Upon arriving in the hill town of Dalat we found a place somewhat akin to Britain: temperatures of around 20 degrees, grey skies, familiar vegetables (cauliflower, broccoli, carrots & peas), and affordable, drinkable, local wine - I was in heaven! We were transported from the bus stop to our hotel on the back of motorbikes and I'm afraid I was hooked. The Easy Riders are a freelance group of guys who offer trips around the country by motorbike. We booked up with 2 guys for a day in the local countryside and we were whisked around to waterfalls, flower gardens, vegetable farms, and a silk worm factory. I was a little disappointed when the guys picked us up as Mike got a big black and chrome motorbike to ride on and I got what I can only describe as a large moped! Still it was fun, so much so that we decided not to travel by conventional bus to our next destination on the coast, a journey of 150km, we'd go by motorbike instead!
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| From Vietnam |
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| From Vietnam |
The romanticism was lost a little when the guys came to pick us up a few days later andthey were both on mopeds. They were larger and more powerful that the one I'd been on a few days earlier, but they didn't look nearly so cool as the big bikes we'd seen around town and were led to believe we were getting. Yet again, you never quite get what you expect in Asia. On the way out of Dalat we visited Penn Waterfall that had a self-drive roller coaster to get down to it - it was hilarious & so unexpected. An ingenious way to make yet another waterfall a bit more fun!
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| From Vietnam |
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| From Vietnam |
We left the city behind, weaving in and out of the traffic and being honked by cars and buses as they passed. It was a little unnerving to be on the other side, as we are used to being in the cars and buses doing the honking as they career past the mopeds. We passed through small towns and went past fields and fields of vegetables as we started our descent to the coast. The road started to get quite steep as it wound down and around the hills and suddenly we crested a hill and there was the most breath-taking view across the plain at the foot of the hills all the way to the sand dunes and the ocean.
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| From Vietnam |
All of a sudden my driver pulled over, honking at Mike & driver in front to stop. We'd got a flat. We all got off and looked at it for a few minutes, there was a bit of discussion in Vietnamese, and then my driver said "It's OK. No one to fix it. We carry on." Indeed there was no one to fix it as we were on a winding mountain road, so on we went very slowly and quite wobbly, and quite worried that we could go sliding off the road but my driver held it together and after a couple of kilometers we made it to a small town and a small store where we could get a new tyre. This store was a place where you could get anything: new tyres, some oil for your engine, some fish sauce, a sack of rice, some beer, some shoes, a hat, a mat for the floor of your house and probably everything else a discerning Vietnamese housewife might need on a daily basis.
The town we had stopped in was the Vietnamerse equivilent of an English council estate. All the houses were square and uniformly spaced, all exactly the same. My driver told me that the Government built the houses for poor people who have no land to farm. It appeared as though the Government had exiled these people to the most godforsaken place in the country. There was absolutely nothing around, it was unforgivingly hot, with no breeze and no sound - it was absolutely silent. A very strange, almost eery place.
We set off with our new tyre and the road got worse and worse. Sitting on the back of a bike, with a large back pack strapped to the seat behind me and my legs up on high pedals is not the most comfortable place anyway, but when the road disintegrates into pot holes and gravel, not bumping into the driver and affecting his driving and keeping my feet on those pedals became a challenge. Not to mention that I had long ago lost any feeling whatsoever in my backside and thighs. As the road improved we rounded a bend and came head long into a 30 knot wind. It was so intense, and we spent the rest of the journey battling the wind as we were blasted with sand and soil.
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| From Vietnam |
We finally made it to the coast after 6 hours of almost non-stop riding, It was exhilarating, exhausting and distinctly uncomfortable, but I'd do it again!
Mui Ne is a beautiful stretch of coastline - 22km of white sandy beach, turquoise water and backed by one hundred foot high sand dunes. The sky is dotted everywhere with kites as daring guys and gals go zipping across the waves in 30-40 knot winds. As I wrote this blog I was sitting on the beach, watching Mike learn to kite surf, buffeted by the strong but warm wind, and drinking from a fresh coconut that a lovely lady in a conical hat had opened for me with a machete. Life doesn't get much better and we lingered for a while.
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