Mike Moxley called me from Thailand, propped up on a bed with the kind of calmness you only get after a decade of wandering the world on two wheels.
And those wheels? Everything from a KLR650 to a BMW GS, the Vstrom 650, as well as the 800, and in Thailand, a Honda CB500. Mike isn’t picky about displacement. He rides whatever keeps him moving, whatever gets him deeper into a country, whatever opens doors to the next unexpected chapter.
“Every day is a blessing,” he says, and he means it. His leg is broken, and his travel is paused. But he’s not stressed, not scrambling, not rearranging life to get home.
Because he doesn’t have to.
Mike has been travelling for ten years, with no end date, no return ticket, and no home he’s obligated to return to. “If I get delayed in a country, it doesn’t matter,” he says. “I can stay forever if I have to.”
As we dug into his life on the road, we discussed the tallest road in the world, remote mountain passes, the Himalayas and the Andes. But the story with the most impact was a story about people.
A story about Vietnam.
A story about how a total stranger became family.
And a story about how a single left-hand turn can lock you inside a small town for 56 days.
The first couple of nights in Saigon, Mike went to see the nightlife and enjoy his first time there. “And I happened to find a little bar that wasn't too busy right on Walking Street. I sit down, and I meet one of the owners.”
At the time, he was unaware that she was the owner, but after a few nights, they shared a few beers and exchanged contact information, as she knew he was touring.
Mike heads north and starts bouncing around, ending up in the middle of the country in a town called Pleiku. He stayed the night and took off the next morning, about an hour out, when an older woman on a scooter suddenly turned left directly into his path.
Mike grabbed the brake, “I get the bike sideways. I hit her, go over. I don't have a single scratch. My bike's not damaged, nothing at all.“
But she is 68 years old and ended up with broken ribs and some broken bones. And a broken rule that no one tells Western travellers…American, Canadian, Australian, and several other passports are not legally allowed to operate a vehicle in Vietnam. Those countries never signed the newer Geneva Convention for International Driving Permits.
Every Vietnamese cop knows this. No tourist does.
So in Vietnam, as soon as there’s an injury, whether you are at fault, their fault, no fault, the process begins.
They take your passport. They ban your travel. They tell you that you’re not leaving the town until they say otherwise.
“They told me right there,” Mike said. “You book a hotel for 60 nights, or you go to jail.”
So he booked the same hotel he had stayed in the night before in Pleiku on the fourth floor.
The moment the police left, the hotel owner cancelled his booking.“You’ll stay here as long as you need,” she said. “But you don’t pay the rate.” Then they proceeded to get him legal advice from a local judge.
But during the accident, the police continued to ask him if he knew anyone in Vietnam, and the only person Mike knew was the bar owner in Saigon. The police called her to translate, and she could have ended it there, but she stayed involved.
A week later, she boarded a 12-hour overnight bus to Pleiku so she could help him negotiate the contract with the family of the injured woman.
Because in Vietnam, that’s how it works: The foreigner is always at fault, and you must negotiate a written financial agreement with the family, then a separate one with the police.
She handled it all. They signed the agreement. Then she ate lunch with him, before taking another 12-hour bus back to Saigon so she could work the next morning.
All for a stranger.
“She saved me,” Mike said. “Honestly, she saved the entire situation.”
While Mike recovered, word spread fast around town. In a town that size, you don’t hide a foreigner stuck for 56 days. Shop owners knew him. Families knew him. Kids waved at him as he walked for food. Everyone knew the story of the man from the fourth floor.
“I’ve ridden 64 countries,” he told me. “But that level of human kindness… I wasn’t expecting it.” By the end of his detainment, the town threw him a farewell party.
A month after he finally got his passport back, Mike was in the Philippines when he received a message from the hotel owner’s daughter.
She had returned from Canada to reconnect with her roots and was about to get married.
“You’d be my only foreign friend,” she wrote. “Would you come to my wedding?”
Mike didn’t hesitate. (In fact, he got a little choked up thinking about it) He immediately flew to Thailand to buy clothes, because when you live out of a backpack, you don’t carry suits, and to honour the occasion, he had a custom Vietnamese suit made.
Then came the moment he’ll never forget. He walked in, the only non-Vietnamese person among 250 guests… and the only man wearing a traditional Vietnamese suit.
Every other man wore a Western suit.
He laughed, celebrated, danced, and soaked in a moment that existed only because of a wild adventure. “Vietnam changed me,” he said. “Not the roads. Not the motorcycle. The people.”
For New Riders - Know the laws before you cross a border, and Mike added, take your time, learn from those with more experience
For Experienced Riders - Mike's advice was that you can do more than you think you can, and don’t listen to anyone who hasn’t done it.
For All of Us - The road is dangerous, but the world is overwhelmingly kind.
