My trip to Vietnam in April 2018 was the first time I’d ever traveled somewhere all on my own. I was twenty-one years old and with several excursions with study-abroad friends under my belt, I felt compelled to venture on my own. Everything I felt and everyone I met are all vividly etched into my memories. This was the trip of a lifetime and it created something of a paradigm shift within me.

The landscape in Ha Giang is overwhelmingly beautiful. Limestone ridged mountains rise up in pyramidal shapes before sinking to hundred-foot mounds and then climbing once more to 5,000-foot peaks. Rice terraces slice along precariously steep mountainsides, hanging over blue snaking rivers, beneath blood-curdling bends. Colorful farmland climbs to rocky, edged cliffs before rolling off to distant pine forests.