we left Ha Giage, we learned that a young girl, Orla Wates from UK had tragically lost her life while doing the loop.

It puts things in to perspective.

We wanted ti include this as a small tribute to her.  We learned she had donated her organs, which says a great deal about the kind of person she was.

Our thoughts are with her family and friends.  What should have been an adventure ended in the worst possible way, and it a sobering reminder that these roads, however beautiful, carry real risks.