Hà Giang is Vietnam's northernmost province, a maze of grey limestone towers, deep gorges and terraced slopes running all the way to the Chinese border. Threading through it is the Happiness Road, a single highway that hangs off the cliffs; its most famous stretch, the Mã Pí Lèng pass, tops out near 1,500 metres and is counted among Vietnam's four great mountain passes. Below the pass the Tu Sản gorge drops some 800 metres to the Nho Quế River, the deepest river canyon in Southeast Asia. Villages of the H'mong, Tày, Lô Lô and Dao cling to the ridges above, their maize planted in pockets of soil between the rocks.
Most travellers come to ride the Hà Giang Loop, a roughly 350-kilometre circuit that takes three or four days by motorbike or with a local 'easy rider' at the handlebars. The road climbs the switchbacks of Tham Mã, hangs off the cliff at Mã Pí Lèng, and opens at every bend onto a fresh valley of stone and terraces. Far below, wooden boats slide up the emerald Nho Quế between walls that shut out the sun. In late autumn the plateau turns pink and white as buckwheat flowers — tam giác mạch — bloom across the rocky fields, and Sunday markets fill Đồng Văn and Mèo Vạc with indigo cloth, spice and rice wine. Once a frontier reached only by the Happiness Road, Hà Giang is now one of Southeast Asia's most popular motorbike journeys, though its highland villages and morning mists still feel a world away from lowland Vietnam.