Quy Nhon to Kon Tum

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Welcome... News update from the east... Still alive and kicking...

To start with the good stuff... Quy Nhon was quite enjoyable, not so enjoyable was the bus ride there though... The driver must have been on his first drive and we were sitting on a steady 30km/h! The drive that was supposed to take 3 to 4 hours took almost 6 hours! Mai Linh Express turned out to be anything BUT express that day... and that for 20.000 dong more than any other bus company. The drive was beautiful though. From Nha Trang to Quy Nhon some of the landscape was just amazing, like the Great Ocean Road in Australia! The road goes along the blue ocean and it makes you just want to jump down the cliffs into the cool water!
Eventually we got to the bus stop and after being attacked by hungry moto drivers again, we finally found a place to stay. It's called Barbara's, down at the beach. Expensive room but good and cheap food in the Kiwi Cafe downstairs. It was quite a nice place, very chilled out and relaxed. But don't trust anything the Lonely Planet map tells you (even the hostel address is wrong in the book). We were looking for the bakery and in the book it had a wrong name and a wrong address! But once we found it our taste butts were laughing... yummy goods there!
Nothing much to do in Quy Nhon and a day or two is plenty there, so we decided to take a detour en-route to Hoi An via Kon Tum. The Lonely Planet suggested it is "possibly the friendliest town in Vietnam" so we thought we could do with some friendliness and hill tribe or trekking action... Bad idea.
Mai Linh took us there... another 'interesting bus ride' but by now we are used to just dealing with whatever. Rude driver! You know how all the locals get dropped off and picked up wherever they like? Well, not so with visitors like us. We asked to get dropped off in town (on the way to the bus stop) but the idiot driver thought it was funny to say it's impossible and to drag us like 3 km out of town to the bus stop. He thought that way the moto drivers can make money off us cuz we wouldn't walk all that way... Damn wrong! We walked all the way back fighting off some seriously desperate moto drivers that just didn't want to leave us alone! Like leeches they were. Disgusting! Terrible first impression on the place... and I can tell ya, it didn't get better!
The hotels are all overpriced and terrible, dirty (not even a shower in the bathroom, which was full of soaking towels and stuff), totally unfriendly owners that don't even acknowledge our effort to speak Vietnamese, the food was shocking and overpriced too and the reactions we got from people were just terrible too. We asked at a travel agent about Hill trekking tours and they turned out to be ridiculously expensive too. USD 37 per person to go in a car and look at some surrounding villages etc. That didn't seem like a good idea judging by the vibes I got from that town in general. They didn't want us there and I didn't want to stay there.
As always, this is just one experience, I'm sure others have better days there.
The next morning we walked all the way back to the bus station and just had to get the F out of that place. Hoi An was the next stop... check back for more on that later.

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Photos

Leaving Quy Nhon
rice on the street