The Ha Giang loop, Vietnam. The Part That Gets Filmed.

There is a particular kind of guest that arrives at a backpacker hostel in a way that makes the staff look up from whatever they are doing. Not because of anything dramatic. Because of the cast.

At Footprints in Otres, Sihanoukville, where I worked for a stretch that taught me more about traveller behaviour than anything before or since, my three closest friends were British, Dutch, and Russian. We developed a small and not entirely charitable pastime involving new arrivals. If someone came through the door with a cast on an arm or a leg, or bandaging of a complexity that suggested either a serious incident or an enthusiastic first aid kit, we would take quiet bets on where it had happened. The majority of the time, putting your money on Vietnam was not a gamble. It was a reasonable inference. Saigon featured regularly. So did somewhere in the north.

This was before the Ha Giang loop became a content category.

The loop is a road route through Ha Giang province in Vietnam's far north, winding through mountain scenery that is, by most accounts, genuinely extraordinary. It has become, somewhere in the last several years, a rite of passage for a certain kind of traveller. Not just something worth doing, but something that defines whether you have done Vietnam properly. The logic, as best I can reconstruct it, is that if you haven't ridden the loop, you haven't really been here.

I find this mildly ridiculous, which I acknowledge is a strong position for someone who has never done the loop himself.

I would like to do it. Specifically from a writer and photographer's perspective, which I am aware sounds like a distinction without a difference but is in fact the entire point. Going somewhere to look at it carefully and write about what you find is a different activity from going somewhere to film yourself going there. The scenery is the same. The relationship to it is not.

My own history with motorbikes is unremarkable. In Cambodia, living near Otres, I rented regularly from a reliable guy a couple of doors down from the hostel. I stuck to automatics because I never got around to learning a manual gearbox, and the terrain around Otres is forgiving enough that this was never a problem. Here in Sóc Trăng I have no particular need for one. My mountain bike handles the longer rides out into the countryside where the photography is, and my fold-up gets me around town. Can Tho and other destinations are easily managed by taxi, which is cheap, reliable, and involves no licensing questions.

I am not, in other words, someone who objects to motorbikes. I object to the mythology that has grown up around them.

The Lam Dong People's Committee recently ordered tighter controls over motorcycle rental services for foreign tourists, following a series of violations and safety incidents. This is being discussed in various corners of the travel internet as though it is an imposition on legitimate tourism. Some of that discussion is fair. A blanket crackdown affects the operators who have been doing this carefully and well for years alongside the ones who appeared recently and are, as I think of it, ready with a bucket whenever it rains. The good operators, the ones with proper safety briefings, maintained bikes, and a genuine investment in their clients coming back in one piece, are not the reason the province felt the need to act. They are absorbing the consequences of someone else's decisions.

Those decisions are worth examining.

Getting comprehensively drunk every night and riding a motorbike through mountain roads the following morning is a choice. It is not a tour operator failure. Booking a northern highland route without reading the operator's website and arriving with the wrong clothes and no rain gear is a preparation failure. Renting a motorbike without a valid licence in a foreign country and then being surprised when the local police take an interest is a risk that was accepted before the engine started. None of these outcomes belong at the feet of the person who handed over the keys.

There is also the matter of cultural context, which the content rarely addresses. Vietnam is not a backdrop. It has its own social codes, its own expectations around dress and behaviour, and its own population of people going about their lives in the middle of what has become, in certain northern provinces, a continuous tourist production. Arriving without any awareness of that context and then finding the context surprising is a preparation problem, not a Vietnam problem.

The gatekeeping irritates me more than the accidents, which is saying something.

The idea that the Ha Giang loop is the definitive Vietnamese experience assumes that Vietnam is a single experience waiting to be correctly accessed. It is not. I would argue, with equivalent seriousness, that if you haven't been to Con Dao you haven't seen Vietnam. Or Hon Son before TikTok found it. Or Ok Om Bok on the river in Sóc Trăng in November, when the Khmer dragon boats come out and the city becomes briefly, completely itself. But I hold that argument loosely, because it is meant for a different kind of traveller, and different kinds of travellers are allowed to exist.

The loop is a road through beautiful mountains. It deserves to be experienced by people who want to experience it, with appropriate preparation, a valid licence, and a reasonable night's sleep before they get on the bike. It does not deserve to be the thing that determines whether your trip counted.

Back at Footprints, the sweepstakes continued until it stopped being funny, which took longer than it should have. The guests with the casts were not bad people. They were people who had done something without fully accounting for what it involved, in a country where the roads are genuinely demanding and the traffic logic takes time to understand even for people who live here.

The Ha Giang loop is worth doing. So is reading the operator's website. So is packing a rain jacket. So is leaving the bike alone on the mornings when the previous evening went longer than planned.

Vietnam will still be here when you get back. So will the content. There is no version of this that requires a cast.