Soggy - Ha Giang motorbike trip, day 3

I’d planned today to be a shorter day on the road. I wanted to spend some time in villages on the way instead of driving all day. There’s a 45km loop that most people take, up to Vietnam’s “north pole” - a big flag at the most northerly point in Vietnam. There’s also a place where you can look into China and potentially sneak across an unofficial border. When I visited Laos in 1998, I cycled up to the Lao/China border. It was open for local people but not for foreigners. I’m not sure there was even a rope across the road and the official just watched us ride past into no-man’s land (is there a gender neutral term for that?) towards China. The Chinese side of the border was several Km away and long before we could see it someone came up and waved us back to Laos. (Remember Tokoroa?) Since I did that and now I’ve also been to China, I decided to skip the extra driving up north.

And then this morning it was pouring rain. I was happy not to have 100+km to drive and could wait to see if the weather improved. Mid morning it looked like it was drying up so I started to walk up to a viewpoint overlooking Dong Van. It kept raining and I gave up halfway and retreated back indoors. A bit after mid-day it looked better so I packed up and started out. Again, around different hills there seemed to be a different climate. Light rain, then heavier rain, then 15 minutes of almost sun. Halfway to Yen Minh I stopped to visit the Hmong Kings' Palace.

As I arrived the rain started again. It’s a modest building with several courtyards that was built in the early 20th Century. The first King who lived there supported the French but his son later supported Ho Chi Minh. I spent a while trying to take photos of the rain pouring down into the courtyards and then sat on a step in the palace waiting for the rain to stop. It didn’t stop and after an hour I thought I’d better go anyway.


Motorbikes in the rain aren’t much fun. It rained with varying degrees of heaviness the rest of the way to Meo Vac. At one point there was a landslide over half the road. I was going downhill past it and a minibus was coming uphill. It only needed to slow down fractionally to give me time to go another 15 meters past the landslide to the wider road but bigger vehicles never EVER slow down for smaller ones in Vietnam. So the bus drove up the hill into the narrowed road and stopped facing me. I had a wall of mud to my left and mud with a water-filled trench to my right. No way I was going to drive into the trench when I didn't know how deep it was and I was sure that a) I'd get covered in mud and b) I'd not be able to get my bike out again. The minibus sat and flashed it's lights at me. There wasn't enough space to turn my bike around and drive back up the hill so I started to walk it backwards. It's heavy, I was pushing it uphill and my feet kept slipping on the mud. I made very slow progress (which I didn't care about since it served the driver right that his (I assume) journey was slowed up even more than if he'd just let me pass). At the rate I was going it would have taken me about 20 minutes to reverse up far enough for the bus to pass but a car came down the hill behind me and the driver got out and helped pull my bike up the hill. Vietnam is full of frustrations and very lovely, helpful people who compensate for the idiots. At least at that point the rain was only light. It got heavier again around the next hill. Despite my waterproofs, I arrived in Meo Vac soggy.