Thirty years of creating and running discovery travel in Vietnam and on overland routes across Asia, Europe and South America.
He was among the first to bring motorcycle discovery travel to Vietnam, from the mid-1990s, when the international market had only just opened. In 2005 he founded MotoTours Asia – a brand of Hidden Horizons Odyssey Co., Ltd – and in 2006 co-founded Voyage Vietnam, the licensed travel entity behind it, holding international tour operator licence no. 0491/2006/TCDL-GP LHQT. Since April 2026 he has also served as Chairman of the Members’ Council of Ha Giang Experts.
Expeditions He Has Led
Hanoi to Portugal in 60 days is the longest journey he has organised and personally led; the second running was forced to stop in Venice when the pandemic broke out. The Yunnan – Sichuan – Tibet – Everest Base Camp route along highway G318 he runs three to four times a year — more often than any other foreign operator on that road.
Beyond those: the Silk Road, the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan, Ladakh with the Khardung La and Umling La passes, and South American journeys through Ecuador – Peru and Chile – Argentina. In total: more than 40 tour products, 16 regularly scheduled programmes and over 100 destinations surveyed on the ground.
Three Generations of Fleet
Minsk 125cc through the 1990s, Royal Enfield Bullet 350–500cc through the 2000s, and since 2019 a BMW GS adventure fleet – MotoTours Asia was the first tour operator in Southeast Asia to run a BMW adventure fleet with full in-house technical capability.
Awakening Potential – Developing Communities
That has been his mission from the start: opening up tourism in remote regions must go hand in hand with creating durable livelihoods for ethnic minority communities, built on their own natural resources and cultural heritage.
In practice that means recruiting and training young people from ethnic minority communities into professional tourism staff; giving bicycles to highland schoolchildren; equipping remote clinics with medical supplies; and building proper sanitation facilities in the villages along the routes he operates. The community stilt-house homestay network in Dien Bien Phu is a working precedent – a five-year plan giving local people jobs and long-term economic opportunity, instead of letting outside investors put up large hotels as happened in Sa Pa.
In the Press
The South China Morning Post (2024) covered the 4,300 km ride from Lao Cai to Everest North Base Camp and described him as having organised motorcycle tours in Southeast Asia for more than thirty years. Al Jazeera (2022) interviewed him about the community ecotourism initiative in Dien Bien Phu. The BBC (2014) published Ian Lloyd Neubauer’s photo essay on the Dong Van karst plateau, shot during an eight-day ride he led. Coverage has also appeared in Nikkei Asia, Adventure Bike Rider, Travel Weekly Asia, VTV and VnExpress. On Tripadvisor, MotoTours Asia holds 4.9/5, with 57 of 62 reviews rated excellent.
Education and the Person
Bachelor of Philosophy and Bachelor of Law, University of Hanoi. He works in Vietnamese, English and French, and converses in Thai and German.
He describes himself as someone who looks for places that are not yet on the tourist map – drawn to wild country, and to the history, culture and daily life of ethnic minority communities. A long-standing adventure sportsman: skydiving, martial arts, off-road driving and riding.