90km from Dalat to the cost and 120km from Dalat to Ca Na, the stopover we choosed for our way to Mui Ne, the place for wind- and kitesurfing in Vietnam (does anyone of you remember “Back To The Future II”? Marty McFly is in the year 2015 and get confused by an advertisement that sais “Surfing Vietnam”, it’s reality!). Thanks to the Lonely Planet Map of Dalat, that indicates the wrong street to Phan Rang from Dalat we had to make a 40km detour on the really most horrible streets you can imagine. It was not just annoying to go this way, it actually was very dangerous. The street condition was very poor, sometimes you had to drive through lakes of hand-sized stones where it was easier to loose the control about your motorbike than to control the motorbike. With insane bus and truck drivers coming towards you it’s not so nice to slip and fall. Really not cool! After about 70km we reached the Bellevue Pass, the name is the program. Dalat lies in an altitude of 1500m and going down to the sea means you go down to 0m and 950m you do in 8 or 10km at the Bellevue Pass. From the top there you can see the ocean 55km away. It really goes down serpentines for 8km with a steady gradient of 7-10%. Going downhill was not a problem, more big fun, but I was very thankful that we didn’t take this way in the other direction. I guess that really would have been too much for our bikes (and they are very reliable, we had no problems at all with them so far). The last 85km from the bottom of the pass until 5km to Ca Na was an easy cruising, even Highway 1 that we had to take for the last 30km was not crowded and a good chance to drive full speed. Five kilometers before we arrived our destination my bike ran out of petrol again but once again help was close and a shop about 3-400m from the place I stopped had a mobile petrol station. In Ca Na we booked a beach bungalow for 5$ each, unfortuantely the weather was everything but not good for swimming but it didn’t matter, it already was dark when we arrived anyway.
100km to Mui, just 2,5hours. An easy and cool drive, the last 20km just along the seashore. What to say about Mui Ne? The best things I remember about it is the acquaintanship of Dominik from Witten in Germany who infected us with the juggling game “Pogo-Stick” and the tailor Binh that repaired my backpack (a smaller zipper was already broken since the hitchhiking in Russia) very professionally. Otherwise, the town is pretty much a tourist nest made up just by hotels, resorts, restaurants and shops that sell bikinis and bathing trousers. The weather, as already mentioned, was not the best so it was not really crowded in town and on the beach, so the time there was alright, swimming was still possible and even enjoyable, the last day there even the sun came out and brought me a nice sunburn. But in total, that wasn’t the beach holiday we were looking for now and decided to go further down the coast in the direction of Saigon, a much less developed area.

From Buon Ma Thuot it’s 190km to Dalat on Highway 27, a very mountainous road, especially the last 100km, so it’s not really wise to do it in one day if you don’t just want to drive. We decided split up the route and to make a stopover at the Lak Lake, which is about 50km from BMT and a very nice lake with surrounding rice paddies, mountains and minority villages, even if the tourism here is already a little bit more developed. If you want you can stay in one of the traditional longhouses in a minority village for 7$ per person but we decided to check in at the only guesthouse in “vietnamese” village for 4$ each. It’s not long ago that you needed a permission to visit the minority villages (actually, there are just 2 or 3) around the lake because the highland minority villages in the highlands still produce some trouble for the Vietnam government. The last real breakout happened in 2004 and 2005 when the “montagnards” raised their fists and voices and some riots broke out in Buon Ma Thuot, Pleiku and Kon Tum. Nowadays it seems to be more quiet but Amnesty International still reports about human rights violations from the Vietnamese government in the mountains. As I said, the lake is pretty nice and on the streets around you can unfortunately spot elephants (not wild, used for tourist entertainment now) or other exotic animals. Years ago there were even crocodiles living in the lake but these days are over, thanks to the human wish for crocodile leather shoes and bags. The last stage from the Lak Lake to Dalat was a whole day on the bikes and more or less exhausting (especially for me, I felt not so well this day) with bumby roads and lots of serpentines, but once again a motorbikers dream, too. We arrived in Dalat a few minutes before it got dark and were happy to find a cheap and very good value guesthouse “Peace Hotel”.
Dalat is a strange city. It really is a strange city and has in some corners the same athmosphere like Hoi An or New Haven, the city from the Truman Show. It’s in an altitude of 1500m what brings an eternal spring for the city. For it’s mild climate it was already known by the french imperialists who build hundreds of colonial style villas in the city. The french influence is still recognisable (they have a relica of the Eiffel tower as a TV tower!) and mixes up with the vietnamese lifestyle. No wonder that the city attracts a good number of tourists (as the only city in the Central Highlands). Apart from that, we spent three nice days in the city exploring the central market (four vegan food stalls in the 2nd floor!!!), the food and drink stalls in the streets (sugarcane juice! definitely my new favourite drink!) and the many cafe’s serving one of the best coffees in the world for small money. We walked around the artificial lake in the town center and visited the marvellous crazy house. Especially the crazy house was totally cool and inspiring, unbelievable how much creativity the human brain can produce. Established in 1990 it’s an ongoing construction project with a unique architecture. Maybe a little bit compareable to the buildings of Friedrich Hundertwasser, you don’t find any straight lines and have to find your way through a lot of tunnels connecting which connect the rooms with each other. Getting lost in this labyrinth is part of the experience. Annika was extremly enthusatically with this house and would have wished to move in at the moment. A visit in Dalat really should include a visit to this project, from me it gets both thumbs up and a very high recommendation.
The only thing that was a little bit unwelcoming for us was the weather that changed during the three days from yellow sunshine (like all ten days before) to grey clouds… we wanted to go to the sea after Dalat! Damn!

From Hoi An our real motorbike journey should begin. 600km down to Buon Ma Thuot through the Truong Son Mountain range and the Central Highlands, through a less (or better: no) touristified area of Vietnam. It was not so easy to find the right road when we left Hoi An and we definitely made a big detour but that was not really dramatically, the rural countryside with all the village and the relaxed people was nice to see. Once we got on the Highway 14 (that’s the official number for the HCMH) riding a motorbike was simply a pleasure. The streets were empty and the scenery great, even if we didn’t made it before it got dark to the city of Phuoc Son (also known as “Khem Duc”) and Annikas light was not working it didn’t really matter. To make it clear from the beginning: The whole 600km to Buon Ma Thuot the street and traffic conditions never were so good again. Phuoc Son was a small sleepy town with two guesthouses just at the beginning of the city. We stayed in one of them and went out for a short walk through the city before we decided that a movie watching on my small laptop is more interesting than this town.
In day two we, or better: our motorbikes, already had to face the first big challenge. The part between Phuoc Son and Dak Glei through the Truong Son mountains was the most demanding part of our way on the HCMH with lots of ups and downs, serpentines and steep gradients of 10% and higher for sometimes a few hundred meters caused excellent views. We can’t really complain, our bikes did a great job and we arrived safe in Dak Glei, even with the last drop of petrol, where we filled up again and stopped for a long lunch break. The last 60km to Ngoc Hoi were no problem anymore, so we made 95km this day, what’s a good distance if you don’t want to get up The next day, just a minute after our departure Annika almost had her 2nd accident, this time it maybe would have been a little bit more serious. A woman who was transporting two big bags of coffee beans lost the content of one of these bags directly in front of Annika and transformed the street into a slippery surface with thousands of hard coffee marbles. Good luck nothing happened, Annika slipped around just a little bit and was able to control her bike. We just went on for 60km this day until the first bigger city on our route, Kon Tum. The streets became more crowded and more annoying in this part and we got in our first (and by the 27nd of November so far only) police control. It’s not so good to get into a control if you don’t have a drivers license but to pretend persistent to understand absolutely nothing (and the police men even spoke a little english) helped. They just let us go. Good luck number two this day. Kon Tum is a nice city with a lot of churches (the biggest part of the people in the Highlands are surprisingly catholics) and impressive “Bahnar” villages (the Bahnar people are one of the numerous minorities in Vietnam) at the edge of the city but it’s maybe enough to stroll around this town for one day, as we did. The sunset over the river that is floating through the town was spectacular, that’s for sure, too.

Again we planned just to go 60km into the next bigger city Pleiku on day four but when we arrived in Pleiku we found out that it was not possible to stay overnight. There are a lot of hotels here (Pleiku has 250000 inhabitants) but all were booked out or ask for unbelievable high prices like 600000 Dong for a double room (23€!!!). The reason was the national “Gong” festival that began exactly this day and obviously is a big thing in Vietnam. I really would have liked to stay and see this but we had to go on, that definitely just didn’t fit in our budget. I ran out of petrol when we left the city before we found the next petrol station, too, but help was near and we bought a bottle of “Xang 92″ from an old woman on the street. Now we had to find another hotel in the next city and that was not so easy as it sounds. There are not so many cities in the Central Highlands with guesthouses and we had to go on for 90km until we found one. It already was dark when we arrived there and the driving was a horror. The traffic in Vietnam is really mad, crazy and dangerous (and the streets were crowded) and if you want to survive you better arrive before it gets dark, the Vietnamese just don’t care about other traffic participants and with a motorcycle you’re the 3rd last on the scale (the 2nd last are the bicyclists and the last are the pedestrians) so you definitely if you get out of the way quickly when a mad car or bus or truck driver overtakes on the opposite lane and heads directly towards you, they won’t slow down or care about you small motorbiker at all. The stupid thing about the dark is, that some Vietnamese don’t care about things like light on their vehicles either, what makes the “getting out of the way” much more difficult. Additionally to that come the awful street conditions. When it’s dark you will hit every fuckin’ pothole on your way and after your final arrival in the guesthouse, for example in a small city of Ea H’Leo you will swear that you will never ever drive again in the night.
The good thing about our 150km-trip the day before was, that we had just 85km left to Buon Ma Thuot this day, the last city on the Ho Chi Minh Highway for us (from there we left the highway and went southeast to Dalat). Some things about the Ho Chi Minh Highway/Trail. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was a network of several paths with a length of maybe 10000km from Hanoi (in the north) down to Saigon (in the south) and was the main supply link for North Vietnames soldiers and Vietcong in the south. The journey was a 6 weeks (in the 70s) to 6 months (in the mid 60s) torture with 36kg of supplies for the people who walked it from Hanoi to Saigon under constant bombing of the Americans. The most paths returned into jungle nowadays but you can still follow parts of the trail. The easiest way to do that (and the only way to do it on motorbikes) is via the Ho Chi Minh Highway. This, at the moment, is the biggest national street construction project, and it will offer a second street connection between the two biggest cities in Vietnam (beside the already existing Highway 1) when ready. Until now, there is still much to do and when you travel this Highway (compared to western standards, “highway” is really not the right word for this road, let’s better say “bumpy countryroad”) you recognise that they actually are doing a lot. There are construction sites following construction sites and sometimes you even think that whole Vietnam is just one big construction site but that doesn’t change the fact that the bigger part of the streets that are chosen to be the “Ho Chi Minh Highway” in future are still in a poor condition, but the scenery is worth every single pothole you will hit.
Anyway, the last 85km were not a problem at all. It became hillier again but the traffic became less, that’s more important. At around 2pm we arrived in Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam’s coffee capital.
With 312000 inhabitants it’s the biggest city on the HCMH between Hanoi and Saigon with no special sights, too. We stayed there for three days, that’s usually already too long but we had a cheap hotel and a relaxed time with great coffee, great food and some fieldtrips, for example to the great Dray Sap & Dray Nur waterfalls (gorgeous and strong, there’s no other way to decribe them) 30km from BMT. But it was really OK, even if it’s not a beauty, a visit to an untouristy bigger vietnamese city is very nice. The feeling, the athmosphere and the impressions we got there were much more “original” than in Hoi An or Hue, for example, where everybody and every single corner is prepared for western tourists.

From Vientiane we usually booked a ticket directly to Hue but we let us dropped out at Dong Ha, a small boring town 80km west of the Lao border because it was strategically better for us. Until 1972 Dong Ha was the closest (bigger) town to the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), a five kilometer long stretch that divided North and South Vietnam from each other, 1972 Dong Ha fell to North Vietnam (the communists), and now, in unofficial capitalist times it’s a good place to start from for some DMZ sights and to buy used motorcycles, as we planned to do. Our arrival in the city was no secret for a long time (there are not a lot tourists coming to Dong Ha) and a tout already waited in front of our (very rundown but very cheap) hotel the next morning. For this day at the Vinh Moc tunnels we needed a mode of motorbike transportation anyway and the (from now on known as Mr Binh) man, and old ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam – the former south vietnamese army) veteran was sympathic, a good source of insider knowledge and pretty cool and funny, too, so we agreed to let him bring us to Vinh Moc, after some necessary negotiations . We arrived in Vietnam in the typhoon season and recognised that already this day when a typhoon (I forgot the name) hit the coast (and us), the bike trip with Mr Binh and his friend was not very comfortable (very wet and windy) but we arrived safely. The Vinh Moc tunnels are a sad chapter in human history and shows very authentically to what war leads to. Vinh Moc is a North Vietnamese village that literally went underground in response to unremitting American bombing in 1966. The USA began a massive bombardement of North Vietnam and just north of the DMZ, the villagers of Vinh Moc found themselves living in one of the most heavily bombed strip of land on the planet. The Vietcong had a base in the area and encouraged (or forced) the villagers to stay and the only thing to survive was to set the whole village underground. The people built an enormous complex of at all 2km long tunnels 12m to 23m below the ground to have a safe shelter from the bombing. The tunnel complex now was “home” for 90 families for more than 5 years (!). In this time even 17 children were born inside the tunnels. It’s a oppressive feeling to wander through this narrow tunnels, to see the tiny caves that was home for a whole family of 5-6 persons and to imagine to live here for five years. A nightmare, but a nightmare that became reality for a whole village. After this shocking sight the very rainy day became more fun. I found and bought a motorbike for 165€ close to the tunnels and learned driving (instructed by Mr Binh) on the parking lot and brought my machine “home” (that was Dong Ha this time) safe. I never drove a motorbike before in my life and maybe Vietnam is not the very best place to learn how to drive but after a while I felt very comfortable on the bike. The next morning Mr Binh (really a great help and a good man) helped us to find another motorbike for Annika. After some more practise and a beer (really smart, but nobody cares in Vietnam and Mr Binh convinced us that you have to drink an inaugurarion beer when you buy a new motorcycle) we were ready to set off to Hue, 75km south on the most busy street in Vietnam, the Highway 1.
75km from Dong Ha to Hue, a real challenge. Maybe I repeat myself, but once again a brief summary of the circumstances: We both have no motorcycle license and Annika just had a half hour motorcycle practise, I maybe had 1.5 hours, it was raining and storming like hell, the highway of (our only) choice was the busiest national road with murderous (literally murderous!) vietnamese traffic. It took us a little bit more than 2 hours to get to Hue and arrived there at dusk, in the middle of the rush hour. WE MADE IT! Really, we were very proud about ourselves and definitely deserved the free beer that was given away in our hostel when we arrived there. Hue is the old kaiser city and cultural capital of Vietnam and has a nice old citadel in the middle of the city (with a citadel inside the citadel and another citadel in the inside the inside citadel ) and a nice river floating down. We visited a little bit of the tourist stuff the next day but the more interesting thing was to see the beach near the town. Almost all bamboo hut there were blown away and everything else was destroyed or damaged as well. The results of typhoon Ketsana that hit Vietnam about four weeks earlier and caused at least 74 deaths in Vietnam.
Hoi An is a charming old city 130km south of Hue with narrow streets, a big river (that partly flooded the city centre after the big raining the days before), much to much tourists and a tailor scene that is totally out of control (more than 700 of them work in the city to satisfy the tourist demands of custom-made dresses, shoes, hats or accessoires). To get to this lovely town, that feels a little bit like a Center Parc, we had to climb some great passes twisting us up into the clouds just along the pacific seashore and we had to cross Danang, Vietnam’s third biggest city and of course we came through it in the rush hour. Honestly, you will never learn to drive a motorcycle as fast as in a big vietnamese city between 4 and 6pm. I guess when you survived this kamikaze madness, you’re able to ride a motorbike everywhere in the world. If anyone thinks about going to Vietnam and to buy and ride a motorbike there, the rules aren’t soooo complicated. The most important rule is that there are no rules and that the larger vehicle drives first. Then, don’t care about everything that is behind you, just care about a 45° zone in front of you and about the motorcycles in that zone. If you want to overtake or are beside someone, honk! Or just honk all the time, the honk is the most important part of your bike. The drivers behind you will do the same so you’re warned when someone comes from behind, too (and you don’t have to watch!). Otherwise, just move through the crowds like a fish in a stream. But of course you should be very careful all the time and just small mistakes can result in major accidents. For example, when we arrived in Hoi An a little accident happend to Annika. She wanted to turn around, gave to much gas and slipped away on the muddy ground. Good luck she was very slow and nothing serious, except a bleeding knee, happened. The room we got in Hoi An was a full strike. The most hotels we asked before were fully booked somehow, as ours was, too. So the owner started to rent his private mansion (I think they always do it when the hotel is boooked out and yes, you really can call it mansion) and we got a room incl bathroom (a bathtube!!!), satellite TV, a big balcony and a computer inside for just 10US$ (for the room, not for each of us). At all we spent three nights in Hoi An. When you manage to ignore the touts and tourist establishments in town you really can have a pretty relaxed time here, with good food (we found three vegan/vegetarian restaurants), the cheapest draught beer in the world (0,12€ for 300ml) and new sneakers for me and sandals for Annika. The sneakers were custom-made for us from a small tailorshop and maybe the only possibility for both of us to get shoes in our sizes in Asia. They were not really expensive (25$ for the sneakers, 15$ for the sandals), vegan (we choosed artificial leather), exactly our size (they measured our feet) and “designed” by us. Another good thing about this shoes was that we had not to support a transnational concern like Nike or Adidas. They maybe exploit vietnamese tailors under unhuman circumstances and we were able to choose the tailor by ourselve without any big companies, whole sellers and shops inbetween.