The first day I arrived in Hữu Lũng, it was 37 degrees Celsius and the air was thick with smoke from farm burning.
“This really isn’t the season,” I thought.
It was April 2026. I had just checked into Là Nhà Homestay, where I would spend the next seven days. Instead of rushing straight to the crag, I wanted only to step into the room, turn the air conditioner on max, and sit.
What surprised me most was not the heat, the smoke, or the fatigue of travel. It was how little psych I felt.
This should have been exactly the kind of trip I normally look forward to: a week with close friends, new walls to climb, and a landscape far from the pace of normal life. But standing there in the afternoon heat, I couldn’t ignore that my excitement felt strangely muted.
Perhaps it was because the place felt familiar in ways I had not expected. I am from Thailand. The rice fields, tropical weather, the motorbikes, limestone cliff high above farmland—all of it was beautiful, but none of it felt entirely new. Different country, similar atmosphere. Different roads, same rhythm.
I had been climbing for more than a decade. Long enough, perhaps, for the novelty of trips like this to wear off a little. I found myself wondering whether I was here because I truly wanted to be, or because climbing trips had simply become part of my routine.
I also wasn’t arriving strong either. My fingers had been in rough shape for months—bone spurs, synovitis, the kind of slow injuries climbers know too well. There was no clear treatment and no clean recovery timeline. For months, I had been trying to balance climbing enough to stay connected to it while resting enough not to make things worse.
So I lowered my expectations. Nothing too ambitious. No heroic trip goals.
There had been a time when I would arrive somewhere like with such a strong drive to do as much as possible and explore. Anything fewer than five routes in a day would have felt wasteful.
Maybe I had arrived at that stage in life where I felt caught in between—no longer content with settling into a mundane routine, yet no longer carrying the same energy or urgency to chase the version of greatness I had imagined for myself when I was younger.
Right beside the homestay was a reservoir where local children spent the late afternoon diving into the water again and again. We stood there watching them, still dusty from travel, in no hurry to do anything at all.
That evening, one of the best parts of the trip began to reveal itself: the food.
Ms. Tu, the manager of Là Nhà Homestay, is a single mother whose hospitality makes you feel less like a guest and more like you’re visiting a relative. Every morning and evening, she produced generous meals for our group: freshly cooked greens, various meats, tofu, soup, rice, and always something new. Through a translation app and plenty of miscommunication, we slowly came to know one another over the week.
She arranged motorbikes for us, helped rescue a friend when her bike broke down, changed tires, accommodated different diets, and on our final night bought a round of goodbye beers.
There are many places to stay in Hữu Lũng. It would be difficult to choose another.
Every morning began with pho, one of the great breakfast dishes anywhere in the world. It is simple, restorative, and heartwarming—what you need before a good day of climbing.
My friend Tao gave me a quick refresher course in riding motorbikes, and then our group set off for our first crag: Weeping Wall.
Knowing how to ride is almost essential in Huu Lung. There is no public transport, and arranging cars would be difficult, but the roads are manageable and the dirt tracks through farmland are forgiving enough for beginners. We rode through rice fields, past grazing animals and quiet homes, with limestone towers rising beyond them.
Weeping Wall leaned gently overhanging, tall and clean, with bolts placed confidently. There were not many easy routes, so I started on a 6C.
I reached the top without falling.
My confidence returned in a small but noticeable rush.
Maybe I’m not in such terrible shape after all, I thought.
Later that day, we moved to Head Wall, one of the most striking cliffs in the valley. There we met another group from Thailand. In total, nearly thirty Thai climbers had made the trip. The base of the wall felt festive—ropes lined up across the wall, people shouting encouragement, the familiar vibe I love.
I tried two 6Cs—War & Peace and Gravical Slabs. Both were excellent.
The climbing here, I realized, was genuinely good.
The next morning, I woke at sunrise with more motivation than I had felt in months. My fingers were stiff but serviceable. I stretched, moved lightly, and hung briefly from a portable board to wake my hands.
Then I noticed I had company.
Kao, Ms. Tu’s daughter, perhaps four or five years old, had joined me. She began to lead a sequence of sun salutations and downward dog beside me while I tried to keep up. She treated the whole thing as a game. It was just for fun.
This became our routine.
At home, the healthy morning habits I try to impose on myself often feel like another task to complete. Here they felt effortless. I would wake around six, stretch in the cool air, and wait for the day to begin. By 7:30, pho and coffee were already waiting.
We would gather around breakfast deciding which wall to visit, discussing dinner plans for later, and talking with Ms. Tu in fragments of translated conversation.
It was a simple rhythm with people I genuinely enjoyed being around.
And I started to rethink some of my earlier hesitation about this trip. I often expect too much from trips, and perhaps too much from myself. Not everything must be about progress or achievement. Sometimes it is enough to settle into a good routine.
Life and work had been chaotic for months. I had come to Huu Lung partly because I did not care to plan an ambitious trip.
What I needed, it turned out, was something simpler.
As the week went on, more of our friends arrived. One night our larger group gathered at Khoi Restaurant, a pizza place near our homestay, where the kitchen seemed mildly overwhelmed by the sudden demand.
Nearby cafés became afternoon refuges. TinTin Cafe served an avocado coffee smoothie so good I regretted discovering it only two days before leaving. In Vietnam, coffee culture feels less like a standardized experience and more like experimentation: egg coffee, salt coffee, avocado coffee, dark roasts dense and nutty enough to stand alone.
There are now more than twenty crags in Huu Lung. Vietclimb and local bolters have developed them in less than a decade—a remarkable pace.
At Dragon Wall, I briefly met Jean Vearly, the founder of Vietclimb, who was guiding students there that morning. My friend Tung and I tried our hardest route of the trip: La Chaponoise 7B. We each had two attempts.
The route was exactly what I love in sport climbing—long, athletic, sustained, and flowing. It demanded movement rather than force.
Other classics at Dragon Wall included Fat Vegan and A Le Le.
Dragon Wall may have been my second favorite crag after Dead End, whose technical face climbing reminded me of the now-closed River Wall at Nam Pha Pa Yai, once my home crag in Thailand.
Tao climbed A Le Le wearing the first sample of our new Poda pants. I had spent months sourcing fabric, refining the fit, and figuring out how to produce them properly in Bangkok. He wore them almost the entire week.
Long pants, yet breathable in the heat. Durable enough for repeated days on limestone.
It was satisfying to see something that had existed only in sketches and mostly in my head being used exactly where it was meant to be used.
Passe-Muraille may have been my favorite for scenery. It sat open among grassy fields with horses grazing below the cliffs, like a landscape from a children’s storybook.
And still, there were walls we never got to climb.
That is one of the pleasures of a place with so much to offer: leaving while knowing there is more to come back for.
By the end of the trip, my mind felt clear in a way it had not for a while.
Too much time in front of a computer, too many conversations, too many open tabs of responsibility—these can fill the mind until it becomes noisy without your noticing. Huu Lung seemed to empty some of that out.
On our last day, torrential rain kept us from climbing. We lay around our rooms, talked, and had drinks at TinTin one last time. Avocado coffee smoothies will be greatly missed.
I arrived thinking about progress, performance, and whether I was still getting better. At 35, I had begun to feel time in a new way—as if I may not have much more time get stronger. But I left remembering that not everything meaningful can be measured through improvement. I didn't start climbing with the mindset of achieving anything. It's all self comparison that came later. I do not need to bring the same pressure for progress and gains that already shapes my working life into climbing. More than anything, this trip reminded me what I value and seek in life—simplicity, good community, and feeling healthy.
