Six months in Vietnam
changed everything.

I didn't do a two-week tour of Vietnam. I lived in it. From January to August 2024, I moved through 22 of Vietnam's 63 provinces — staying long enough in each place to understand it, not just photograph it.

The first month, I made every mistake the guidebooks warn you about. I followed the tourist circuit. I ate at restaurants with English menus. I took the organized tours. The experience was fine — pleasant, even — but I kept feeling like Vietnam was happening just out of reach.

The shift happened somewhere on a mountain road in Ha Giang. I had taken a wrong turn and ended up at a Hmong village during a weekly market. An elderly man gestured for me to join his family for rice wine and something I still haven't been able to identify but will never forget eating. We didn't share a language. It didn't matter. That was the Vietnam I'd come for.

The next five months were spent systematically following that thread — finding the places, people, and experiences that fell outside the tourist economy. I rode motorbikes on roads that don't have names. I slept in villages where I was the only foreigner in living memory. I ate breakfasts cooked by grandmothers over coal fires. I got lost, then found, then wonderfully lost again.

I started helping other travelers — first friends who were planning trips, then strangers who found me online. The feedback was consistent: the places I recommended, the routes I suggested, the practical knowledge I shared from having actually been there — it was genuinely different from anything they could find in a guidebook.

So I built this. Not a tour company — I don't handle your bookings or profit from your purchases. Just a person who knows Vietnam deeply, helping others see it the way I got to see it: from the inside.