You may be able to see a truck in the picture (just below here), it is on the road beyond and to the right of the farmer. The truck is a couple of thousand feet below and toiling up to reach us.

A farmer ploughing his field at the start of the Mã Pì Lèng Pass near Mèo Vạc

The road runs into China some 10 miles away. The only other road through these mountains is the one from which the photo was taken and which runs from Mèo Vạc to Đồng Văn a distance of 14 miles though what must be some of the most spectacular scenery in the world. This is the beginning of the Mã Pì Lèng Pass.
A pass in English sounds like a bit of an effort, something to be got over, or through, with threats involved; famous battles and traps attend as in 'the Pass of Killacrankie O'. The Vietnamese have a different concept: these are the gates to heaven where the sense is of the 'heavens', both a place beyond and the firmament above. The image is of opening up and leading into light and space. And as the road runs out higher and higher onto the hillside, and the sky expands and mountains recede, so we ascend to these heavens, and stand at heaven's gate.
As hills go these are not big, but they make full use of their stature as befits the final throws and last outposts of the Himalaya, rolling and clambering up to full free standing mountains of near on 7,000

These mountains are inhabited – notice the house roof in trees two-thirds of the way up; this hill is vertically above the right side of the first picture

feet, and then tumbling down in barren cascades and flinging themselves into the bottoms of deep gorges where apparently tiny rivers thread between the vast buttresses. It is as difficult to convey the scale of all this in pictures as it is in words. Any image that shows the top of the hill and the bottom of the gorge cannot show something as small as a house.

Inhospitable and barren the landscape may appear to be, but it is populated. Wherever a field can find soil it is fitted in, wherever a house can cling to the precipitous slopes it will be attached, although such attachments would seem to depend more on faith than physical security defying gravity as they do. Between these houses and fields people quietly go about their lives. Lives which to us would seem daunting for the slopes extend for thousands of feet from crest to the water below and some are steeper than 60 degrees. The people here are from the Black Dao ethnic group with their own language and traditions quite separate from those of the majority Viet population. We learnt from one of them that the inhabitants of such hamlets and houses, have to go down to that river for their water at certain times of the year. Imagine climbing, with your water, over a kilometre vertically upwards just as a part of the daily routine!

Black Dao man from local village

These humans are clearly a different physical species from myself. But the acute slopes are not just a problem for collecting water, for every inch of the rather poor dry soil is cultivated, and this leads to extraordinary farming. The pattern shown in the picture is common: a curving ‘field’ of about 2 feet wide, terraced in steps of the same height which makes getting from one ribbon to the next, above or below, a major physical effort; and getting an ox and plough onto some point, a kilometre from a road, a sort of athletic miracle for both man and beast.

For the traveller on the road there are few such problems. The road was built to a high specification and is little used by vehicles larger than motor cycles. So it is in good condition by Vietnamese standards: one's body is offered a smooth ride. Amusingly the gradients are all modest, despite appearances, the signs assure you that you are rising at 9.64% or 9.37% and never reach 10%; one suspects a job lot of misprinted signs palmed off by the ministry that produced them, onto the ministry that had stipulated that gradients could not pass 10%! But for our heads it is less comfortable, the dizzying drops and towering cliff faces keep up a roller coaster of prospects that would satisfy the most jaded traveller.

The Nho Quế River below the Pass

At the top of the pass there is a memorial to those who made the road through this impossible country, a task completed some 40 years ago. To add to the marvels of construction, it was undertaken at a time just after the French War had finished, when the country had few resources, except the charm to gain help from others. As you look out from here across the massive mountainsides you see a tiny thread cast round them, like a Lilliputian rope to Gulliver, and wonder how anyone thought of a road there, and then convinced another country that they should fund it.

The pass is not long and a glance at a map might suggest a half hour run between the two main towns at either end. But the map deceives. For each bend reveals a new extraordinary panorama and demands a new stop for photographs, and more time to take in the wonder of it all. A wonder appreciated by the locals who also find time to stop and watch over their land. So there we were together smitten, but we were the only strangers.

The thread of the road through the Pass

This place is far away, two days drive from the capital and the airport, so it is not an area that figures on the tours and treks that set out by the hundred from Hà Nội each day. Journey times are very slow, so for most tourists this marvellous scenery just does not exist. The Mã Pì Lèng Pass is the icing on the cake of the north of Vietnam: stunning scenery, friendly people and not another tourist in sight.