Ha Giang Province is one of the most spectacular and rugged regions of all of Vietnam. Towering mountains plummet into valleys carved by turquoise rivers. The region is home to a myriad of Vietnam's ethnic minority groups. I was there to visit a series of minority markets that are held once a week in different locations. Some people start walking from their villages at midnight the night before to make it to the market in time, some covering 25 kms over some pretty rugged terrain. But markets are more than just places to buy and sell they are social events and because of this they have a fantastic hustle and bustle. Many of the women are dressed up in all their finery and the men tend to chat, drink corn wine and smoke rough tobacco from bamboo waterpipes with their friends. The clothes worn are changing, as new fabrics are coming from China and people are buying rather than making their own clothes. This has brought in a plethora of synthetics and many women are mixing the new fashion with the old. This makes it much harder to determine what ethnic group people belong to.

We rode motorbikes from Hanoi about 350 kms on the first day in 39 degree heat. By the time we started winding our way up the hills I was very tired and what I thought were oncoming vehicles, were actually fireflies. We stopped for our first night in Quan Ba also known as Tam Son. These images were all taken on the circuit that loops around from Tam Son, Yen Minh through to the far northern town, near the Chinese border, of Dong Van before circling back around via Meo Vac to Yen Minh again. The scenes photographed are along the journey linking towns, villages, markets and border regions. Some of the markets we went to are: Lung Phin, Pho Cao, Sa Phin and Pho Bang. Whilst in Dong Van we also made a couple of side trips to the most northerly point of Vietnam to Lung Cu where there stands a tower with a huge Vietnamese flag flying above the village below.

May 2014