Day 15 - The long & winding road

Hello everyone. Well it's been an eventful week! New visual-journey progress update

Last I wrote, we were still in Dalat, and we'd booked an 'Easy rider' dude to take us on some tours around the local area. The lunch we'd had the previous day was a very local café- it tasted okay, but we all had the shits the following day... bad! But it's wasn't the first time for us, you expect these things right? So we head off on our day trip, each on our bikes, following Mr Hung (our Easy Rider) around to various stops. These included a 'Crazy Monk' monastery, some flower growing farms, the local village farms, coffee plantations, and then onto a place where they grow silk worms from lave. By this point I was feeling a little light headed, and needed to sit down in this poor persons house... Within minutes I passed out and threw up all over myself (great!). Seems I'd gotten full-on food poisoning. Scared the boys a bit. Bless Mr Hung, he was very helpful, and the owner of the house tried acupressure treatment on my temples and forehead (it hurt!), that left me with marks that have only just disappeared now – didn't really help. So Lukas drove my bike, coming back to pick his up later, as I hung onto the back of Mr Hung returning to the hotel. I took some medicine and slept the rest of the afternoon. The lads went back to get Lukas' bike, and continued the day-tour onto some waterfalls, and silk factory. I was well enough to eat half a bowl of soup by the evening, but was still fragile.

After a great nights sleep I felt okay again by the morning, and we decided we'd done most of what Dalat had to offer, so we checked out of our hotel, and hit the road again. We had an ambitious plan to drive about 170km to another town in the highlands, near a national park, but once again we had problems with our directions... This time we headed about 50km in a wrong direction; realising later (after much head scratching) we had to go backwards, in order to go forwards – roads here really make no sense.

Regular little-faces appearing to say hi.


The mountain roads were great fun to drive around, if not a little dangerous, and my bike was in need some TLC by this point. So much so I slipped on some sand going around a corner and crashed it :S I wasn't going very fast, and only had a few scrapes & bruises. My bike needed a little welding, so we stopped in the next village to reattach my footrest pedals and stand. It helped make me a little wiser, and more cautious from then on, and more determined to fix up my bike to be more road worthy (the guys had some work done one theirs while I was bed-ridden in Dalat).

On the road


Eventually we make it to Boun Ma Thout before dark (6pm sunset) and find a pretty decent little hotel outside of town. This city is unfortunately developing-urban-grim. Just a couple of main roads packed with constant traffic, and it's filthy – so so dirty, but it acts as a good base for exploring the local area, and Petr negotiated us a pretty good deal (he's good at that), on possibly the nicest room we've stayed in yet – we all had our own beds! Good thing too as we were knackered! We clocked up 250km of driving in one day, had an accident, and uncoupled our bags several times to refuel along the way.

The following day we went in search of the national park. Again there were no signs to help, so we were doing circles and trying random roads, attempting to ask for directions where we could (didn't help very often). Eventually we found it, and the girl in the office there told us it was Sunday (we've lost track of days), and they weren't open (or at least no guides were working), until tomorrow at 7am. We discovered it was possible to do a couple of day tour in the Yok Don national park, the leaflet had pictures of tigers, elephants, monkeys and all sorts of animals, so we thought great – we'll come back tomorrow at 7, all prepared with minimal gear to go on a 2/3 day hike through the jungle.

Driving down the 'light' jungle paths
 

For the rest of the afternoon we found a 'Bamboo Village' where you could take an elephant ride (unfortunately they didn't look well looked after) and look around the village, as well as do a bamboo bridge walk, where we witnessed more appalling treatment of animals that really turns your stomach – monkey's especially; locked in a 1m² cage going crazy walking in circles, as the Vietnamese tourists poke them with sticks and throw rubbish in their cages. Sick! If the ticket office girl spoke any English, I'd of demanded my money back. So we headed back to the hotel.

I took the opportunity of being in a city to get my bike fixed up again in a garage. They can fix anything in this country. I had my front shock absorbers repaired, a new front tire (was pretty bald - hence accident), the battery acid topped up, an oil change, and the light fixed, all of which came to a grand total of less than £5 for all parts and over an hour labour! Following a seafood meal fit for a king, we headed off to bed early preparing for the national park tour the following morning.

Eating out
 

5:15am – alarms wake us. We pack up, check out, and got back to the park (40km away) by 6:50. The semi-English speaking guide (boss as the girl from the day before called him), told us of our options, and broke our hearts saying there weren't many opportunities to see animals at this time of year :( Seem they all bugger off to a tastier places while the dry season hits this part of the country. We could still go, but it's possible we'd see nothing. A several day hike no longer seemed like a good idea, and the cost involved hiring an elephant to carry our luggage, tents, food and water ($70 a day) seemed like a potential waste.

Eventually we found an option that suited us – we could go by bike (after crossing a river by boat) for 1 hour through the boring part of the forest, until we reach the interesting inner-forest nearer the mountain – there we'd have a greater likelihood of seeing something. So we set off with our (seemly mute) guide and packed lunches, drove there for an hour, RAN (this guy didn't want to go slow!) through the Jungle for 90 mins, saw bugger all, and drove back. Lukas was so unimpressed he took one picture of a spider, and that's it! For those who know him – that should say a lot about how little there was.

A but pissed off at this point, we'd stumbled across this luxury resort on a lake we’d passed the day before, which we'd decided to stay at for a day or two. It's dirt cheap; still in construction, and is only up and running with the most basic of amenities. We're the only guests in this 100 hectare spot on a lake, with our own cottage. There's a bizarre kiddies play zone with pools, play parks, and a pointless oval monorail that goes about 250m. But the staff are really friendly, the weather is good, and the scenery pretty special. We stumbled upon it looking for a rubber factory after seeing a sign on the gate. Seems it's owned by Daklat Rubber Company – one of Vietnam's largest corporations. It's a bit like Lost - with the Dharma Initiative – setting up a community. Phase one will be finished in 2010, and finalised in 2020 when it will be one of the countries top health spa resorts.

Local scenery
 

While here we've been chilling out a bit. I went for another walk, hoping to find something alive – I didn't. We've travelled to a nearby town for lunch where I'm writing this, and then back to the resort where we'll probably hire a boat to explore the lake, have a nice meal, and check out tomorrow to head back to the coast to a place called Natrang, to do some more exploring, before continuing the journey north.

Keep listening. And thanks for the comments guys – keep it up!

More images by Lukas