Ha Giang

This morning I took a taxi to the bus station. It was a bit too far for me to want to go by motorbike taxi with all my luggage. When I got there and bought my ticket to Ha Giang, I asked what time the next bus was and was told ‘10 minutes’. Good that I didn’t have to wait, but bad because almost all the seats were taken.

Even though it’s a day bus, the actual bus used is a ‘sleeping bus’ so there are two tiers of not quite flat beds. The only space left was right at the back on the top tier. The 4 places at the back are higher up than all the others and there’s not enough headroom to sit up. So it was 6 hours of lying down as the bus swayed about and went round sharp bend on the mountain roads.


I arrived around 4pm and dropped my stuff at the hostel before going to sort out hiring a motorbike for the next 4 days. A lot of the bikes for hire in Vietnam are terrible – breaking down all the time. I wanted to make sure I got a good one. The company I chose was more expensive than others but has new bikes and a lot of good reviews. As it was getting dark I realised the only photos I’d taken were blurry phone shots from the bus. This is the street where the motorbike hire company is based, looking towards the mountains where I’ll be going tomorrow.