Ho Chi Minh to Da Lat

For the last week of our trip we planned to go north to the Central Highlands and came across the Easy Riders while reading places to go in our guidebook. This is a group of Vietnamese motorcycle riders who run tours through the backroads of Vietnam for anywhere between a day to twenty at a time, depending on how much time and money you are willing to commit. We decided on four days from Ho Chi Minh to Da Lat so the day after we arrived back in Ho Chi Minh from the Mekong Delta we met up with Tuan, one of the guides at the local version of Starbucks, Highlands Coffee to get a briefing on the four days on the back of a motorbike that were to follow.
We started the next morning and spent an hour weaving in and out of moto-clogged roads before leaving Ho Chi Minh city behind. We stopped at a Cao Dai and Buddhist temple for a briefing on the religions, the later of which is the predominant religion in Vietnam. We then headed further into the countryside so that we could make frequent pitstops to see family run rice paper, noodle, brick, chopstick, and innumerable other factories. There were also tons of coffee pit stops to give everyone a chance to rest after sitting on a motorcycle over roads that were anything but smooth. By the afternoon we had reached the Ho Chi Minh trail, which has been repaved and is not quite the same as the road that was once used to transport supplies to support the Viet Cong. This also called for multiple stops at the gargantuin roadside monuments to war veterans.
One of the greatest benefits of the trip was being able to ask any questions you wanted to Tuan or Lee who were driving the bikes. Being able to have everything explained from communist propaganda posters to the types of crops being grown in the fields we drove past was incredibly helpful. They were also able to pick out all the hole in the wall roadside restaurants I would have never gone to on my own. Vietnam has very little vegetarian food and navigating my way through the menus that I can neither read nor understand had limited most of my dining experiences to more touristy restaraunts. This time we found ourselves eating in the dingy open faced roadside eateries. I would love to say that I tasted amazing Vietnamese food that I never knew existed, but when it comes to vegetarian fair it is hard to branch out past garlic vegetables and the occasional tofu creation.
By the second day the air had cooled off a bit and we were winding our way through coffee and cashew plantations. It was coffee harvesting season and the berries could be found drying in the yards of every house we passed and people hauling bulging sacks of berries streamed out of the fields around evening. Vietnam is the second largest coffee exporter in the world, which I found very exciting given my coffee ediciton. Vietnamese coffee is served as a thick syrup-like concoction that is brewed in a small filter that perches atop your cup. I loved it until the bike trip, when I discovered that the Vietnamese like to have their beans roasted in copious amounts of butter, sugar, and chocolate. Yuck. Although I was a little jaded it was still an experience driving through the plantations and stopping along the way to see all the processing from picking to processing of the berries.
The second day was also when the incredible views of rolling hills began and these only got better as we got further up into the highlands. The road cut through pine forests and peaked over vallies of fields that resembled a patchwork quilt of varying patterns and green hughes. It was one of the many things on this trip that I stuggle to capture with words or photos. That is probably the main reason I enjoy traveling. Finding the moments that I cannot experience unless I am there because words and pictures fall short of the beauty of the real thing.
Arriving in Da Lat on day four Kara and I got our first taste of cold weather. It reminded us that it was December and reminded me that it was almost the holidays and time for me to head home. We caught a bus back overnight the next day and were back in Ho Chi Minh for a last few days of museums, shopping, and the restauraunts we wanted to visit one more time (one was actually an Indian restaraunt).