Unplugged.

I am forty-one years old and I run more businesses than I can comfortably count. Coming into the summer of 2026, with all of the work and all of the planning stacking up in front of me, I made a real and deliberate effort to get away. Not a vacation. An escape. I wanted to get lost in the mountains of northern Vietnam, completely unplugged, no communication with the outside world, no noise, just me and the road and enough quiet to actually think about my future and the businesses I am building. I blocked out the calendar and told no one anything. And here is the thing I have learned over and over in my life: it is funny how the universe works. It gives you exactly what you ask for. I asked to be unplugged. The universe took that request very, very seriously. What was supposed to be a three-day trip became five days, and somewhere in there it got challenging, and beautiful, and it became the best thing I have ever done.

The leaving took all day.

I had rented a Yamaha XSR 155cc with no saddlebags and no rack, but I still packed a leather duffel bag with everything I owned the night before. That morning, ready to roll out of Hanoi at ten, I took that same duffel and strapped it to the strut at the rear of the bike. But nothing really stays put on a motorcycle, and I had brought too much. The first time I pulled off to get gas the bag came loose, I tried to set it right, and it came loose again and tumbled off the back, because I was carrying far more than one man on one bike should. So I turned around, went back to the hotel, and stripped it down to the essentials: a laptop, some clothes, a camera, my drone, and a water thermos. That was it. I went back and forth on what I actually needed for longer than I want to admit, the irony being that I had come here to need nothing at all. By the time I finally rolled out of Hanoi for good it was one o’clock in the afternoon. And you know what? It was fine. I had no schedule and nowhere to be. If the trip ran an extra day, it ran an extra day. That was the whole point. I had cleared my calendar so I could disappear into these mountains for as long as I wanted.

The road opens up.

The ride from Hanoi up to Hà Giang is supposed to take about five hours. The first hour or two is highway, ordinary roads, and then the country cracks wide open. Farmland for as far as you can see, undeveloped land stacked on undeveloped land, communities and villages that have never been touched by any of the things we think are essential. You do not understand how big Vietnam is until you ride across it on a bike. And the people. Little kids on the side of the road waving and yelling hello, but it was more than the wave, it was the way their lips parted and the look they gave me, not confusion exactly, but pure curiosity, watching a Black man on a smooth XSR with a pair of tinted goggles strapped to his face riding through their village. I stopped constantly, for landscapes and animals and whole regions of this country you will never find in a brochure or a magazine, and I filmed all of it. I even got to practice a little Vietnamese with the locals along the way. I never even stopped for a real meal. I wanted to keep shooting, keep moving, so I just packed snacks, Nutri-Grain bars and goldfish, and ate them on the road, unwilling to lose the light or the drone time to sit down somewhere. That is why the five-hour ride became eight and a half, and why I did not pull into the hotel until nine o’clock that night.

An Châng.

The place I stayed that first night was the An Châng Retreat and Spa, and it is something I will never forget. I had tried to reserve a room before I left and could not, and I am glad it worked out that way, because of what happened when I rolled in filthy and exhausted at nine at night. The security guard and the front desk receptionist took one look at me and could not believe I had ridden from Hanoi in a single day, by myself. On the house, they said, we are giving you a free massage. The kitchen is closed but we are opening it back up so you can eat and rest easy tonight. They fed me pumpkin soup, beef pho, and a banana-mango smoothie, and after a day like that it was perfect. And opening that kitchen for me said more than any words could. It felt exactly like coming home to my mother’s house, the way you do when you roll in late on a college break, and the first thing she wants to do is feed you, because she knows you are hungry and she is not about to let you go to bed without a meal. It felt like family. It felt like, we know you just made a treacherous ride to get to us, so let us feed you and take care of you tonight, so you sleep well and wake up tomorrow with energy. My room was a junior suite with a view of the mountains and the river, and a big wooden soaking tub out on the balcony, the kind that fits two people, that I already knew I would use. The bed was an Alaskan king, big enough for six people, and the sheets were scented with something that reminded me of Bubblicious gum, except where the gum loses its flavor in sixty seconds, this scent never faded. The whole property sits hidden behind a mountain ridge, so quiet that all you hear are the birds, and I had a private butler checking on me the whole stay through WhatsApp. It felt like God had reached down, picked up a retreat, and set it gently in the middle of the most beautiful landscape in northern Vietnam.

The day the universe took my phone.

The plan for day two was simple. Eat, rest, and roll back out around noon. They fed me a breakfast that was almost comical, three cups of granola and yogurt, four omelettes, beef pho, chicken pho, four waters, more than any one person could finish, and they just kept bringing it. Then it started to rain. The Hà Giang Loop is nothing but turns and curves carved into the side of a mountain, and I was riding it solo, so when the rain set in I made the call that safety came first and I was not getting on that loop today. The receptionist was happy to have me stay another night, so I booked it. So I had a full-body massage while it rained outside, fell so deep asleep on the table that I woke up with drool on my face, and booked a second hour right on the spot. After that second hour I walked the property while the pouring rain turned to a light drizzle, nothing heavy, but enough to know those roads would be slick going up and down the loop, and I was glad I had stayed off them. I kept walking, soaking in the landscape and the sheer scale of the mountains and the property itself. Then I went back up to my suite and that big wooden soaking tub out on the balcony. It was a massive thing carved out of wood with jacuzzi jets built right into it, designed for exactly this, soaking and bathing. I filled it with hot water and the bottle of muscle-relaxing substance she had left for me, let it marinate, then stepped in, sat down, and exhaled. Refreshed, relaxed. And this was exactly what I came for. Then I made my one mistake. I brought my phone to the side of the tub, because I do not know how to stop working, and this is where the universe gives you what you actually need. As I reached for it to check emails and do a little work, it slipped out of my hand and into the water. I snatched it out so fast, shook the water off it, grabbed the towel beside me and dried it down. There was nothing more I could do right then, and I was not worried, because at that time I did not even know my phone was not working. So I set the phone by the tub and went back to relaxing. I let myself enjoy where I was, the breeze coming off the river and across the balcony and over me in that tub, my body loosening and my muscles letting go, and for that stretch of time I forgot the phone had ever fallen in. I did not worry about a single thing. I had had an amazing breakfast and an even more beautiful two-hour massage, and I could not have cared less if I was stuck up here for twenty days straight. I was at peace, and that is exactly what I came for. Then I got out of the tub and took a nice nap in those Bubblicious sheets while it kept raining. And when I woke up from that nap, I instantly grabbed my phone and saw it was sitting at forty-two percent. But when I went to plug it in to charge, it would not charge. And that is when it hit me. I instantly thought, oh boy, what do I do if this phone dies? My maps, my research, the destinations and locations I had planned for this trip, my banking information. Like everyone in this age, their whole life is on their phone, and I could not charge it. And the real concern was that I do not speak the language, I am in a secluded corner of northern Vietnam with no electronics stores, no shops, no way to fix it. What am I going to do? So I laid back into those Bubblicious-scented sheets and hoped and prayed that the phone would charge.

Stripped down.

Day three I woke up fully recovered and completely refreshed, body good, mind clear, the Bubblicious scent still somehow on the sheets and on me, free of everything except the one thing I could not fix. The phone still would not charge, sitting at thirty-five percent. So I ate that perfect breakfast one more time, because I already knew it would be the best food I would get out here. You always hear that the food in Vietnam is good, and it is, but the food up in these mountains is great, every single plate of it. And while I worked through the omelettes and the mango smoothies and the granola and yogurt, I turned the phone on just long enough to memorize my route to the next city. Here was the plan. I was sitting at thirty-five percent with a phone that would not charge, so I was on the hunt for a wireless charger, or anyone who could fix it, sooner rather than later, for an emergency or just to run my maps. The H’Mông Village Resort I was aiming for sits up in Quản Bạ, and I was praying Quản Bạ would have an electronics store or a repair shop. If it did not, the next city up the loop was Đồng Văn, the biggest on the whole route, and surely I could find one there. More than the charger, though, I wanted to get off the path, to chase the side roads and the viewpoints and actually enjoy this loop, and I could not, because I could only hold so much of the route in my head and I could not afford to lose my way. Because at this point there was no way I was turning back. No way I was riding all the way back to Hanoi. I thanked the An Châng team for the kind of hospitality you do not forget, and rode out. What was supposed to be a two-and-a-half-hour ride became five, because I refused to burn the phone on navigation and leaned on my camera instead, stopping everywhere to capture what I could. By the time I reached Quản Bạ and checked into the H’Mông Village Resort, it was the perfect opposite of the night before. Traditional, a two-story bamboo hut, the bathroom and shower downstairs, a loft bedroom upstairs with just a mattress on the bamboo floor wrapped in a mosquito net, because in a hut like this the bugs come and go as they please. And sitting perfectly in front of that king-size mattress on the bamboo floor was a massive bay window that framed two enormous mountains with the sun breaking over them. Once I checked in, set up shop, and took a shower, I went back out to finally find an electronics store, or anyone who could fix my phone. I never found one. But I found the best food on the whole loop instead, fried rice with beef and egg and a Saigon beer, and I watched people in the street playing a game that looked like volleyball played entirely with the feet, the chest, the shoulders, like a hacky sack you keep alive in the air, the whole place singing and dancing until everything shut down at nine. Then I rode back in the dark, getting myself lost for twenty or thirty minutes because every loop and curve up here looks identical, until I finally found my hut and lay there, fully unplugged for the first time in I do not know how long.

The night it got real.

I want to be honest about this part, because it was not all peace. There was a night, looking out that bay window into total darkness, where the weight of it hit me. No phone. My laptop, my only backup, would not charge either, because the power supply I had was not strong enough and I had rushed out of Hanoi without my proper adapter. And money was its own problem. I had about two million dong on me, which is roughly eighty US dollars. I also had a bank-transfer QR code, the kind most businesses in Vietnam run on, but it lived on my phone, and I was not about to risk that phone paying for meals or hotels or gas. So I leaned on cash instead, and I would rather have saved the phone for emergencies and for my maps anyway, except the phone was in no shape to lean on either. I was lost on the Hà Giang Loop, I do not speak Vietnamese, and I had no easy way to call anyone or find my way if something went wrong. My last snack was a bag of goldfish crackers and a bottle of water, and that was my breakfast. But here is what I kept coming back to. I am an athlete and a businessman. I have spent my whole life solving hard things. If we get lost, we get lost, we will find a way, and we will be fine. And besides, this was exactly what I had asked for.

Getting lost on purpose.

Day four I woke up to two massive mountains wrapped in mist, the fog rolling down off them and settling over the grass at the base of my bamboo hut, a sight I will not forget. I opened the bay window and just took it all in, the smells, the view, the early sun. But I had a mission. I had to get to Đồng Văn, and not only because I wanted to see more of the loop. I was down to nineteen percent now, and I needed an electronics store to get a charger or get this phone fixed. So I left the H’Mông village and rode for Đồng Văn, and this time I had to keep the phone on, because there was no memorizing all the turns along that highway. My one hope was that Đồng Văn would have a shop that could sell me a wireless charger, repair the phone, or sell me a new one outright. That was the bet, and I rode it praying the universe would not do me wrong, that I would find some help when I got there. I set my iPhone into the cell phone mount on my XSR with Google Maps running, and what I rode through that day I will never be able to fully put into words. Whole cities left in ruins. Villages of stone abandoned on the side of the mountain. Downhill slopes longer than fifty football fields in one straight shot. You could still read the faded characters on the older buildings, the kind of script that looks almost Chinese, still see exactly how people had carved a life out of the rock up there before they left it behind. The road was alive with everything, semi trucks and water trucks and cars and motorbikes, even cows, all threading through the same curves, and the terrain ran through every shade of green and every shade of dirt and colored earth you could name. And then I stumbled onto a cave, a big one, barricaded off behind barbed wire, where someone before me had punched a hole big enough to climb through. I walked up what had to be a hundred steps into this massive opening, and to my surprise the whole thing dropped away beneath me, a forty-five degree angle running straight down into the mountain, five or six hundred feet of it, the mouth of it alone four or five hundred feet around, the steps cut three feet in length, three feet wide, and three feet down, built for giants. The cave breathed cold air that hit me in the face the deeper I went, and I could hear bats moving through the dark above me. It was massive, insanely massive. And down at the bottom I could make out what looked like a temple or a pagoda, destroyed, sitting on a bridge of natural rock carved straight out of the mountain. Whoever built it did it many, many years ago. I found out later the cave sits in Tả Lủng, a ward of Đồng Văn, off the road that runs toward Mèo Vạc, and the locals call it the Cloud Cave, Hang Mây, named for the mist that rises out of its lotus-shaped mouth when the air is right. It runs more than three hundred meters into the mountain, and almost no one outside this corner of the country knows it is even there. I could not let myself wander far that day, as much as I wanted to. There were side roads and viewpoints I wanted to chase down, and I had to pass them by, because of the condition of my phone I could not risk veering off the main route. I needed to be able to call someone, and I needed to know I could still find the next hotel. If the phone died and something went wrong out there, I would not be talking to you right now. So I stayed the course, got back on the main road, and started coming down off the mountain. And as I dropped into the loop, I glanced at the phone. Seven percent. And the second I saw it, lights bloomed in the corner of my eye, off to my right. If you have seen The Hangover, or you have ever driven into Las Vegas and watched the strip rise up out of the dark, you know the grin that takes over your face, the feeling of a cowboy riding into town. That is exactly what hit me. The city glowed that acidic Vegas glow, and it felt like it was saying, you made it. I dropped into fifth gear and flew the rest of the way down, and I reached the city on under ten percent of a dying phone. I had made it to Đồng Văn.

Down to seven percent.

I had not booked a room ahead, on purpose, because I wanted the freedom to choose where I landed. And as I rolled into Đồng Văn, the first thing I saw was a stretch of electronics stores. They were closed for the night, but just the sight of them put me at ease, because it meant that worst case I could come back in the morning before I left town and get a wireless charger, get the phone fixed, or buy a new one outright. That alone let me breathe. I had also researched this city, and there were hotels I had wanted to stay at, not five-star, but high-caliber places. But by the time I rolled in, all I wanted was a hot shower, some food, and rest, because I finally knew I was going to be okay. There was one more thing that caught my eye on the way in, a big gathering down at the town hall, the whole place lit up like they were about to throw a celebration or a festival. Some part of me wanted to believe they were celebrating me, that I had made it into Đồng Văn on seven percent of a dying phone, that I had made it home for the night. Maybe that is exactly what it was. So I stumbled onto a hotel whose name I could not even pronounce, one of the taller buildings in the area. I pulled into the lot, hopped off the bike, and walked into the lobby, where the owner’s son greeted me with open arms. They were down to their last room, five hundred thousand dong, about twenty US dollars, a king-size bed with no window. And even though I am the kind of traveler who would rather be at an Aman or a Four Seasons or a Capella, that night I did not care one bit. That level of luxury is its own thing, but out here in Đồng Văn I was getting a different kind of hospitality, something more immersive, more authentic, the kind of thing money cannot buy. I was at seven percent, I was tired of riding, and more than ready to be off the bike for the night. The hotel was wonderful, the kind of place that knows exactly how to take care of the riders coming in off that loop. The owner’s son genuinely tried to help me, and I even asked to borrow his wireless charger, but it was an Android charger, no use to my iPhone. The bed was firm, exactly what I needed. After I showered, I headed back out to find food, and I remembered that gathering at the town hall. So I walked over, and you would not believe it, it really was a celebration, a full festival, a block party with the entire town in it. Locals and foreigners circled a big bonfire, hands in the air, yelling and laughing and shouting, and the market beside them was alive, vendors selling everything and anything, clothes and hats and shoes and furniture, knives and pipes and tools, dried fruit and street food and trinkets, whatever you could think of. It was a good party. But as much as I wanted to stay and get into it, I had nothing left, man. I was mentally drained. Keep in mind I was riding through a place where I cannot speak the language, where I half-knew where I was going, and the worry of running out of battery had been sitting on me all day. So I went back to my room and crashed without eating a thing, asleep by nine and dead to the world until eleven the next morning.

The phone comes back.

Day five, before I even went looking for that electronics shop, my curiosity set in. I decided to plug my phone into the charger to see what would happen. And there it was, the famous Apple sound, that little bling the moment a charger connects. The charger worked. The phone was not dead after all. The best I can figure, riding all day with the phone clamped into the mount on my XSR, with the wind rushing up under it, had dried the water out of the charging port. Whatever it was, it had come back. I sat there a good forty-five minutes and let it fill all the way up, and just like that I did not need the electronics store at all. I asked the front desk for a late checkout, explained everything I had been through, and they were happy to let me linger an hour longer while the phone charged. On the way out I grabbed a dragon fruit, an apple, and an Asian pear from a local fruit stand, packed them onto the bike, and headed toward the Mã Pí Lèng Pass.

The river.

About three and a half hours on, I reached the reason most people ride this loop at all. From the top of the Mã Pí Lèng Pass you look down on the Nho Quế River, a ribbon of impossible turquoise needling its way along the bottom of the gorge, green forest mountains stacked up on either side of it. The color is real. It comes from the limestone in the water, and depending on the season it runs brighter or softer, but that day it was electric, so blue-green and so perfect that it honestly looked like something AI had generated. The road I was standing on has a name worth knowing too. They call it the Happiness Road, a hundred and eighty-five kilometers connecting Hà Giang to four mountain districts, and the beautiful part is that it was built almost entirely by hand, by people who broke the rock themselves so that life out here could be a little better for everyone the road reached. You feel that when you ride it. I sat right out on the edge of the loop, on a ledge with no guardrail and nothing between me and the drop, and just watched that river move through the canyon. I put the drone up over it, not just for the shots, but to see the other side of the canyon, the part I could not ride to, and I could have stayed there for hours. But it was one in the afternoon, and I was deep into day five now. I had gotten to see so much, even rushed the way it was, and I had reached the end of the loop. I could have turned back to chase the spots I missed while my phone was down, but the truth was the trip was telling me it was time to get home, reset everything, and make sure the phone was right. I had been out here long enough. I had been pushed further, mentally, than I had planned. And that left one last decision: find a place to stay the night, or make the long haul straight back to Hanoi.

Eleven hours in the dark.

From the river back to Hanoi is an eleven-and-a-half-hour ride. For reference, the longest I had ever ridden a motorcycle in one sitting, before this trip, was about five and a half hours. By now nearly all my electronics were dead anyway, the camera batteries, the drone, the action cameras, all of it, because the adapter I had brought could not feed the power supplies out here, so the phone was the only thing left alive. So I buckled down, put the camera away, and started the ride home. And it was just me and the XSR now, my partner in crime, the one thing that was going to carry me back. She had been smooth the whole trip, hugging the road, moving with me like she could read my mind, my companion the entire way. I climbed back up over Mã Pí Lèng as I left, that turquoise still burning down in the gorge, and then I started the countdown. Eleven hours became nine, and at nine I pulled over and ate the dragon fruit. Nine became seven, and at seven I stopped again, ate the Asian pear, and sat out on a ledge looking at a turquoise lake hidden down in the mountains, the kind of water that looks like blue glass, sitting there in the middle of nowhere. Then the sun dropped. Seven became four. Four became a fight. Pitch black on a mountainside with no street lights, no reflectors, no guardrails, which is exactly why this is called the deadliest road in Southeast Asia at night. I was fighting the dark, fighting gravel, fighting mud, fighting the insects slapping against my goggles and the few that got in behind them, gravel kicking up off the road and stinging me in the face, and a cold that dropped on me the second the sun was gone, all of it while I was still up on the mountain. Four became three, three became two. I stopped once at hour two to fill the tank, and then I kept going. No street lights out there. Just the stars overhead and my headlight on the XSR, the two of them guiding me home.

The way it ended.

I rolled into the outskirts of Hanoi’s Old Quarter around two in the morning, tired of riding and starving. You ride long enough and you just get tired of riding, and that is exactly where I was, even though my XSR and I had become one out there, my companion the whole way. I was just tired and hungry. And I found a little roadside bánh mì shop just as the owners were closing, almost exactly how the whole trip had started. They took one look at me, caked in road grime and dead insects from head to toe, and the wife waved me down to sit, sit, please, let us serve you, let us cook for you. I smiled and told her cảm ơn, which means thank you in Vietnamese, and typed into Google Translate that I wanted two egg bánh mì and two waters. She typed back that they had no water, only beer, and that by the look of me I could probably use one. I smiled and said sure, vâng một bia, which means yes, one beer. She shook her head, no, no, no, and typed that I should take five. All I could do was laugh. She even told her husband, in Vietnamese, that I needed five beers, and then all of us were laughing, sitting right there laughing together, not just because it was funny but because it was true. So I said why not, and ordered five Saigon beers and two egg bánh mì. And just like every plate I had eaten everywhere else on this trip, I destroyed those bánh mì, they were delicious, and I drank three of the five, sitting right there on a little plastic stool in the dark, the beers so cold they quenched a thirst I did not know I had and cooled me all the way down. I made sure to raise one to my XSR, my companion through every kilometer of this trip. I sat there dirty and sweaty but grinning, deeply happy that I had gotten to experience northern Vietnam like this, with no phone, with all the people I met along the way, with all of it. The way it started and the way it ended, I would not change a single thing. A motorcycle, a bag of clothes, and a camera was all I needed. I will call it the best mental escape of my entire life. So if you are overworked, or you need a reset, or you are going through something hard, I am telling you the Hà Giang Loop will give you whatever it is you are looking for, the challenge, the mental reset, or the immersion in a culture you will discover in every hidden gem along the way. It did not give me a story to tell. It gave me a life to live.