Khoai Lang Thang

Đinh Võ Hoài Phương was born in Bến Tre on 23 May 1991. On YouTube he is Khoai Lang Thang, and the channel he opened in February 2017 is his own work: food, daily labour and ordinary places, told slowly in a Mekong accent, usually by one person with a small camera or a phone. He sits on the ground to eat, wades into fields with farmers, and stays long enough to talk before a town becomes a subject. By November 2026 the channel had about 3.6 million subscribers. In 2024, and again in 2025, he won Creator of the Year at the Vietnam iContent Awards.

Cái Mơn, a villa calendar, and the name Khoai

He grew up in Bến Tre, the Mekong province known as the land of coconuts, in the flower village of Cái Mơn. After Vietnam’s provincial mergers, Bến Tre sits inside Vĩnh Long. Home, in his telling, was an ordinary family, neither poor nor rich. His mother bought local flowers and sold them on. At Tết the selling sometimes ran until New Year’s Eve, and after too many losses she gave the trade up. He has said he sat and sold flowers with the family in the days before the holiday. He is the older of two brothers, and he has long lived and worked in Ho Chi Minh City.

A December 2025 Kenh14 feature, drawn from his own posts and television appearances, describes his mother as the person who raised the two boys and as the strongest influence on him. On the show Have a Sip he recalled her view that what others could do, she could do, and what a man could do, a woman could do. She fixed broken pipes and lights, and once went out at night with a lamp to catch a snake in the chicken coop. That example, he has said, taught him to assume he could manage if he trusted himself and worked. On HTV7’s Cà phê cuối tuần in 2020, handed an envelope with the prompt “a gift,” he thought of her. “Tôi rất may mắn khi được mẹ tặng cho nhiều thứ để bước vào đời,” he said: a pleasant voice, and a face people found easy to trust, so that he could be himself. The meal he says he misses most, after eating across countries, is rice his mother cooks. In September 2017, living alone in Saigon, he hoped to earn enough to bring his mother and younger brother up to live with him, and to travel with them.

The nickname is a pun he has explained many times. In the southern accent, Hoài Phương comes out “Quài Phương.” Middle-school classmates twisted that into “vườn khoai,” sweet-potato garden, and then just Khoai. When he needed a name for wandering, food and culture, he added Lang Thang. Travel appealed to him as a boy. The sharper dream was architecture. His mother hung calendars of handsome villas, and he wanted to design houses like those. Cái Mơn offered no realistic path to study drawing and sit the architecture exam, so he chose construction, on the belief that the two jobs were close. He later said they turned out to be opposites.

His first trip alone was unplanned. In grade 10, at 15, he went to Đà Lạt. After he moved to Saigon for university the trips became regular: he worked while studying, saved a little from each paycheck, and after exams went to places such as Đà Nẵng, Côn Đảo, Đà Lạt and Cần Thơ. By graduation he had already seen a fair number of Vietnamese provinces, and new horizons, new food and new people were what made him restless. To cover tuition and living costs he waited tables and sang in cafés and small music rooms. Singing, he has said, was for pleasure. A real career at it would have needed formal training he did not have, and he has said he feels no regret about leaving that door closed. In July 2020 a magazine noted a music video from him, “Đợi nụ cười em.” His younger brother studied veterinary medicine, then moved into photography. By a December 2024 interview that brother had opened a channel of his own about six months earlier.

Second in the class, then a hammock at Tết

He studied civil-engineering construction at Tôn Đức Thắng University in Ho Chi Minh City, course 14, and graduated á khoa, second in the class. That is how he described it to CafeBiz in September 2017 and to Tuổi Trẻ in January 2018. By the second or third year he already knew the work was not his. Engineering, he told Thanh Niên, was “quay cuồng với số liệu,” a spin through numbers, where he had wanted the freedom to design. Family circumstances ruled out starting again in another field. He talked himself into finishing, hoping a real job would be less dull than class.

After graduation he worked in Ho Chi Minh City as a design and structural-consulting engineer, including at what Tuổi Trẻ called a large firm, and he passed through more than one role. The length changes with the interview. To CafeBiz in September 2017 he said more than three years had gone by in full-time engineering. In 2019 he spoke of about two or three years in the profession, on top of about a year of private agonising. To Thanh Niên in December 2024 he remembered two years as a design consultant. Across those accounts the shape is the same: a few years of paid engineering, a long doubt, and a resignation only once the films had begun. Friends warned that a technical graduate who chased a passion would have nothing to live on. He has said he understood the warning. He has rejected the idea that the degree was wasted. The technical training, he said, made editing software less alien, and the university’s stress on discipline and professional ethics stayed with him. Pressure to leave a job he disliked was also, in his words, what pushed him out of the safe zone.

The origin he tells most often is domestic. During Tết 2017, lying in a hammock one afternoon, he thought: why not make videos about food and travel and put them online? He already liked eating and going places. He still calls that afternoon the piece of luck that changed his life. In March 2026 he told Esquire Vietnam about a longer prelude: about nine months lying at home, asking what he would do if he stopped being an engineer. Farming occurred to him, and so did a small business back in the hometown. The Tết idea was the one that moved him. He stayed employed while he tested it. He took leave, filmed for a few months, saw the first encouraging signs, and only then handed in his notice. He hid the resignation from his family. Nearly a year passed before his mother knew. By then, he has said, the channel had gone far enough that she did not blame him. Friends had objected. Most of them later came around.

Back in Saigon he bought a used Canon G7X. He had no photography, filming or editing background, and he was embarrassed to speak to a lens. Days, the engineering job was still his. Nights, he taught himself on YouTube and installed editing software. The first outing was chosen because the ticket was cheap: Thảo Cầm Viên, the Saigon zoo and botanical gardens. He walked around filming whichever animal he met. To Esquire he remembered lowering the camera to the ground at the ticket window because he did not dare raise it, and he said he did not yet know how to talk on camera in an ordinary way. He cut that material in two, labelled the upload “end of episode 1,” and left part 2 unposted, because a few days later it looked too poor. He kept the clumsy first film as a marker of the start.

He remembers the upload as 22 February 2017. The channel itself had been created on 6 February 2017. In a later interview he dated the start of the work to March 2017. He sent the zoo film mostly to friends. Some called it long and sleep-inducing. Most told him to continue, and he has called that the encouragement that mattered. He read the comments and corrected what he could. By September 2017 he was on roughly his 40th vlog, with more than 26,000 subscribers, and the YouTube money, still modest, was starting to cover part of the cost. From the beginning he wanted plain footage, with little staging, so a viewer might feel they were walking with him. He has also been frank that a passion has to pay. If it earned nothing, he has said, nobody would believe it was a life. Around 2019 he described sponsorship as something he sometimes had to take so a trip could happen, and he tried to keep brands from bending the film. YouTube income let him choose more of the trips himself. Early on he used savings, stayed near Vietnam or in neighbouring countries, ate at ordinary stalls, rode public transport and slept cheap. In the Mekong Delta, hosts often fed and housed him.

Floodwater, old roads, and a gold button

He films Vietnam more than anywhere, and within Vietnam he has deliberately made fewer films about Saigon and about Bến Tre, so that those places stay special. Abroad he often stays for weeks, sometimes longer, going to markets and talking to people before he treats a town as a subject. Understanding a place, he has said, matters more to him than a tally of countries. A line he repeats, including on the Vietnam iContent stage, is “cứ chân thành chắc chắn sẽ nhận được chân thành,” sincerity returned in kind. By 2025 he was also calling the pace “chậm mà chạm,” slow, and still reaching people.

On camera, home is the western Delta: water hyacinth and lotus stems, floating markets and freight boats, Muslim communities in the west, and the feast films. Flood-season pieces follow nets for linh fish, điên điển flowers, and sour hotpot. The “nấu cỗ” series stays with multi-day rural cooking: a three-day, three-night memorial meal on a cồn, a giỗ started at 3 a.m., a garden table of local specialties. The trip he says he remembers most from the start of the channel is several months back in that western country, which taught him the place he was born. In 2019 Gia đình & Xã hội quoted him on water-chive pickers who stand in floodwater for ten hours, for very little money, and still laugh.

The 100,000-subscriber Play Button came on 25 December 2017. Around midnight on 22 October 2019, by his own memory, the channel passed 1 million subscribers and the gold Play Button, roughly two years in. He has said he had never expected the number. A November 2019 newspaper profile put the Facebook group “Gia đình Khoai Lang Thang” above 50,000 members, and said he had spent more than 1,000 days on the road visiting more than 100 Vietnamese sights. The same year, a compilation known as the 800-day journey down the length of Vietnam stitched those domestic trips into one film. Viewers came to treat it as a love letter to the country.

Two relationships from that period still surface when he talks. Wandering to Đầm Dơi in Cà Mau, he met cô Tám and cô Năm, watched them make cakes, stayed, and was treated as a younger relative. In Hà Giang, early in the channel, the roads took him to a La Chí village and to two boys, cu Khánh and cu Lì. About five years later he went back and helped get electricity into Khánh’s house. VnExpress in December 2025 noted a return to Bản Phùng in Hà Giang after four years, and said his plan was to revisit the early places, Hà Giang and the western provinces, as visits to home, relatives and friends.

Two early trips abroad set habits he still describes. In Thailand, while he was new at the work, a man ran up and grabbed the camera, speaking a language he did not know. Neighbours translated: the man wanted a shot of himself deleted. Hoài Phương has called it the lesson about filming strangers without asking. In Spain, on the first day, his backpack was stolen in a hotel, camera and laptop inside. He lay awake, then decided the loss had come at a kind moment: day one, before the trip’s footage had piled up. The next morning he bought another camera and continued. By 19 August 2019 the channel was past 800,000 subscribers, with more than 150 films, and the map already included Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and Spain.

A long quiet patch came later, which he discussed with Người Lao Động in 2023. Uploads slowed. Viewers wrote to ask if he was all right. He said he had run out of energy and stopped to look for it again, and he treats those pauses as necessary. He also said he rarely did press, because each appearance had to feel new. In the early years he wrote, filmed and edited alone. By 2023 he was sometimes bringing his younger brother in to shoot and cut. By December 2024 he told Thanh Niên he had one regular helper plus occasional companions, and he still preferred to shoot and edit himself so the films stayed his. Some trips are made with friends. Brands sometimes pay for a journey.

Thirty playgrounds, then the ads went off

The project he still talks about is “Việt Nam - Chuyện chưa kể,” also called “Gom góp chân thành.” On 2 August 2019 he posted a short film about rural children who play in dirt and rivers and have heard of basketball, table tennis and badminton without ever having a safe court. At first, he has said, he imagined one playground, or two, or at most ten. He refused to open a public donation account, because he had watched friends endure rumours after handling other people’s money, and he went looking for a large brand instead, ready to build something smaller with friends if nobody joined. About twenty days later, OMO came in as sponsor. In mid-August 2019 he announced playgrounds for more than 30 hard-up schools and tens of thousands of children. The first he filmed opened on 20 September 2019 at K’Nai primary school in Lâm Đồng, where about half the pupils were from ethnic-minority families. The wider set of about 30 was planned to be finished by early 2020. Thanh Niên later said the film of those playgrounds passed 10 million views. By December 2024 he said later community gifts were quieter and paid for with his own money. He told Người Lao Động in 2023, during the “sao kê” wave of demands that influencers open their charity books, that he would still ask the public for help if he was sure he could account for every đồng in and out.

The sharpest professional shock he has described came just after the gold button. On 1 November 2019, Gamek reported a Facebook post in which he said YouTube had switched off monetisation less than ten days after 22 October. He argued that the platform pushed controversial subjects and limited what he called clean films. He gave “Việt Nam chuyện chưa kể” as the example: about 7 million views on Facebook against a little over 500,000 on YouTube, with views and ads restricted, he said, because the film dealt with a social reality.

Recognition arrived in the same stretch of months. WeChoice Awards 2019 named him Hot Content Creator after public voting. Kenh14 reported the win on 12 January 2020, ahead of a field that included Cris Phan, Ngọc Trinh, Khoa Pug, Dino Vũ, Hậu Hoàng, 1977 Vlog, Giang Ơi, Quỳnh Trần JP and Phê Phim Team. The Men & Life Awards named him Travel Blogger of the Year at a ceremony on the evening of 25 July 2020, honouring work from 2019. The magazine that reported the prize also had the channel above 1.3 million subscribers, and around the end of that July the Facebook page was past a million. In 2023 the Hà Giang provincial People’s Committee commended him for digital communication that spread the province’s image. Travel Live’s HOTLIST 2024 named him one of 12 inspiring travel figures of the year.

Baobabs, a public tap, and a van over the Alps

Africa is the foreign journey he describes with the most feeling. Madagascar took three flights and about two days from Tân Sơn Nhất, via Mumbai, at a fare he said was higher than a ticket to the United States, with delays and extra costs along the way. The episode “Du lịch Châu Phi - Madagascar” went up on 3 July 2024. He has compared the island to the Mekong Delta of about twenty years earlier: slow, communal, short on phones. A hotel owner who realised he was Vietnamese drove him between towns and refused payment. He waited for sunset on the Avenue of the Baobabs. In Kenya he went into Kibera, which he described to Thanh Niên as the world’s third-largest slum, and saw people buying water from a public tap and carrying it home.

Other meals have stayed with him in the same way. He told VnExpress in 2025 that one dish has lodged harder than famous food: rice and salted vegetables cooked by a family on the Meghalaya hills in India, offered because it was what they had. He has spoken warmly of Vietnamese communities in the United States, Japan and South Korea who recognised the channel and sometimes insisted on paying for a Vietnamese meal. A 2025 account of his return after a year away described a self-drive trip through America with friends, off the usual big-city route, and time in Africa in the same long stretch. A year-in-review he posted on 1 February 2026 looked back over 2025 from the Mekong to Asia and Europe, including a February 2025 visit to the old post town of Ouchi-juku in Fukushima.

From 2025 the new form was a vehicle he could sleep in. He has called himself, jokingly, a freeloader who eats his way across continents. VnExpress, reporting a conversation on 4 November 2025, said he had spent much of the previous two months in Europe: a flight to Munich, a few days in an ordinary apartment, then a rented RV over the Alps, a stop in Garmisch-Partenkirchen on the Austrian border, and plans for Austria and Switzerland. He cooked in the vehicle and once slept at a highway RV stop when the proper site was full. A stranger’s gift of a train ticket, and a night in the mountains, stayed with him. The Switzerland film from Brienz, “Ngày 3 ở Thuỵ Sĩ,” was published on 29 March 2026.

In parallel he put out a 16-day Iceland series in a campervan smaller than that German RV, shared with two close friends he calls brothers. The first episode went up on 28 November 2025. He describes black-sand beaches, mossy canyons, a glacial river seen from a cliff, and an aurora on day one. A forecast of gusts up to 144 km/h sent the three of them driving clear of the storm with about 16 hours’ warning. Lifebuoy sponsored the trip. He also posted a disclaimer that problems had arisen with the Iceland rental company, and that he would not review it.

Two nights at Military Zone 7, then the tenth year

The Vietnam iContent Awards, organised by the Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information, VnExpress and FPT Online, gave the slow films their largest public stage. On the night of 30 November 2024, at the Military Zone 7 arena in Ho Chi Minh City, he won Creator of the Year, the top prize of the first edition, and Most Loved Creator, the only category decided entirely by reader votes. VnExpress put his YouTube audience that night at 2.65 million. He was 33. He cried on stage, thanked viewers and his family, and repeated the line about sincerity. Fans asked for autographs afterward.

He won Creator of the Year a second time at the same arena on 29 November 2025. He had also been nominated for Inspiring Creator. On stage he said he was proud the job was being recognised, thanked viewers for criticism and for their time, and said the second win brought pressure to keep working responsibly. Musician Nguyễn Văn Chung and TikToker Vĩnh Thích Ăn Ngon were among those who congratulated him in public. The season drew more than 100 nominations and 500,000 votes over two months. Around the same months he received a VCEP Award as a creative and inspiring figure in travel and culture, a place among 10 inspiring travel faces in the 2025 HOTLIST editor’s selection, and a separate nomination there for “Influencer Voice.” On 8 December 2025, Men’s Folio Vietnam named him Travel Influencer of the Year in the Lifestyle group of the Male Icon Awards, at Le Méridien Saigon. Announcing the prize, the magazine said he had also appeared in a tourism music video, “Việt Nam - Những chuyến đi,” with other travel bloggers. In December 2025 the 11th National Award for External Information gave him an encouragement prize in the digital and multimedia category. Vạn Xuân nominated him as striking content creator of the year for 2025, and for 2026 as both outstanding KOL and striking content creator.

The face attached to those votes was also being copied. On 24 October 2025 he told Người Lao Động that TikTok and Facebook pages were re-uploading his clips, using AI to mimic his voice, and then selling poor goods. Viewers had written to accuse him of selling bad products. He said he does not sell online, and he named three verified channels as his real ones: the Facebook page at 3.5 million, TikTok at 2.8 million, YouTube at 3.03 million. On 25 December 2025, Znews reported a post on his Facebook page, then at 3.8 million followers. Deepfake ads, some of them hidden, were telling people to deposit or invest money. Dozens of victims had emailed him. He said he had been reporting pages for months and that each takedown was replaced by another. He asked viewers not to transfer money on the strength of any video that claimed to be him.

A smaller argument about his manner landed in the same season. In late November 2025 a small TikTok account called him a male “black rose”: high emotional intelligence, charming on camera, closed and performing in real life. He answered in the comments and then to Người Lao Động on 2 December. He accepted one point. He rarely tells other people his sadness, he said, because he has lived independently since he was young and does not want to burden them, unless the person is truly close. He pushed back on the idea that the public manner is the whole of him: he argued in comment sections, he said, and could be selfish in defending himself. The poster had also praised him, they had messaged, and he was moved by the support. Beyond that he let the reading go, with the line that he does not fully understand himself either.

He has grown more cautious about what a popular film can do to a small place. He told Esquire he has seen a local restaurant fill up after he filmed it, then lose its lease or its quality, and he feels indirectly responsible. Before he publishes a place, he now asks whether he is about to spoil it. Through 2026 the films kept the same method on a wider map. With Zalopay he worked through China: Chongqing, which he calls the “8D” city, Jinan in Shandong, “the city of a thousand springs,” and Qingdao’s night market, shot in weather that cost him the sunny waterfront. At Măng Đen he sat a feast with Mơ Nâm villagers, the elder Kon Chênh and anh A Nấc, joined the gong dancing and learned local dishes, in a Lifebuoy and Unilever campaign. Thailand, travelled on his own plan, took him to Kanchanaburi and a Mon village on the Myanmar border, across what he calls the country’s longest wooden bridge, through Phetchaburi’s riverside seafood and sugar-palm country, and into the Phraya Nakhon cave, where a shaft of light falls on the Kuha Karuhas pavilion. Tea country meant the old hills at Long Cốc in Phú Thọ and at Suối Giàng, which he places in Yên Bái, in Lào Cai, plus the large Cozy plantations, with em Vũ at Suối Giàng and em Luận at Long Cốc named on camera. Phuket, at the start of November, was a week of rain, a seafood market where he says he was overcharged three times, and a near-miss of the same treatment when he hired a boat to an island settlement. He still called the trip a success because of the food and the people.

In early November 2026, social clips placed him in Ladakh, in torn, patched clothes, with marks on his nose and forehead and a swollen cheek. Asked what had happened, he said he had hit his face on a rock, and joked that someone should mend his clothes.