We had a head wind (all wind in Vietnam seems to go from North to South which is rather unfortunate as we're riding everyday from South to North) for most of the day, and lots of rolling hills that kept the quads burning. It was gorgeous scenery though--you hear so much of Vietnam's coast, but the central highlands have proved equally stunning to us.
We cycled past many ethnic minority villages and had good glimpses into rural life in Vietnam--a far cry from the prosperous lifestyle in the cities.
An ethnic minority village where life happens mainly on foot
Our ride finished in Dak Glei, the only town for 50 kms on either side of us. We were told ahead of time, but our friendly tour guides in Kon Tum that there was one guesthouse here, and we soon found it and hunkered down for the night.
Time is drawing nearer to TET, the lunar New Year, and people were starting to close shop so we were lucky to find one restaurant open though I think we ate their left over dinner rather than something from the menu. We met a nice Vietamese man who bought us coffee and had a charades-like conversation before packing it in for the night....we wanted to get up early to catch a bus to Hoi An for two reasons:
1) we wanted to celebrate TET in a bigger city, with all the commotion around us
2) we had been warned by people and travel guides that all things close around this festive time and we feared if we spent the next two days cycling our 200 km into Hoi An we'd run into trouble finding food and places to sleep
Our guesthouse hosts, though they had no English, reassured us we could catch a bus in the morning to Hoi An without any difficulty. As we are passed by hundreds of buses daily, we knew this to be true. Had a good sleep and woke up early to get our day started...what were told at this point that was left out the night before is that the Hoi An bus didn't come until 10 am....oh well, one more morning of coffee drinking won't hurt us!
9:15am rolled around and we were shooed to the street and told to flag down the bus when it came..which apparently could be anytime from 9:15, to the scheduled time of 10am, to the actual time of 10:30. We saw the green bus in the distance, our host confirmed this was in fact it, we positioned ourselves very plainly in the driver's view, and we jumped, waved, hollered as he bombed past us. Our host looked at us, shrugged, and left us be.
Waiting at the side of the street for what seemed eons for anyway, anyone to take us far, far from Dak Glei
Hmm. Now what? We proceeded to try our flagging techniques and for the successful 4 or 5 buses that stopped, when we ran to the door, the bus driver would come out, we would point very cleary at our map, the bus driver would shake his hands at us and drive off before we could utter a single word. This happened about 5 times before we decided to just get ON, no questions asked, the next bus that stopped. Apparently, taking 20 seconds to look at the map and confirm the bus is going where we think it is, is too much to ask.
We finally did make it on a bus, made it to where we thought we would, and have sworn to bike ourselves the most we can around this country!!
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