Leaving Saigon was the first bus ride after a while and it really was a little bit sad to know to be dependent to schedules and timetables again after the total freedom of motorbiking where you just do up your own schedule and adjust it all the time to current events. But you can’t have everything. The bus was actually a very good one, it was very comfortable and the driver didn’t intend to be the king of the road. And even if it was an overnight drive through the Mekong Delta it was quite interesting with two ferry crossings. We arrived in Rach Gia in the middle of the night at maybe 3:30am and we’re very surprised that the most small cafes were still open. Usually Vietnam is one of this “early to bed – early up again” countries but 3:30 really was a little bit too early even for them. The miracles solution was very cool: The european Champions League was live on TV and they broadcasted the match Juventus Turin – Bayern München. We still had a lot of time until our ferry left the next morning so we did like the locals do and joined them with a few ice coffees. It was simply gorgeous. To watch a german team playing in the CL live in the middle of the night with pleasent 20°C in a small Vietnamese city with locals and ice coffee definitely has it’s own charme. After the match (Munich won 1:4!) we slowly walked to the ferry pier and waited for the sunrise and the departure of our boat. The ferry trip must have been very nice with some nice islands that passed by but we didn’t get a lot from the action and slept most of the time. When we finally arrived we maybe have been still a little bit too sleepy and forgot all kind of stuff on the boat, like my cool NorthFake sweater that I bought in Mongolia, self-made postcards from self made photos that we prepared the day (that’s the reason why you all got no christmas cards!), scissors and food. Well, doesn’t matter and we promise that we will send postcards to all of you in, let’s say, the near future . The arrival in Phu Quoc is a little bit annoying with a lot of touts, motorbike and taxi drivers and people who try to sell you souvenirs (of course I wanna buy souvenirs from an island that I just set my first steps onto two seconds ago!) but we just ignored them and some kind of hitchhiked into the main city, Duong Dong.
We checked in the first affordable hotel and cured our bus lag (a special kind of jet lag that occurs after overnight bus travels) with a few hours nap. After strolling through the very small city for some hours in the afternoon we already knew that we will like this island and this place and the first thoughts of maybe spending christmas here instead of Cambodia or Thailand came up. We just had to find a nice spot near the beach with nice people around, a great cosy athmosphere and great food that was not too expensive, quiet, relaxed and equipped with hammocks in the middle of the jungle and taaaataaaa…. after two days we found it: Freedomland!
We really were lucky that we found it and got the big deal with it. Open just since 4 or 5 weeks before our arrival it describes itself as a “Homestay Eco Resort” and simply is just one of the last small paradises on planet earth. It’s runned by Peter, a Vietnamese man and his portuguese wife Rita (but unfortunately we didn’t get to know her because she was in Portugal in the time we’ve been there) who put a lot of effort into this place. It’s a place you don’t want to leave again, it really feels more like a big housing community than a “Resort” (that’s really not the right way to call it) which is probably is mostly because of the great dinner that all guests have together in the evenings. It’s not like in a Restaurant where all order their own stuff and eat at separate tables, Peter prepares a big dinner itself and serves it on a long table. And no one will ever be unsatisfied: The food is awesome and could easily get through in a 5 star restaurant and additionally very vegan- and vegetarian friendly. If they serve any meat they just serve seafood but you always will get a great vegan or vegetarian alternative to that. The ritual of the common dinner makes it easy to get to know the other people who are around. That creates a special nice athmosphere that you can feel in the whole place: Nobody is alone, all people interact together, feel comfortable and good, there’s no anonymity and the fact that there are just 7 or 8 bungalows and therefor not so many people the areal still offers solitude to the people when it’s needed. To make it short: That’s the perfect place to chill out, to relax, to take a break from travelling or just to have a nice holiday.
Our activities during the two weeks we spent in Freedomland were actually pretty limited, but we chose it like that. For us it really was a great pleasure just to hang around, to do nothing and to be lazy. We didn’t even visit the nearby beach that, by the way, was totally abandoned, very often (maybe just every second day). I could even list all our activites until the 24th of December (you can read how our christmas looked like in the next article ): On the second day of our stay in Freedomland we went on a great snorkelling trip out to some remote islands near Phu Quoc with 8 other “Freedomlanders” (just 8$ each incl. lunch on the boat), then we went to the night market in Duong Dong ten kilometer away two times and once we walked along the sandy and rocky coast into town – that’s it, and it was great!
During this two weeks on Phu Quoc there was one annoying thing, too (except the flies at the breakfast table): When I wanted to get some money out of the local ATM the machine just swallowed my credit card. It was not my default and I still was totally in my credit limit for this month, the problem was a mistake of my bank. They changed all credit cards and deactivated all the old ones, so mine too, but I knew about that thing and called them before the deactivation and explained to them that I can’t pick up my new credit card and that I’d like to use my old one instead. They agreed and extended the validation of my credit card, at least they told me that. At the end they still deactivated my credit card and the ATM swallowed it. I was lucky that I was able to pick up the card again at the bank the next day and another call to my bank finally solved the whole problem, I am able to get some money again.

No, it was not as bad as this quote from “Apocalypse Now” suggests. Actually it was pretty cool there and I liked it a lot. Mostly we have to say thank you to our great hosts Tram and Chris, who hosted us for the week that we spent in this great city. Without them it maybe wouldn’t have been sooo cool. Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, as the communists call it, is a chaotic cluster with a lot of energy and things going on. Basically, this city can satisfy all your demands, but still in a vietnamese style.
We got into the city with our motorbikes, the last stage on our bikes and probably the most challenging one, too. We avoided the main roads and chose a small route that brought us, after two ferry river crossings, directly into its heart. It was not so bad as expected, but still pretty tough. A good thing was, that we already knew where we had to go (thanks to my fantastic handdrawn map – a real masterpiece in the history of maps) and surprisingly we had no real problems to find our way to Tram’s home.
Our main task during this week was to sell our motorbikes for a reasonable price, which was not so easy and at the end we sold them, but for a price we were not really satisfied with (but it was still acceptable).
At all we spent a week in Saigon and the time really ran fast. We visited the War Remnants Museum, where it’s pretty easy to get an idea of the cruelty of war, enjoyed the Saigon nightlife with our excellent nightlife guide Tram, bought me a new cap (finally I found one that I like at least a little bit) on the market, did some casual sightseeing, tried to cross streets with an unbelievable traffic volume during the rush hour, ate good vietnamese, pakistan, mexican and indian food, gazed in amazement at the sorted chaos of the thousands of black wires, that supply Saigon with electricity or just chilled in parks or on Tram’s balcony.
However, Saigon is a good reflection of the vietnamese culture with all the good and the annoying things. I won’t tell you so much more about the city, because I think I will write much more about Saigon in a couple of months. I decided to move here for a half year or a year from mid-March on to teach some English and save some money for my onward travels…
Saigon, see you soon!

Our first “beach week” still wasn’t exactly that what we imagined but it was OK in general. From Mui Ne we drove about 120km to the Ho Coc Beach, with a stopover during the day at the Tacu mountain, where a giant 49m long and 11m high sleeping buddha statue makes the main sight.
In Ho Coc we were a little bit disappointed. The beaches were nice and not crowded at all, but the sleeping possibilities were very limited. The only option we could afford was a bungalow park that was mainly in reconstruction with some work going on during the day. Really not as nice as expected. Additionally the weather was not the best, most of the day it was clouded and windy. Nevertheless we didn’t let that spoil our mood, so we just went with our bikes some kilometers to another awesome beach and enjoyed the loneliness and the churning ocean with it’s awesome waves. We stayed two nights in this resort and on the third day, when we left Ho Coc, the sun was back with all the power, too. The coastal road winding along this stretch of the coast is empty and simply beautiful as the beaches and forests around there are also. But once again, the question is how long it will be like that. Just 10km north of Ho Coc, at the Ho Tram beach for example, there’s a huge building project in progress, bringing six or seven new enormous upmarket resorts to this still undeveloped area. When ready, this resorts will make up the “Ho Tram Strip”. Really, Vietnam is developing in every corner and people who want to see a Vietnam before mass tourism should hurry up… in ten years this country will look totally different.
In the early afternoon we arrived in Long Hai, a small town with a premier location in a bay and a great beach. Even if there was not so much going on, we stayed for three nights and finally enjoyed our beach holiday there.
Vung Tau was the next stop for another three nights. The city is pretty cool situated on a peninsular stretching into the South China Sea for a couple of kilometers, with two mountains at the peninsulars end. Atop the smaller mountain a giant 32m high jesus awaits the South Chinese Sea with arms wide outstretched. That reminds not just a little bit of Rio de Janeiro. Also this Jesus is just 2m smaller then it’s famous rolemodel. Beside that, Vung Tau is a commercialised beach resort city that receives a lot of visitors from HCMC at the weekend. During the week (when we were there) the city is much more quiet and pleasant, a little bit away from the seashore (for example in the city centre) you don’t even feel that this ususally is a very touristy place and it becomes even very enjoyable. We tried to figure out a way to get by boat to the Mekong Delta somehow, but it was just not possible to get there without getting into Saigon first. Usually we planned to explore the Mekong Delta for some days before going to HCMC, but getting through this eight million inhabitant giant is just a pain in the ass. We slowly got used to the thought that the way from Vung Tau to Saigon (110km) unfortunately would be our last stage of our motorcycle journey through this unique and great country…

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.