It gets so hot in the afternoons. The last few days, we've been melting inside our motorcycle suits by the time we reach our hotels. The problem is that we're so lazy in the mornings, never leaving before 9AM, but today, we make an extra effort to hit the road early before the afternoon sun takes its toll on our energy levels. But first... we get some breakfast. Neda found us a Bahn Mi place in the next town over, just a couple of kms away.  This Bahn Mi place is also a bakery, the pastries looked so good, so we ordered some of those too! We sat down to chow down on our monster carb breakfast and the young owner started to chat with us. He was very curious about us and knew a little bit of English so he wanted to practice. His name was Lim and he just opened the business recently. Neda used Google Translate to tell him about where we're from and where we're going in Vietnam.  Nice guy! And great pastries too! We gave him a good review on Google (where we found his place). As we were riding off, Neda said that Lim kept correcting her on her pronounciation of all the Vietnamese towns and cities. "We are going to Mang Den."
LOL! They did the same thing to me in France with my Quebecois Francais... We are taking a bit of a meandering path north, on a smaller road DT662, despite my GPS and Google Maps urging me to take the larger road QL25 to the west of us. We've learned that DT stands for Duong Tinh (country road) and QL stands for Quoc Lo (national road). I'm a bit wary about the quality of the pavement on these secondary roads, but there seem to be some cool twisties up ahead on the map! To manually program our route, I have to set a course for a town called KBang. The town names up here in the mountains are the best!  We cross a bridge and peer over the side. I remark, "Wow, so much garbage in the water..."  Not garbage. Ducks! This road should be called Quack Low... Stopped to watch all the duckies playing in the stream below us. Quack Quack, Kbang KBang, M'Drak!  Okay, maybe this is what they meant when they said "dead-zone"... North of La Pa, all signs of life cease immediately. Not metaphorically. Literally. No scooters on the road. No sleeping dogs to dodge on the asphalt. No buildings at the side of the road. It's like someone drew a line that we couldn't see on the ground marking where the safe zone was from some kind of nuclear fallout that happened generations ago, and we had just ridden over that invisible line. If we had stopped and turned off the bikes, I feel like we wouldn't even hear the sound of birds or crickets in the bushes... I look in the mirror behind us: All sorts of people, buildings, traffic... and KARAOKE! Then I look ahead of us: just trees and a single blacktop ribbon that cut through it, stretching out to the horizon. Is this some kind of warning that we shouldn't be going this way? So eerie! *shrug* We continue on. Kinda cool that we're riding into some kind of apocalyptic end-of-days movie set. We continue our lonely ride up DT662, only mute trees on both sides of the road watching as we pass by them. Every once in a while, we see something interesting:  Riding by a different kind of farm Wind power is big business in Vietnam! Most of the wind farms are off-shore, but there are quite a few set up in the lowly-populated central highlands. This area is prone to tropical cyclones during it's typhoon season, from June to November. As we are motorcyclists, we made sure to visit Vietnam during dry season!  Scary sugar cane monsters at the side of the road rear their heads at us as we ride by!  To break up the monotony, Neda pulls over and does a little dance! "AHHH! There's a bee in my jacket!!!!" Okay, so not a dance, then. I do my best to help her... by taking lots of pictures... She doesn't find the bee, but a red welt is starting to form on her skin. Ouch. Sugar cane monsters and killer bees! So there is life on Apocalyptic Road DT662! We continue to ride, on the lookout for more signs of dangerous wildlife for over an hour, until the Bee Road intersects with an A-Road, QL19. Finally, villages and signs of life spring up again.  This ox, playfully swimming in a mud bath, welcomes us back to civilization by wiggling its ears at us  It's starting to get hot, so we stop at a convenience store and buy some refreshments and take a break in the shade of a tree  Just outside of KBang, we are swarmed by schoolkids again I check the time, 12:30PM. Do different schools let out at different times of the day? Weird. Some of the kids on the scooters help their classmates on bicycles by giving them a push up the hill with their foot.  We're enjoying the scenery of the central highlands, making so many stops to take lots of pictures  Check out the lush landscape that we're riding through! Beautiful! We're a big fan of seeing those layered mountains in the distance, and also the triangular hill-tops that look like the conical straw hats that everyone wears in Vietnam. So symbolic!  From DT662, we turn onto another country road, DT669. This is the twisty road we scoped out on the maps  Pavement quality: good! Jungle scenery: sweet! Twisty road with no traffic: Priceless! WAHOOOO!!! Glad we didn't listen to the GPS!  Neda spreads her wings and prepares for take-off! At one point, DT669 opens up to a super-wide, six lane concrete road. This is unconfirmed, but I read that this was actually an old airport runway that was converted into part of the road. There seems to be no other reason why such a piece of road like this exists out in the middle of nowhere? It lasted for a km or two and then narrowed down to asphalt again, so it may very well be true. Very cool-looking!  Drivers hide in the shade of their trucks from the blistering heat We pass by over a dozen trucks parked on the side of the road, carrying loads of sugar cane piled up high. It looks like they are waiting for some kind of commercial inspection at the front of the lineup? It's the middle of the afternoon and once again, we feel like pieces of meat in a fast food restaurant baking under heat lamps. So hot!!! We reach the end of DT669 and cross over into Kon Tum province. Just before we turn off onto one of the national roads, we catch sight of these picturesque rice paddy fields.  We stopped at the top of the hill to have a snack and admire the bucolic fields below us  Doing the tightrope walk between rice paddies  AH132 is perfect stretch of brand new pavement Not a bump or ripple in the asphalt, the brand new surface is as smooth as a MotoGP track. For the first time this trip, I try to shift up into a sixth gear that doesn't exist. Very fun taking the corners without worrying about pavement quality! Traffic has picked up a bit though, there are some big tour buses on this road. The super-highway climbs higher and higher, the temperatures start to relent and the air becomes cooler. Tea and coffee plantations appear on the side of the road. At the top of the hill, we see the reason for the highway and tour buses. The town of Mang Den is a relatively new development and it's become a very popular mountain-top resort for Vietnamese people to get away from the heat of the big cities down by the coast. Tourists stream out of the buses to take pictures of the pine trees around them. I guess they don't see many pines at sea level. Fancy hotels line the street. We checked online and the prices rival western hotels, which is super-expensive for Vietnam! This area reminded me of when we rode through Cameron Highlands in Malaysia.  This is where we're staying, a little, quaint cottage compared to the large expensive hotels The owner came out to greet us and upon seeing that Neda was a farang, his face fell a little bit realizing he'd have to try to speak English. Then he saw me and his face lit up again... until I started to speak English as well. Then his smile disappeared once again: "Oh, I thought you were Vietnamese..." Poor guy went through quite the emotional roller-coaster in the space of 15 seconds! Also... I'm getting business cards printed up: Gene Lee
Neda wasn't too happy with the room, it didn't match the pictures on the web site, a bit run-down, and so expensive compared to what we've been paying elsewhere in Vietnam. We paid more for this dingy room than that luxury hotel in Nha Trang! Tourist trap pricing...  On the hunt for food Once again, we're victims of being hungry at the wrong time of day. Nothing open at 4PM. We don't eat at the regular times that most people do, so we're basically locked out of all the restaurants between 1PM and 6PM. We manage to find a small food stall that served basic rice, meat and veg. A bit disappointed because we were hoping for a nicer meal.  As a consolation, we did find this happy-looking boba tea place!  Durian bubble tea with bits of lychee, toasted coconut flakes and jelly, jujube fruits, and frozen durian. So delicious! So nice to end a great riding day with a cool, refreshing drink! Ugh, Neda's bee-sting is started to swell up... :(
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