We left Da Lat on another sleeper bus heading for Buôn Ma Thuột. Once again we crossed a mountain pass before arriving in the coffee growing part of the central highlands and being unloaded on the edge of the city. Luckily we are travelling light so it was a nice four kilometer walk to our hotel in the backstreets. The room had its own private garden completely screened by bamboos and separated from the room only by huge windows. Each morning felt like waking up in a tropical garden.
Buôn Ma Thuột is definitely not a tourist destination for Europeans. We were back to being the exotic “white people” with people asking for photos and wanting to know where we came from – back to the film star feeling. We were out on the bikes and nearly got sucked in to a serious drinking party down one street. After a few photos we managed to escape and took another route home but this passed a kids birthday party where we were given beer in return for our rendition of Happy Birthday and “I’m a believer” via the monster karaoke system. We escaped this party to cycle off to “an appointment” that we invented just to get away 🙂 By day 3 the street vendors knew us and already had the grilled bananas or local pizza on the charcoal as we approached.
We visited a fantastic museum of coffee which combined stunning architecture with extremely interesting and informative displays. Money well spent. From the museum we saw a pagoda so walked that way and found a Buddhist temple with an English speaking monk who happily showed us around and answered all the questions we had been wanting to ask from all our temple visits.
The next bus was meant to leave at 06:00 so we were up at four. It eventually left at 08:30 and took 13 hours to reach Đà Nẵng. We were really glad that it was a sleeper bus and that Vietnam has fast mobile internet everywhere. We could dose, watch the scenery or use our phones to ensure that we didn’t get bored. 13 hours in a sleeper bus beats 7 hours in a plane every day.
In Đà Nẵng we slept a night then headed to nearby Hội An where we had booked a small hotel which only has 5 star reviews. It was a good choice as everything was perfect and the owner organised everything we mentioned. Suddenly we were back in a major tourist destination and the prices had all been adjusted accordingly. A fried banana that cost €0.30 in Buôn Ma Thuột was now €1.40 but the customers were no longer locals.
The town is an ancient seaport and (if you ignore the masses of people) very beautiful. Luckily the tourists are all concentrated in three streets and on two bridges. If you walk, bike or scooter two kilometers out of town you are back in to the friendly world of “real Vietnam”. The hotel had free bikes so twice we headed off in to the surrounding fields to overdose on countryside, temples and water buffalo. One day we also hired a motor scooter and visited the thousand year old temples at Mỹ Sơn. They were abandoned long ago and are ruins but still incredible. You can still see the amazing detail on the surviving carvings and, when you think “it was all like this” then you can only think “Wow!”
We were in Hội An for the Lunar New Year which meant that everything had been cleaned thoroughly and lit with lanterns and decorated with special trees representing the arrival of spring. It was like visiting Europe at Christmas, just as beautiful and just as hectic.
More pictures in our Google Album “Vietnam”.
Enjoy