Markets, not maps
My mother's side is Tày. My grandmother traded goods across the Chinese border and carried them back to sell in the villages here — so my childhood happened in markets, in other people's languages, in houses that were not my own. Đồng Văn was a small place then. Nobody came here on a motorbike loop.
That is how I learned Ha Giang. Not from a map, and not from a guiding course.
Eighteen, carrying somebody else's bags
I started at eighteen, carrying gear for a cook who took people into the forest. I was the support, not the guide. What I remember is the energy foreigners brought with them — they asked questions about my own province that I had never thought to ask.
Then I tried a different life. School in Hanoi, then a desk in an office, building websites and writing content for companies. It did not hold me. My first guiding job came from a message on Facebook, and someone trusted me before I had any right to be trusted. I have been doing it since. Four years now.
The night I got lost on my own mountain
This is embarrassing to write down. I got lost on Mã Pì Lèng — the place I know better than my own street.
It was a few friends and me, on our own time, looking for a viewpoint nobody had photographed yet. We started from the Nho Quế river late in the afternoon, which was the first mistake. The ridge between Bản Mồ and Thiên Hương runs like the spine of some animal — you climb one vertebra and there is another behind it, and another. The higher we went, the colder it got, and then it started to rain.
We took our wet clothes off and packed dry leaves around ourselves in a crack in the rock. Wet cloth pulls the heat straight out of you. That is not a technique I learned in a course; it is a thing people here know.
We reached the top in the dark and there was no way down.
What saved us was maize. Hmong families farm those slopes, and where there is maize there is a path — a thin one they cut themselves to reach new ground. We found it and walked it through the forest, in the rain, on red mud, most of the night.
I tell guests this story for one reason. When I say we are turning back, or waiting a day, or not taking that road — I am not being careful with your holiday. I am being careful because I know exactly how fast this place stops being beautiful.
What I think decent travel looks like here
Two things, mostly.
The first is the sky. You do not argue with the weather in Ha Giang. The rain comes with the summer and stays into the early autumn, and the landslides are not a rumour. I read the forecast before I read the itinerary, and if your dates are wrong I will tell you before you pay, not after.
The second is how people ride. The thing that genuinely angers me about tourism here is the way some drivers ride — fast, overtaking blind, racing to keep an itinerary. There have been many accidents. Not near-misses. Accidents. I ride slowly enough that people behind us get impatient, and I have made my peace with that.
Where I am now
Still in Ha Giang. No family of my own yet. English and Vietnamese, plus enough Tày and Hmong from growing up around neighbours to get us further in a village than a phrasebook would.
I run every trip myself, in groups of no more than five. That is not a marketing decision — it is the largest number of people I can actually look after on these roads.