The Archive
Everything published so far, newest first — 20 stories
August 2026 2 stories
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The Coffee Beat
The best coffee in the highlands is served in a plastic chair
Three years of roadside stalls taught me more about hospitality than any tasting flight — and considerably more about robusta.
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On the Road
Ninety kilometres of red dirt, and not one sign in English
The route from Kon Tum to Măng Đen is technically a road. Technically.
July 2026 3 stories
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The Foundation
We built a school library out of shipping pallets. Here is the bill.
Every line item, including the two we got wrong and had to pay for twice.
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Kit
Packing for monsoon season: six things I got wrong the first year
Dry bags are not the answer. Or rather, they are not the whole answer.
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People
The grandmother who feeds every driver on the Pleiku road
Bà Sáu has run the same bún stall for thirty-one years and has never once raised the price for a stranger.
June 2026 4 stories
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How We Work
Why we stopped taking bookings for groups larger than twelve
It cost us about a third of our revenue. It was still the right call.
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The Coffee Beat
A farmer explained robusta to me for three hours and I understood maybe half
Anh Dũng farms 1.8 hectares outside Buôn Ma Thuột and has strong opinions about everyone above him in the chain.
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The Foundation
Twenty-four students, one spreadsheet, and the question we get asked most
“What happens when they finish?” is the right question, and for two years we did not have a good answer.
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Food
Salt, chilli, and lime: the highland dipping sauce that ruined me for everywhere else
Muối ớt xanh takes four ingredients and about ninety seconds. Getting it right took me a year.
May 2026 2 stories
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On the Road
The bus that leaves when it is full, and never one minute before
There is a timetable. Nobody has ever consulted it, including the driver.
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Food
Three months of cooking on a single burner, and what it fixed
One ring, one pan, and a hard limit on how much you can pretend to be doing at once.
April 2026 2 stories
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On the Road
What a four o'clock start buys you, and what it quietly costs
Everyone tells you to leave before dawn. Almost nobody tells you what you miss by doing it.
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The Foundation
The library that flooded in year two, and everything we changed after
We built it eleven centimetres too low. Six hundred books paid for that decision.
March 2026 2 stories
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The Foundation
Why we turned down a grant worth four months of income
It came with a photography clause. That was the whole conversation.
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On the Road
Dry season is the wrong time to come, and I will keep saying so
The photographs are better and everything else is worse. Here is the trade, laid out plainly.
February 2026 2 stories
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People
Tết on a farm where nobody had anywhere else to be
Four days, one family, and the particular exhaustion of being fed by people who will not let you help.
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Kit
A short defence of the thermos flask
Unfashionable, unbreakable, and the single most useful thing in the pannier.
January 2026 1 story
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How We Work
What one homestay taught us about pricing our own trips
They charged us less than the work was worth. We had been doing exactly the same thing.
December 2025 2 stories
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The Coffee Beat
Harvest, watched from the drying yard rather than the café
Six weeks in which the entire province smells like fermenting fruit and nobody sleeps much.
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The Foundation
Two hundred books, one motorbike, and a genuinely bad decision
In my defence, the van had cancelled. In everyone else's, I should have waited for another van.
No stories carry that combination of tags yet.
Or take the paper home — one letter every other Friday.