We're going to try to make it to Dalat today. Our plan for the day takes us up into the mountains and off the horrendously busy QL20 highway that so drained us of our will to live yesterday. Any highway is like that when you're on two wheels. It's a 220 km route, which is slightly more than Tigit Todd's recommended daily intake. Hopefully we don't overdose on mileage. #stretchgoals Last night, the forecast was calling for rain for most of today, but surprisingly, we wake up to glorious sunshine! Really hoping to get a solid day of blue-sky riding.  Breakfast by the river Very surprised we aren't being bothered by any mosquitoes here in Vietnam. Must be because of the cooler winter temperatures (all relative, right? Still a high of 30° in Cat Tien). Even while we were on the road - no dead bug collection on our visors. Granted, we were riding no faster than 40 km/h for most of the day - slow enough that even the bugs could dodge our helmets, just like we were able to dodge oncoming scooters in our lane! Hm. Maybe that's why the speed limit is 40 km/h... #lightbulbmoment  From our dining table, we watch other tourists take a boat tour down the Dong Nai River All the tourists are staring at their smartphones. I'm not going to judge, because I'm the one spending every evening banging away on my laptop on this blog.  Neda's breakfast is some kind of pho... Except instead of the traditional rice noodles, there's egg noodles in there and there's a fried egg on top with lots of green onions. Is that even allowed according to the official Vietnamese Pho Rulebook? This morning, I've opted for the non-pho breakfast. I'm eating egg noodles topped with a fried egg with a lot of green onions... heywaitaminnit... #lazychefalert We have a lot of mileage to cover today, so we hop straight onto the bikes after breakfast. Well, not right away. Apparently there are some important things to do before we leave.  Neda informs me: "Wait! These dogs need petting!" #priorities  We hop straight onto the bikes after breakfast *AND* petting all the dogs DT725 is an alternate northern route to the main highway. As we were planning our route, I was drooling at all the twists and turns on the map.  The reality doesn't disappoint! The road is virtually empty because most of the vehicles are on the highway, blissfully out of our path of travel. The sun is out and the pavement is silky smooth. We toss our bikes into the turns with wreck-less abandon, left and right into the corners. The ascent up the mountain road forces us to bang up and down the gearbox as we hunt for that elusively narrow powerband on the tiny 150cc buzzboxes beneath our butts. Small bikes are so much more engaging than big-bore motorcycles, because you can't be lazy and just leave it one gear.  We find a scenic overlook and pull over to survey the land all around us  Dry season in the central highlands is from November to April, but you'd never guess by how lush the scenery still is. We follow DT725's twists and turns north-east for a while, sharing the road with only the odd scooter. After an hour of this, the road changes its mind and heads south-east again towards the Bao Loc area. The vegetation we pass on the side of the road morphs quickly, it starts out with lush palms in the jungle at lower altitudes. Climbing higher, the banana trees are replaced with tea and coffee plantations and at the summit, pine trees watch over us as we plod along at a steady 60 km/h (or maybe slightly faster, but don't tell anyone...)  Just playing around on a dirt-road off DT725. Two farmers on a scooter, carrying more implements than should phsyically be possible on such a tiny vehicle, pass by us and give us puzzling looks like we're lost... :) Speaking of which, I'm able to use my GPS again! Now that we're out of the HCM area, our two-wheelers are allowed to rejoin the Big Boys on the main roads. Not that we are taking the main roads today, anyway. In any case, I'm a lot happier not having to rely on my phone. We're enjoying our little motorbikes. Although the XR150s are shaped like a dirt bike, they're more street-oriented, with non-knobby tires and short suspension travel. But it does offer a wide and comfortable seat as compensation. In other words, perfect for the kind of roads we're on. The air-cooled single-cylinder thumper hums silently most of the time, until it's asked to climb hills, at which point it makes its protests known. Still, a lot more smoother than I thought it would be. As we reach Bao Loc city limits, the jungle thins out and shops and stores make their appearance once again on either side of us.  Lam Phat Church - We're seeing a lot more Christian churches up here in the hills than down in the city Red lanterns are still up from the Lunar New Year. Neda says they remind her of the Christmas decorations that our neighbours still have up all throughout January... #lazybecomeseagerinNovember We're actually in Bao Lam, a northern suburb of Bao Loc. Bao Loc is where Neda originally thought we'd make it yesterday. There's no way that was happening. After just a day and a half on the road, we're getting a much better sense of the distances and times involved in overlanding Vietnam. It's been a few hours since breakfast and we're getting hungry, so we keep an eye out for a food place patronized by a large enough crowd.  This one looks good!  We order cafeteria-style, pointing at the chicken drumstick, fermented eggs and some pork slices to go with our plate of rice and green beans Neda thought she had grabbed a tea drink from the fridge and it turned out to be an energy drink. I grabbed an energy drink knowing that it was an energy drink. She didn't like the taste of hers, so she gave it to me. After lunch, I'm pumped up with so much sugar and caffeine, I can hear my heart beat in my helmet! 8) Fully fueled (jet fuel in my case), we hit the road again!  At the side of the road, we see something cool. Can you guess what this is? Some kind of plant?  It's incense, drying in the sun. Neat, eh? There are more towns on DT725 east of Bao Loc than west, where we came from. But thankfully, it's nowhere as busy as yesterday. We saw some neat sights along the way:
We followed this little guy for a few minutes. Poor kitty was getting quite distressed at one point, trying to clamber out of her plastic prison. The owner had to take her backpack off and reassure her precious one, all the while still traveling down the road! LOL! It's taken us over 5 hours to travel 200 kms. We're on the final stretch but because we're coming up to Dalat city limits, my GPS is once again sending us on roads which we're not allowed to be on. I brake hard in front of a no-two-wheeler sign, and have to back up, find a spot to pull over and figure out where we need to go using Google Maps on my smartphone. As I'm trying to re-orient ourselves, this guy on a scooter pulls up beside us, and despite speaking not a lick of English, dives right into trying to help us get back on the road to Dalat. I remember in India, we encountered great difficulty understanding the local's hand gestures when asking for directions. It seems every country has a different vocabulary of non-verbal communications. Through a funny back-and-forth game of Vietnamese-Style Charades, we quickly deduced that tapping on the left arm means "Go Left" and not "Three syllables! First syllable is...!" How interesting!  This guy was so friendly and helpful. We thanked him "Cảm ơn!", and again get a big smile in return for trying to speak his language That surprised smile is so rewarding, I so wish I could learn more Vietnamese than just "thank you"! Those rain clouds you see in the distance are smack dab in the direction we're heading in. We've got enough experience to know that there's no escaping the showers.  Prepare the sausage suits! Neda hates the sausage suits.  All around us, on the road up ahead and behind us, all the scooterists pull over and break out their ponchos We ride straight up into that black cloud of dreadful wet, as the road to Dalat rises sharply to the sky. It's such a crying shame that it's raining, because this is such a twisty road and the pavement is so pristine! Cars and two-wheelers merge once again, but traffic has slowed to a crawl due to the water-works. We're literally 10 kms away from our hotel and Google Maps is telling me "42 minutes to destination". The only saving grace to having our rainsuits on is that the temperatures plummet the higher we climb. I don't have a thermometer on my bike, but I think we're close to 10°C, which is cold when you're wet. I really don't understand why it's raining so much. In Ho Chi Minh City, we visited that Hindu temple dedicated to Mariamman, the goddess of rain, but we took extra care not to pray to her. I didn't even make eye contact. So WHY?!!! :( From what I could see through my rain-stained visor, Dalat is a very cool-looking town, the buildings and architecture look very unlike all the other Vietnamese towns and cities we've passed through. Traffic takes a turn for the worse as we approach our hotel, which is situated on top of a hill. All vehicles headed up the hill have to funnel past an intersection, and right at the corner, an elementary school has just let out for the day. Parents in cars and scooters are trying to get in and out of the school's tiny parking lot to pick up their kids, and it's turned into a madhouse in the pouring rain. We're thankful that our tiny bikes are able to squeeze past car bumpers and mirrors, but we're just one of a hundred other two-wheelers, so eventually we get stuck behind a sea of scooters all the same. The GPS receiver on my smartphone can't get an accurate reading from the satellites because the buildings are blocking the signal so I don't know which way to go. On my smartphone, the Google Maps countdown: "1.2 kms away. 13 minutes till destination" goes up with each wrong turn I make: "1.5 kms away. 22 minutes till destination". CÁM ÓN!!! So frustrating! It seems to take forever, but we pull up to our hotel. Dripping wet in the lobby, we check in, peel off our layers and take a long moment in our room to de-stress from the ride into Dalat.  Our hotel after sunset. Rains have abated so we're heading out for dinner We explore Dalat on foot, walking past the school at the bottom of the hill that caused all those problems. The streets are totally empty now. We just happened to arrive at the wrong time of day. :(  Although we're up in the mountains, far away from the coast, there's a variety of seafood on display at the stalls We're checking our seafood appetites for when we reach the shores, so we know it'll be nice and fresh! :)  We do pick up some yummy fruits, the kind we never see in the supermarkets in Canada Okay, we do see mandarins in Canada, but not custard apples... We did some research on what kind of cuisine Dalat is known for. It led us to this:  Lau Bo - Vietnamese Beef Hotpot. Perfect for warming up on those cold mountain nights Sweeter than we expected. We found out that they use anise and cinnamon in the broth. I didn't mind too much, but Neda likes her soups more savoury. Also a lot of tendon-y bits, which the tables all around us devoured con gusto - so apparently it's quite a delicacy - just not to our tastes.  If you see a fancy restaurant in Vietnam, it's probably not a restaurant but a coffee shop All over our short travels in the south, we've mistakenly these fancy places for restaurants, but they only serve coffee there. They're called "Ca Phe", wonder what that translates to? Coffee is very big business here, they seem to generate more business than the food places, so much so that their storefronts are way more fancier! So peculiar!  Nice restaurant? No! Fancy Ca Phe!  Dalat nightlife is so vibrant. So many people sitting outside Ca Phes and stalls, eating, drinking and making merry! Neda is quite the tea afficiondo, so after dinner and she takes us to a tea room where we drink Oolong Tea grown in the area.  Learning tea culture in Dalat I'm merely a tea novice and was very impressed with our hostesses intricate tea-making ritual, cleansing the pot and glasses, the waking of the tea (I had no idea tea had to be woken up), steeping the tea, straining and pouring it with such grace! She didn't speak much English, but we communicated with each other using Google Translate on both our phones. Technology - bringing the world together!  Long day. The view from our hotel room just before we slipped into unconsciousness. Although this was not our first riding day in Vietnam, I don't really consider yesterday's escape from Ho Chi Minh a proper motorbike ride. This was our first real riding day, and it was glorious!
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