Leaving Hanoi felt as disorienting as entering it. We had been told to wait on one side of the road, and so when the bus came, it passed straight by us on the other side without even seeing us. It was only through Rose’s quiet clarity that we realised what had happened and moved to the correct side, where we waited in a small café for another two hours before finally flowing out of the city. Once we crossed that threshold, the density loosened almost immediately, and the land

Arriving in Hanoi felt like a crash landing on an alien planet. If the journey up to this point had softened something within us, Hanoi immediately disrupted it. Nothing flowed in a straight line. The bus from Thanh Hóa dropped us on the outskirts, and from there everything fragmented—taxi, bus station, conversation—each moment disconnected from the next. We asked for Yên Bái, but our words seemed to dissolve before they reached anyone. Faces looked back at us without hostili

Leaving Thanh Hoa, something in the journey began to shift. The dragon was no longer something we entered; it travelled with us. Outside the bus window, the hills rose and fell like the back of a great body moving beneath the earth, keeping pace with us as we moved north. What we had encountered in the caves had not been left behind — it flowed with us – was now a part of us. Within that movement, I felt a settling. The intensity of the previous days softened into something m

We arrived in Phong Nha on a night bus after about nine hours, reaching the town late, in the dark, with no sense of the landscape that we had arrived in. We simply found our room and rested, unaware of what was waiting for us in the morning. When we opened the shutters, we were met with a landscape that took our breath away. In front of us, rising out of the earth, was the body of the dragon, physically undeniable. Great shafts of rock pushed sharply into the sky like the ar

We arrived in Hoi An directly from the quiet valley of My Son Sanctuary, where the Ancient Cham towers rise from the jungle in a bowl of mountain silence. After that stillness, Hoi An felt like another world. The town was overflowing — lanterns blazing everywhere, streets packed with people, boats crowding the banks of the Thu Bon River as hundreds of floating lights drifted across the muddy water. It was overwhelming, almost surreal, and for a moment, I wondered if we had st

Travelling north along what we have come to call the Dragon Spine of Vietnam, the journey has slowly begun to reveal itself as more than a movement across geography. Each place seems to mirror a different stage in the rising of life-force through the body of the land. The path began quietly at Borobudur in Java, where something stirred awake like a whisper at the base of consciousness. At Angkor Wat that awakening met the great axis of Shiva, the stabilising pillar that joins

Our time in Pleiku felt like standing between two ancient forces of the land. On our first morning we travelled out of the city to Chu Đăng Ya, an extinct volcano rising quietly from the Central Highlands. The road wound through small villages and farmland before climbing toward the slopes of the crater. What was once a place of fire has long since softened into fertile soil, its rich volcanic earth now covered in crops and fields. At the summit an ancient tree stood like a s

We arrived at Lak Lake in the middle of the afternoon, descending from the red volcanic plateau of the Central Highlands until the wide lake appeared quietly beneath a soft sky. At first the water seemed almost colourless — a calm grey mirror lying between the hills. After settling in we wandered through the small lakeside town before eventually sitting down at a simple restaurant overlooking the water. It was there, while eating fish from the lake and fresh spring rolls, tha

The Waters of the Central Highlands – Dray Nur & Dray Sap After a rather indulgent morning of great coffee, fresh croissants, and a blissful two- hour massage, our driver, Bon, took us on another dragon adventure. Leaving Buôn Ma Thuột , we travelled through the deep red volcanic lands of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, where the iron-rich soil reveals the ancient forces that once shaped this plateau. Our destination lay along the Sêrêpôk River: the twin waterfalls Dray Nur Wate

Our journey into Vietnam began with a sense that the land itself was quietly guiding us. Leaving behind the intensity of the southern city, we travelled north to the solitary peak of Black Virgin Mountain (Núi Bà Đen) , the highest mountain in southern Vietnam. Vietnam and the opening node of the Dragon Spine, we have come to follow. Rising abruptly from the plains, Núi Bà Đen feels like the root of a much larger living structure. At its summit stands the revered figure of th