We have managed to reduce our minimalist boat life to super-minimalist backpacking. Together we have ten kilograms of stuff in our two rucsacs and that includes four kilograms of IT equipment so that we can work and blog.
We walked to the bus station in Ho-Chi-Minh-City and caught a bus for the six hour trip to Mũi Né on the coast. The bus was a sleeper bus which means that it carries 34 passengers and each of them has a small bed / seat to lie in. A great way to travel as you can doze half the journey away.
Mũi Né is a holiday village where the inhabitants of Ho-Chi-Minh-City go to escape the city at the weekend. There are hotels and restaurants all the way along the coast and luckily we had booked in the the Lac House which had five of five stars and all of them well earned. Mrs Lac and her sisters also own an amazing restaurant right next to the sea where the food is tasty and the waitresses are incredibly friendly. We ended up eating there every night and enjoying life as the waves broke on the stones below us (and we didn’t have to worry about how we were going to land the dinghy).
During the daytime we walked the fourteen kilometers out to the sand dunes to photograph Heidi “trekking through the desert” and then the next day we rented bikes to explore the coast and walk up a beautiful valley in the bed of the “fairy stream”. And of course we kept ourselves hydrated and full of energy by tasting all the incredible “street food”.
The next bus journey took all day and involved crossing the mountains to finally reach Dalat high in the Central Highlands at 1500 meters above sea level. We were among the oldest travelers on a bus full of young backpackers. They asked how we had reached Vietnam so we told them our seven year story and the reaction of one young lady was “You are so cool! Can you adopt me?”
Everyone had warned us that it was cold and the first evening, as soon as the sun set, we bought two warm jumpers with hoods. Dalat is also a tourist destination mainly for locals but also a few Europeans. We started each morning with a coffee looking across the flowering gardens and pine forests and then put on the walking shoes and visited a monastery, a temple, lakes and the night market. We wandered the back streets stopping for coffee and street food to sit and watch the passers by and practice our two Vietnamese expressions – “Xin chào” (hello) and “cảm ơn” (thank you). Everyone was impressed that we were so multilingual and we were equally impressed with how friendly everyone was to foreigners with three words of Vietnamese.