Vietnam -

"Pssst! Marry wanna?"

Now, she may be a good 60 years my senior, but she's nicely dressed – and I bet she turned a few heads in her day. And anyway, this is the best offer I have had in three months on my bike. The only offer, in fact. A little forward, perhaps, but I suppose an octogenarian might reckon she doesn't have time to hang around for preliminary niceties.

"Hash? Opium?"

Oh, ok, I get the picture. She loves me not.

From the middle of the 19th century until about 15 years ago, opium was a major crop in these parts, earning the farmers of Vietnam's northwest highlands much-needed cash, and setting the hillsides ablaze with the riotous blues, reds and purples of poppy flowers.

Now, the government encourages locals to grow cardamom instead – but somehow that doesn't seem to have worked its way onto the street menu yet.

This is Sapa, crouched on a Vietnamese hillside near the Chinese border.

The completion of the Hanoi to Kunming railway in 1909 opened up this remote mountainous region, and for a few decades Chapa, as the town was known to the French, served as a colonial hill station, a place of retreat from the sapping summer heat of the Red River delta.

But French Sapa was virtually destroyed in the course of the first Indochina War between 1947 and 1952. As a result, there is little to connect the Sapa you see today with its European roots, except perhaps for the chiming of the church bell, whose doleful resonance mingles with the early morning mist with disorienting effect.

Across the valley from the church swells Mount Fansipan, a green, gullied ridge that peaks at 3,143 metres – the highest point in Indochina.

Wherever you are in Sapa, Fansipan – depending on the weather – glowers or glimmers at you. Often it serves up several doses of both in a single day. Waves of cloud cascade off the mountain and bounce up the other side to drown Sapa in fog, only to clear moments later and reveal once again the lumbering massif to the south, in all her forested glory.

When the weather is clear, the mountain cries out to be climbed, but the trek up and down takes a minimum of two days, and is better attempted in three or four; picking a four-day slot of fine weather up there takes a good dose of luck.

If the heavens smile on you, your reward will be views all the way to China and Laos.
But if the weather gods are less friendly, well, content yourself with smaller-scale wonders of nature. Enjoy the flowers or see how many of the mountain's 85 endemic species of moth you can find.

Or, you can be like this little piggy, and stay at home.

I asked Ronan Bianchi, the French manager of the Victoria Hotel (the French are back in town, after all). His response was full of Gallic forthrightness, "There is no good season to climb Fansipan." And after over-indulging on a Victoria Hotel breakfast, which laid me out for the morning and a good slice of the afternoon too, I could only agree.

Sometimes it's better to sit at the bottom and look up, rather than stand on the top and look down. Don't you think? Easier on the legs, in any case. And your hotel balcony is not a bad place for a spot of moth watching, either. I found white ones and brown ones, spotted ones and mottled ones, little ones and big ones, as big as my hand. Excuse the lack of Latin names, I'm just a cyclist and Latin is more than my job's worth. If it's the Latin names you're after, go hire yourself a lepidopterist.

But if you haven't arrived by bicycle (it's a 1,000-metre climb, whichever way you come) and you've gone easy on the pain au chocolat, I suppose you might still have the urge. Plenty of agencies in town will provide guides, porters, tents and all the necessaries.

Less strenuous expeditions are available though – to see minority villages, markets, and waterfalls.

The Silver Waterfall tumbles from near Heaven's Gate Pass in three sections, which I was going to call Top, Middle and Bottom, until somebody told me they are supposed to represent the three stages of life: Childhood, Marriage and Old Age, which I have to admit is a little more poetic. Shakespeare might have counted seven Ages of Man, but if he had known about the Silver Waterfall, he could have knocked off As You Like It a bit quicker and been off down the pub with his mates rather than worrying about pantaloons and mere oblivion.

The villages in the valleys around Sapa are home to various hill tribes, including the Phu La, the Giang, and several sorts of Dao.

Oh, and of course the Hmong.

These guys seem to have been following me around Asia for a couple of months now: first through Hunan, Guizhou and Guangxi in China, and now here they are again in Vietnam. In China they are called Miao, but it's the same folk, just a different name.

Of course, it isn't quite as simple as that – there's more to the Hmong than meets the untrained eye. There are various variations on the Hmong theme: Black Hmong, White Hmong, Flower Hmong, all distinguishable by their costume, if you know where to look.

The advantage of this clothing-based tribal identification system is that they don't need special kit when playing in the inter-tribe football league; the drawback is that it rather stifles free sartorial expression:

"Mum, I'm fed up with black. Why can't I wear red today?"

"Because we're not Red Dao, that's why."

"But I hate wearing black."

"Well we're Black Hmong, so get used to it. And anyway, it isn't black, it's indigo."

All of which makes for a colourful display, but: hands up if you've ever visited an exotically populated part of the world and been left with the slightly uncomfortable feeling that you are being led around a minority zoo.

"And here in the next cage, I mean village, we have the endangered Ha Nhi species, I mean tribe, found only here in this remote mountain habitat of northern Vietnam. The females, I mean women, are easily identified by their bright red plumage, I mean headdresses. Their diet is omnivorous, and during the mating season, I mean festival time..."

And so on.

Ok, you can put your hands down now.

That sense of being a gawping spectator of other people's lives can become frustrating and awkward, especially when language barriers make communication difficult. For that reason a visit to Sapa's museum is an absolute must.

The place has two virtues: firstly, it is small – something which all museums should aspire to be. And secondly, it presents local people's stories of their lives, their cultures and their aspirations, in their own words. A photographic exhibition called Shooting Back reverses the usual picture of local people staring down the barrel of the tourist's camera, by putting cameras into the hands of local teenage girls – which they use to document their lives and in particular their encounters with, and reactions to, foreign tourists.

Lo Su May, a Dao woman from a nearby village, tells her story: "I was in the market and some tourists said they liked my clothes, so I sold them. Now I buy old clothes [to sell]. Tourists don't like new clothes, I don't know why. Maybe it's because new ones are more expensive. I also sell aluminium jewellery made by Kinh [Vietnamese] people. Dao people only use silver. By selling things to tourists I can help my family earn money. Some days I can earn 50 or 60,000 dong [around USD 4], but some days I don't sell anything at all. I use the extra money to buy food and fertilizer."

Reading stories like hers, I came away feeling at least a little bit the wiser about the work, lives and worlds of local people, and how they are adapting to the sudden arrival of camera-toting, old-clothes-buying tourists like myself. The world needs more museums like that.

Edward is a week or two behind schedule thanks to a mechanical problem with his bicycle. He reckons it had become used to the tropical weather of the lowlands and didn't like being left out on the balcony during the cold Sapa nights. The bike is now fixed and he is back on the road. With fair winds and a few downhill runs, he will be in Vientiane, Laos, in time to file a report from there next month. Follow Edward's journey day-by-day on his blog at www.asiaandaway.com.