Fortunately, whoever was torturing the cat last night, finished the job early and we were treated to a quiet night's sleep. 
A little bit of fore-shadowing Leaving our guesthouse True to form, the owner welched on the breakfast that he promised us. We woke up and he was nowhere to be found, so we just split. If we had known how disappointing our guesthouse would be, we would have splurged a little and booked into the luxurious hotels on the main strip and got the full touristic Mang Den experience.  We made up for it a little bit by finding a fancy bahn mi place for breakfast The restaurant is the tiny place on the left, the coffee shop is the huge, extravagant building on the right. This is exactly how it is all over Vietnam: the ca phes are so much more fancier than the restaurants.  Like most Vietnamese food places, the menu is very simple, only 2-3 choices  Make-your-own bahn mi breakfast. Two thumbs up for presentation and taste! We had a great day of sightseeing yesterday and we're pumped to do some riding! With our bikes and bellies filled up, we hit the road! We have a few choices of roads that run north, our bike rental company has published several GPS routes of roads that they've explored. We choose the one with the twistiest road! Gonna hit them as hard as 150ccs of Honda-driven, internal combustion thunder and fury will permit us to! :D  This one looks pretty good, amirite? We leave Mang Den on QL24, which is also known as AH132. It's a national road and the pavement is very good. At Tieu, it splits off to QL24B and stops being a national road, so the path becomes narrower. We head north on QL24B in search of more twisty goodness!  Some of the scenery we saw as we were zigging and zagging Saw some interesting slices of rural life - we followed this guy on a scooter carrying bags full of water with large fish in them. He was making deliveries to the people in the village who had put in orders. We saw him stop in front of a house and deliver a fish, it was still swimming in the bag. So cool!  Sharing the back country roads with all sorts of traffic. In Vietnam, everyone on the road uses their horns all the time... As usual, the "right of weight" takes precedence on Vietnamese roads, and we slow down, stop or move out of the way of these oxen. We also dodge sleeping dogs, sunning themselves on the pavement. Hm...  We Moo-ve over for cows as well You know, despite two-wheelers being the most common vehicle in Vietnam, we have to stop or move for just about everything else on the road. Even dogs and pedestrians! Neda says, "Flow like water."  QL24B follows the Song Re river. We see a dam from the side of the road  Proof that my bike was there  These are our favorite scenes from Vietnam, terraced rice paddies. Everytime we see one at the side of the road, we stop to take a picture. So pretty! We stop very, very often...  One of my favorite pictures of central Vietnam, shows the elevation changes when the road switches back and forth  We rode by this rice field and saw so many workers out in the paddies!  Stopped to take a closer look. They're not workers, they're Vietnamese scarecrows! Haha! "I've had it with you damn birds! No more Mr. Rice Guy!"  Did you know Red Bull originally came from Thailand? In response, Vietnam has Black Ox! Hmmm, kinda lazy-looking animals. I think Black Ox needs to up their taurine and caffeine content... I don't know where I'm going with this yoke. It's been a few hours on the road and we have not seen a large urban centre since leaving Mang Den. At the junction of QL24B and DT623, we ride into the relatively large town of Di Lang. We're starving, so this looks like a good place to find a spot to eat.  Rode around for a while and stumbled upon this restaurant LOL! Of course they have KARAOKE! here. The name of the restaurant translates to "Comrades! Forest and Sea products".  We opt for the forest product: Heo rung sa ot - Wild boar with lemongrass chili This was *soooo* mouth-wateringly delicious! Such a surprising find out in the middle of nowhere! I love when that happens!  After lunch, we got a bit lost GPS sent us straight through this open-air market. It felt like we were in a chase scene in an Indiana Jones movie, ripping through some souk in Morocco on motorbikes. Except we were going very slowly. We didn't want to wake the guy sleeping in the picture above. Did you notice him at first glance?  Leaving Di Lang behind us. We follow the track blindly, because... well, twisty roads! We exited Di Lang and followed the GPS track straight north on DT626 which turned out to be more fun and games on great roads. But then the track splits west off into the jungle. My GPS doesn't have a name for this road... Hmmmm...  The villages and road keeps get smaller and smaller, the deeper we ride into the jungle At some spots, the tree branches at the side of the narrow road path brush up against our helmets and sleeves. Yikes! The quality of the road falls off dramatically, we're riding on crumblings of concrete, but we keep hoping that it's temporary and the good pavement will return.  It doesn't.  In fact, it gets worse We got greedy for twisty roads and assumed that the pavement would be good everywhere we went, and now we're being punished for our gluttony. At this point we decide to give up on this GPS track. I turn on my smartphone and ask Google Maps to route us out of here and back to civilization.  This is where Google Maps want us to go. Uh... no. Both of us immediately veto that suggestion. Feels strange that even in this hyper-connected world where everything is mapped out and updated in real-time, there are still places that Big Data has no eyes or ears on. Either the road here got washed away or it hasn't been built yet. I think we'll just have to keep on going down the GPS track until we see a better bail-out point. We keep heading west further away from our intended destination. We're about half-way to the Laos border... Double Yikes.  We pass tiny village after tiny village, the odd scooter going between villages looks at us like we're lost. Because we are... The road turns from dirt to broken concrete every time we ride through a village which always gives us a little bit of hope. But as soon as the village ends, so does the crumbly concrete and it's back to dirt again. I'm still having fun diving deep into the Vietnamese jungle, getting far, far off the beaten path. However, Neda is anxious about running out of daylight. We only have three hours left before sunset and our average speed has dropped from 40 km/h down to 20 km/h. I've manually inputted a route to get us to a main road and it looks like there's 20 more kms of this dirt road before we hit pavement. And then another 100 or so km before we reach our destination for the evening. Neda has put a temporary moratorium on us stopping to take pictures  But sometimes there are exceptions...  We *ALWAYS* stop for terraced rice paddy fields! I'm positive that not many tourists have seen the things we've seen on this route! Thankfully this stretch of dirt doesn't last the 20 kms we predicted, and we're back on semi-ok, broken pavement and tiny villages again in 10 kms. We're still heading west, away from the coast, which is worrisome, but the only other alternative is doubling back and that will definitely double the time that we've already ridden today. The only option is to forge ahead, into the unknown.  Ruts from the rains. Even though it's an hour before sunset, we've lost the light early because the sun has disappeared over the tops of the mountains. You've heard the expression, "when it rain, it pours"? Well, it didn't rain on us, thank god, but it seemed like everything else was conspiring against us to reach our destination. - I have bad night vision. I need driving glasses at night. We pull over to get them out of the dry bags. And then realize, I didn't bring them... because we weren't planning on riding at night. Fugg... - Neda's driving lights on her bike are intermittent. We were going to get it fixed at the next service appointment in Danang up north. We weren't planning on doing any night riding... She has to stay right on my tail because if she falls back, she becomes invisible and vulnerable to head-on collisions. - Neda's communicator's battery is dying because I didn't charge them last night. The ONE time I neglect to do it, turns out to be our longest and most trying riding day. I have to hook her up to a portable power bank to keep the comms going - My smartphone running Google Maps is dying because it's not powered by the bike's battery. At some point, I'll have to grab the power bank from Neda and charge up my smartphone while riding - The bugs have come out, so I have to keep my visor down otherwise my eyes will be pelted by insects. Combined with my bad night vision, and cloudy visor from all the dust, I can't see anything in front of me. Every oncoming vehicle's headlight blinds me temporarily. Vietnamese drivers have an annoying habit of driving with their high beams on. We ride like this for two hours after the sun set. Thankfully, the traffic has died down considerably. No one rides at night. Only idiots like us do...
I don't trust either Google Maps, nor my GPS to take us the right way, so I'm constantly cross-referencing the two maps while either riding blind in the dark or squinting against the high beams of oncoming traffic, trying to figure out the best way to get us to our destination. We arrive in Hoi An just before 9PM. Thankfully, there are street lights that guide us into the city for the last half hour of riding. We've been on the road for almost 12 hours, ridden over 300 kms - double the distance that was recommended, most of it on dusty, dirt roads. We're exhausted and we just want to clean the road grime off of us and fall asleep for a very long time.
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