This is the story all about we lost J’s passport in a Vietnamese town, and I’d like to take a minute just sit right there, I’ll start my story with no details spared.

If you haven’t visited Vietnam, you likely haven’t heard of the Ha Giang loop. It’s a beautiful 400km stretch of roads through mountains and valleys in Northern Vietnam and quickly became the highlight of my time in country. You turn up, rent motorbikes, and set out onto the open road… before spending the next few days dodging potholes and trying to take in the mountain views without driving off them!

We arrived into Ha Giang stupidly early. Something we got more and more used to in Vietnam – a sleeper bus meaning you may arrive at 3.30am. To give this a bit of context we need to travel back in time to a month or so ago when Jamie and I were still cruising around South America and growing accustomed to 12-14 hour overnight buses. I remember us chatting at the time about how great it would be in Southeast Asia where everything is closer together. Well, it isn’t. 7 hour bus trips are not fun when they mean arriving in the middle of the night when no hostels are open.

Luckily, as we pulled into Ha Giang town a saviour made her way onto the bus and said “if you haven’t got a hostel booked, you can sleep here for free, ANDDDD we also rent out bikes for the loop”… legend! All four of us quickly snapped at the offer – this was Jamie and I plus Isa who had trekked with us through the rice terraces in Sapa, and Ellie who we’d met at the bus station on the way to Ha Giang.

Actually this is a very good time to share some valuable advice with anyone planning their first trip…

travel is far simpler than you might expect

I’m a planner by nature and I’ve learnt that I need to plan a lot less than I thought I would. More often than not, your problems will fix themselves because thousands of people have had those same dilemmas before you!

So, where were we? We woke early the next day to give us plenty of time to get used to our bikes before heading out. We had a life-changingly delicious lemon tea with breakfast and were stupid enough not to ask what it was. Bummer! Moving on though… like I mentioned earlier, we had plentyyyy of practise with the bikes before starting the loop:

For anyone thinking of doing the loop or some other motorbike adventure elswhere in the world, I’d NEVER been on a motorbike before this and it was a lot easier than I was expecting, so if you’re unsure give it a try and you may surprise yourself!

The first couple of days passed. We had a lot of fun, some local kids guilt tripped me and jamie into handing over all our oreos, and the backdrops were just awesome from the viewpoints we stopped at (as well as almost all the roads).

We stayed in basic but lovely homestays, tried some strange local food – supposedly those orange things are eggs but we were never truly convinced!

We even picked up a 5th member of the squad, Sho, who snuck across the border into China with me! After 2 minutes of neither of us being shot at, electrified, or blown up by mines, the rest of the pack followed us over for some more snaps…

And then people, we get to day 3. Oh day 3. A weird day, a long day, a passport-losing day.

I’ll skip ahead to lunchtime to keep you guys with me. We stop at a restaurant around 2pm and Jamie shouts over to me “Jim, have you seen my bag”. The small day bag with ALL of his stuff in… including one British Passport 😐😐😐… which as far as we knew was still tied to his bike. Well obviously not anymore – we had no idea where it had fallen off except a photo from a hour before with it still on the bike. I heckled Jamie back to the bikes to go and search for it but neither of us held out much hope.

After 30 minutes, and in typical Jamie fashion, we stopped searching because he was hungry and didn’t wanna miss lunch – at least he has some sense of prioritisation 😂

(Some more nice photos because I want to break up the text)

So we head back to the restaurant, grab some fried noodles and then something very weird happens. Jamie starts getting lots of Facebook friend requests – accepts them and then gets messages along the lines of “we’re in this town, we have your bag and we left it at this restaurant”. We couldn’t believe our luck.

However, it was now 3.30pm and despite this great news, it also meant we had A LOT of driving ahead of us. Around 4 hours, and we definitely didn’t have 4 hours of sunlight left. I grabbed Jamie and again we ventured out to get his bag. This road was getting very familiar!

Around 50 minutes later I arrived outside the town, with Jamie following behind somewhere at “Jamie Pace” which falls somewhere between a sloth and the branch it’s climbing on 😋

I called Jamie, found the restaurant, grabbed the bag, checked the passport was still there and circled back to Jamie with around 3 hours of driving ahead of us and maybe 90 minutes of sunlight left at best. I really wasn’t psyched about driving in the dark on these roads. As the sun fell we carried on riding, making our way towards that nights hostel. It had been a long day though the views in this part of the world never fail to give situations like this a silver lining.

This should really be the end of the story about now. Think again…

In all the commotion of the passport/bag losing drama we had forgotten one crucial element. As we stopped to check our directions, Jamie asked me a simple question “Jim, how’s your fuel gauge” to which I gave a simple answer… “oh f**k”. We were both on empty (or very close to it – the bikes were still going but we had no idea how long we had left). This photo tells you enough about our situation:

No life around. No towns near. Not a BP garage or Wild Bean Cafe in sight. With at least 50 minutes of driving still to go we really weren’t close to anything. So I came up with a plan – we drive to the next place that we come across – if there’s a bike outside, we politely ask them to give us enough fuel to make it to our homestay. If they don’t have any, we keep doing this until we run out of fuel (at which point we start looking for a Bear Grylls boxset and a DVD player). Roughly 10 minutes into our plan we came upon these guys:

This was just their house, but we were desperate so I asked about fuel and with some hand gestures thrown in (thank you 20 years of christmas charades) they understood our situation and sold us a bottle each to get us back on the road.

Hours after the girls arrived we finally turned up – bag retrieved, passport recovered! And jamie has 3 new Facebook friends – more silver linings 😄

It’s not a day I’d want to relive any time soon, but there’s one thing I don’t want to forget – twice that day we relied upon total strangers, and both times they absolutely crushed it! Don’t ever lose faith in humanity 😉