I cannot put into words how beautiful the landscape was when doing the 3 day Ha Giang Loop, but also gave a heavy view on the hard life of the farmers living in the mountains.

We were a group of 6 people: my host Bick with her dad as a driver, 2 germans, my driver and me. We stayed in 2 different homestay‘s, eating incredible food at each place and drinking happy water…which I learned is some sort of 30% rice alcohol.

One night we went out into town, there was a big event bringing locals and travelers together. We danced, we sang, there was a bonfire and some karaoke.

All in all, we took so many pictures, I don‘t even know what to do with them, they alone could probably fill a whole book. The peacefulness of the rice fields and mountains was hard to grasp in a way. Too beautiful to be real. And then driving and walking through the local villages, it‘s a different world. People working on fields that seem to be at a 70 degree angle. It was going so steep down, I would be so afraid, one step, and I‘d fall. The places where rice wouldn‘t

grow, they grow corn. And they use every inch. I saw a whole area covered by rocks and the tiny spaces with a little bit of soil, between some boulders, there was a tiny, just starting to grow, corn-plant.

Driving through the villages I also saw a few old barefoot women carrying these big bundles of leaves or sticks or harvested goods what felt like three times larger than they were. Sometimes I saw people transporting these on a motorbike but it was quite rare. In one of the villages, there was a group of maybe kids, all propably younger than 7 years old. Two girls carrying their baby sibling on their back, out of which one looked like she was maybe only 4 or 5 years old. My host Bick explained that the older kids often have to work in the mountains with their parents, so the younger siblings have to take care of the babies.