I Did the Ha Giang Loop and All I Got Was This Spiritual Epiphany

Because why not sing Empire State of Mind to a karaoke room full of confused Vietnamese uncles?

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This batch of daily diary entries marks another week of my solo-travel voyage throughout Asia! If you missed last week’s batch, you can read it here!

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December 13-17, 2024 — Ha Giang Loop, Vietnam

I’ve been gone seven months and still, the air feels rented — every meal, every sunrise, every road carved from mist feels like something I need to deserve. I document. I teach. I translate beauty into usefulness, like I owe the earth a reason for being here. Even joy, I turn into labor.

But this week, Charity came. And with her, a pause. We met in the Philippines for a blink, bonded over thrift store treasure hunts and sugarcane juice, and now she’s here in Vietnam, where no one expects me to teach or explain or make meaning. For once, I clear my calendar like a slate wiped clean, and we walk Hanoi’s streets like two kids who forgot they were supposed to be someone. We sing Lana Del Rey to passing motorbikes. We thrift through piles of other people’s memories. We eat fried bananas and let oil drip down our wrists without apology. I want to ask the sky if I’ve earned this, but Charity pulls me into the next street before I can ruin the silence with questions.

We book a sleeper bus to Ha Giang — horizontal and weightless, sliding through the night like letters slipped under a door. I wake only for a meal wrapped in lotus leaves, pork and rice and coconut water that doesn’t need me to praise or post it to exist

Ha Giang greets us with dusk and dancing — mothers practicing choreography on volleyball courts, dogs weaving through their feet, smoke unraveling from street carts in silver ribbons. Tomorrow, the Loop will begin.

And the Loop is not a road. It’s a rite. A winding, brutal, magnificent unraveling through jagged peaks torn straight from the gut of the earth. I ride behind a local driver whose hands have memorized every turn, while my own hands finally go slack — no camera, no captions, just skin against wind, silence full of engine hum and the sharp gasp when the next vista breaks open before us like a wound too beautiful to touch.

At roadside stalls, warmth: matcha KitKats melting in my pocket, green tea that tastes like the earth’s own pulse, coconut mochi soft as clouds. Charity tries the water pipe — smoke curling into mist until you can’t tell what’s breath and what’s sky. I watch without needing to follow. No proving today. No catching up. Just this.

At a loom by the road, a woman spins hemp into color. She lets me try. My fingers fumble. Hers correct. I expect words but get only touch — proof that some beauty lives beyond translation. On a child’s balance board left by the roadside, I stand. The wood wobbles beneath me and I brace for collapse, but something in my body — yoga, snowboarding, or survival — keeps me standing long after the crowd loses interest.

Nights fall heavy with happy water and karaoke — strangers pressing microphones into each other’s hands, begging for heartbreak songs in languages half-understood. I sing Empire State of Mind into the fog and my voice cracks and nobody cares. They only care that I’m here.

On the last day, my driver takes me home. He wants me to see the life my weight rested on all week — his children, his wife, the chickens, the fields, the kind of love you don’t have to deserve because it just is. We drink tea in silence, and when I press money into his palm — “for your children” — I know it’s too little, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe beauty doesn’t need to be repaid

The mountains never asked me who I was. The mist never asked me to prove my worth. The road doesn’t need my gratitude. It would have existed without me.

And still, I was allowed to be here.

And that is enough.

Love,

Etai

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