🌟 The Story of Dragon Team – How a Dream in Ha Giang Became Our Journey
The story began with a journey in late 2018, on Ma Pi Leng Pass, after darkness had already fallen.
At that time, I was working as a freelance tour guide in Ha Giang. I was leading a group of travelers with several local drivers on a motorbike tour.
That day, according to the itinerary, after crossing Ma Pi Leng Pass we still had to continue to Lung Cu, about 45 km away.
But by the time we left Ma Pi Leng, it was already dark.
The road wound through the mountains, with steep mountainsides on one side and deep drops on the other.
The fog was extremely thick. At times, we could see only about 5–7 meters ahead. On that mountain road in the darkness, the whole group could travel at only around 10–12 km/h.
It took us nearly four hours to cover those 45 km.
The guests were scared.
The drivers traveling with me were scared too.
And the truth was, I was scared as well.
But I was the tour leader. I still had to talk to the guests, reassure them, and do everything I could to make them feel that we were in control and could keep them safe.
Inside my head, though, I was asking myself very different questions:
Can I keep everyone safe every time?
If this job is this dangerous, will I still be able to do it tomorrow?
We finally reached the homestay at around 21:30.
By the time we sat down for dinner, it was around 22:00.
While the other travelers at the homestay had already finished eating and were getting ready for bed, we were only just beginning our dinner.
It was not the first time one of our working days had lasted that long.
On normal days, we worked for around 7–8 hours. But there were also days when it rained, guests had breakfast late, traffic was blocked, a motorbike had a puncture, or something unexpected happened.
The itinerary still had to be completed.
Some days we spent around 12 hours on the road, with the final few hours riding after dark.
If the guests complained, I was the person who heard those complaints directly. But I was only a hired guide. I had not designed the itinerary, and I had no authority to change it.
That night, sitting down to dinner at 22:00, I started thinking:
I want to do this job differently.
I wanted to be able to decide the itinerary myself, so we would not have to continue riding in the darkness simply because every planned stop had to be completed.
I wanted this work to be safer for me and for the drivers riding alongside me.
And at that time, both my income and the drivers’ income were low.
I began to carry a dream with me: one day, if I could organize my own journeys, I wanted the people working with me to have safer, more stable jobs and better incomes.
But at that time, I truly knew nothing about business or marketing. I did not know where to begin.
I simply kept trying to find a way.
On the days when I had no tour, I often went to an internet café.
Then I found Viator and managed to register a supplier account so I could begin listing my own tours.
I still had the WhatsApp contacts of travelers I had guided before. I had mainly kept their numbers because we often sent photos to one another after a trip.
I started messaging them again, asking whether they would be willing to write a review or recommend me to other travelers.
I messaged quite a lot of people.
Fewer than 10 replied.
But then the first reviews appeared.
In those reviews, my former guests wrote about me — a local guide who had traveled with them through Ha Giang.
And then, one day, a stranger messaged me.
They had read the recommendations from previous travelers and wanted me to guide them through Ha Giang.
At that time, Dragon Team as it exists today did not exist yet.
They booked Long.
There were still very few travelers finding me directly, so I continued working as a freelance guide for other companies.
Sometimes a company had four guests, while I had another two guests of my own. I would arrange additional drivers and bring everyone together on the same journey.
I earned my wage as a guide and a little extra income from the travelers who had found me directly.
I continued like this for nearly two months.
But then a problem began to appear.
The travelers who found me after reading those reviews wanted to travel with Long. But sometimes, on the date they wanted to start, I was still away guiding another tour and had not yet returned to Ha Giang.
I could not accept travelers on any date they wanted and still guarantee that I would be the person traveling with them.
So I began setting fixed departure dates: the 1st, 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th and 25th of every month.
I only accepted guests on those dates so I could manage my schedule and make sure that when they arrived in Ha Giang, the person they had come looking for would also be the person traveling with them.
Gradually, I stopped accepting other freelance tours and focused on my own guests.
I called three driver friends whom I trusted most and asked them to work with me.
Sometimes we needed a fifth person.
But at that time, our trips usually had only three or four guests.
The first Dragon Team had only four people.
We had been operating regularly for less than a month when the first news about COVID-19 began coming from China.
At that time, life in Vietnam was still almost normal. Travelers were still coming to Ha Giang.
Over the following two weeks or so, Dragon Team still ran another three or four tours.
Then the first cases appeared in Vietnam.
Everything changed very quickly.
The travelers disappeared.
The journeys stopped.
And Dragon Team stopped too.
I returned to my hometown in Phu Tho.
My home is a small, peaceful rural area with no tourists.
At first, I followed the news every day. I only wanted to know when the pandemic would end so I could return to Ha Giang.
But what I saw kept getting worse.
The pandemic spread to more and more countries.
At that point, I was no longer thinking about when I could return to Ha Giang.
I looked at my wife and my children, and I began thinking about more frightening questions.
What was going to happen to my family?
How could I protect them?
There were periods when we barely left home. About once every 10 days, I would go out to buy the things our family truly needed.
And time kept passing.
I worked in the fields and around our small farm, day after day, simply trying to keep family life going.
Gradually, I stopped following the news so closely.
Gradually, Ha Giang faded from my mind, and so did the work I had once loved so much.
More than two years passed like that.
In the middle of 2022, a friend in Ha Giang called me.
He asked:
“Are you coming back to Ha Giang? There are tourists here again. I’m working as a driver again now. Ha Giang is busy with travelers again. Are you coming back?”
I was surprised.
I started checking the information again.
Travelers really had returned. Ha Giang had tourists again.
More than two years of the pandemic had made life very difficult for my family. After such a long time without work that generated an income, the savings we had put aside before were almost gone.
I had a wife, children and a family to take care of.
So when I discovered that travelers had returned to Ha Giang, my first thought was:
I can work again.
I can earn money.
I can take care of my family.
I arranged to return to Ha Giang almost immediately.
After more than two years, I went back to my old job:
working as a freelance tour guide.
When I returned, I continued an old habit: after each journey, I asked guests what they liked and what they thought could be better.
And those conversations gradually changed the way I thought about a journey through Ha Giang.
Before then, the groups I usually guided had only around four to six people.
But in 2022, I once guided a group of 13 guests — the largest group I had guided at that time.
I had to speak much louder so everyone could hear me. After a while, my voice became hoarse and I started coughing.
But for me, the biggest difference was not my voice.
In groups of only four to six people, when we stopped for a drink or sat down to eat together, guests often asked me about my family. I asked them about their hometowns, their jobs and their lives.
Some of our conversations had nothing to do with the itinerary or the places we were visiting.
And after traveling together for several days, the relationship between us was no longer simply that of a guide doing his job and guests who had purchased a tour.
We gradually became travel companions.
With a group of 13, I found that much more difficult.
I could still lead them. I could still explain the places we visited.
But the guests no longer saw me as a member of the group. I felt like I was simply a hired worker in their journey.
That trip made me think much more seriously about group size.
Later, when I rebuilt Dragon Team, I decided that our shared groups would never have more than 10 guests.
On another evening in late 2022, I was talking with a guest after dinner.
He told me that before coming to Ha Giang, he had seen tours online where people drank heavily and partied in the evenings.
Then he said something I still remember today.
He said:
“I can party and get drunk with my friends at home on the weekend. I don’t need to take a long holiday, spend a lot of money and fly halfway around the world to Vietnam just to do that. I want to stay clear-headed enough to experience, see and learn about a different culture and a different way of life among the local people here — things I cannot experience at home.”
I just sat and listened.
But his words stayed in my mind.
Later, when I rebuilt Dragon Team, I decided that our journeys would focus on exploring Ha Giang, its culture and the lives of local people, rather than revolving around parties. Even the homemade corn alcohol served at dinner is introduced as part of the culture of the people living on the Dong Van Karst Plateau — something for guests to experience, not something to drink until they get drunk.
Around the same time, guests would sometimes ask me:
“Long, do you think Ha Giang will become too touristy one day? Will these untouched places gradually disappear?”
I often told them:
“If one day you come back to Ha Giang, I’ll take you to another road that tourists don’t know about.”
But the more I traveled, the more I realized that what they were worried about could happen. Tourism in Ha Giang was developing very quickly.
So on the days when I had no tour, I took my motorbike and started searching for small roads through local villages.
One time, I took four guests along a small concrete road, about 6 km long and around 2 meters wide.
After riding for a while, we stopped in a village to rest and take some photos. As soon as we got off the motorbikes, one of the women hugged her husband and started crying.
I became worried.
Was she frightened? Had the road we had just ridden made her feel unsafe? This road was smaller than the routes we normally used — had I made a mistake?
I walked over and asked her:
“What happened? Were you scared? Did you feel unsafe on that road?”
She shook her head and said:
“It’s so beautiful… Thank you so much. I’m so lucky that I chose you as my guide. I researched Ha Giang before this trip, but I never saw anywhere like this. Thank you for bringing me here.”
That moment had a deep impact on me.
After that journey, I continued spending my free days searching for more small roads, villages and places that tourists rarely visited.
By early 2023, the idea of rebuilding Dragon Team had become much clearer.
During February, I began accepting fewer freelance tours. I worked just enough to cover my essential expenses.
I spent the rest of my time back at an internet café, just as I had in the beginning.
I created a Facebook Page, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
I hired a team to build a website. They helped me with the technical side and the structure, while I wrote the three-day and four-day itineraries myself, along with the content about our journeys, using what I knew about Ha Giang.
Most of the photos at that time were simply pictures I had taken on my phone during trips.
At the beginning of March 2023, I completed the registration of Dragon Ecotourism Co., Ltd. and used Dragon Team as the brand for our tours.
More than three years after everything had stopped because of COVID, Dragon Team officially returned.
This time, we had a registered business, a company stamp and our own team.
But we still did not have our own office.
We partnered with a homestay in Ha Giang as a place to welcome guests and organize our tours.
Dragon Team also had an operations staff member by then. She was responsible for arranging and coordinating the team’s work.
But because we did not yet have an office, she still worked mostly from home, handling things by phone. When a group was departing or returning, she came to the homestay to prepare everything and support the guests.
Between the middle of 2022 and that point, I had also been observing and choosing the people I wanted to work with.
When Dragon Team started again, we had around 10 local drivers who did not speak English and three local team members who could communicate in English, along with me.
This time, Dragon Team was no longer just Long and three friends. We were truly becoming a team, and we could operate in our own way.
I redesigned the itineraries so we could travel more slowly, give guests more time to experience local culture and daily life, and try to make sure everyone reached the homestay before dark.
I limited our shared groups to a maximum of 10 guests. Whenever possible, we left the main roads and took guests onto smaller roads through local villages.
I also began choosing homestays run by people from different ethnic communities and bringing local cultural experiences into our journeys, so guests would not only see Ha Giang but also have the opportunity to understand more about the people who live here.
I began turning everything I had learned from those journeys — and from the travelers themselves — into the way Dragon Team organized a tour.
And now, I also had the opportunity to do something I had dreamed about since my days as a freelance guide.
Today, Dragon Team’s core drivers are paid around 25% more than drivers working for other large companies in Ha Giang.
Put simply, the amount they earn for three days of work with Dragon Team is roughly equivalent to what they would earn for four days of work with other large operators.
The first dream I had carried with me since my days as a tour guide had become a reality.
I had created our social media channels earlier, but in reality, I rarely posted.
Most of my time was still spent on the road.
I continued asking guests after each tour:
What did you like?
Is there anything we could do better?
Little by little, we changed.
Guests made videos.
Guests took photos.
Guests told the stories of their journeys.
Some wrote reviews on Google and Tripadvisor.
And other travelers began finding us through those stories.
One time, after a tour, I was talking with two British women who were working in Hanoi.
As usual, I asked them about the journey and how they had felt about it.
During our conversation, one of them suddenly asked me:
“Do you know how I found Dragon Team?”
I said I didn’t.
She told me that before the trip, they had searched Google for phrases such as “Ha Giang Loop Small Group” and “Ha Giang Loop Special.”
In the search results, she saw Tripadvisor reviews from previous travelers mentioning Dragon Team.
So she went to Tripadvisor and searched for Dragon Team.
She told me that, at that time, Dragon Team was ranked Top 1.
I was quite surprised and took out my phone to check.
“Oh… it’s true. Top 1!”
I still remember how that felt.
Years earlier, I had sat in an internet café, messaging former guests and hoping that a few of them might be willing to write a review for me.
Now, the words those travelers had written were bringing complete strangers to Dragon Team.
As Dragon Team continued to grow, I began thinking about something bigger.
My first dream had begun with wanting to change the work of my own life and the lives of the drivers working beside me.
But then I began hoping that Dragon Team’s growth could help more people than just us.
That became my second dream.
I wanted part of what Dragon Team received from tourism to go back to the communities where we live and work.
Today, Dragon Team dedicates 1% of our revenue — 1% of what our guests pay — to community support activities, especially for disadvantaged children in remote mountain areas and families facing particularly difficult circumstances.
On some suitable journeys, our guests can also take part and personally help give those gifts to local people.
Today, Dragon Team is very different from the four people we were at the beginning.
But we are still changing our journeys.
I am still searching for new roads.
We are still looking for ways for our guests to meet local people, sit with them, listen to their stories and understand more about life in Ha Giang.
And I still remember that journey at the end of 2018.
Ma Pi Leng Pass in the darkness.
Fog that allowed us to see only a few meters ahead.
Dinner at 22:00.
And a tour guide sitting there, not knowing whether he would still be able to do this job tomorrow.
I did not know then what Dragon Team would one day become.
I only knew that I wanted to do this work differently.
Dragon Team began with a dream like that.
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