Jeep adventure in the Central Highlands

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After the culture and shopping of Hoi An we made for Nha Trang, a city where every American soldier wanted to be posted for some good old fashioned R and R. Whilst the beach is beautiful, the seedy reality that once was and still is was only too apparent when we went for supper at a bar whose proceeds go towards stopping paedophilia which is becoming a growing problem amongst tourists there.

On the second day we were conned into a trip to a idyll named 'Bamboo Island'. We caught a boat over there and after two hours of sitting on the concrete edge of a resort with no beach, no snorkelling equipment, no fish and not even a bar we decided that enough was enough and asked them to take us back to the mainland. We're yet to find our paradise island.

Anyway onwards and upwards. Instead of a bus straight to Dalat we opted for a 2 day jeep adventure through the Central Highlands with a comedy guide called Bao who wore aviators in the front of our 60s US army jeep. A few touchy feely liberal tourists along the way questioned our ethics and taste in hiring such a vehicle but Bao with great confidence assured us that it was cool, after all they won the war and the Americans left some of their toys behind.

Within five minutes of leaving we entered into the old city of Nha Trang where the Vietnamese live and where they were all at market. Despite the incessant beeping f our driver we managed to hit a deaf man in the middle of the street. Great start. He seemed fine so we pressed on, visiting a brick factory, breakfasting on the side of the road on rice pancakes with onion oil, shrimp paste and chilli and travelling along the Phoenix Pass which is still treeless over 25 square kilometres owing to the American's dropping of Agent Orange in 1968. Unbelievably people are still their clearing mines and people are still injured on a regular basis.

Then a visit to Dreysap falls which is like a mini Iguazu and then we made for the village in which we would stay for the night. Of course on the way we had to wait while they finished building a bridge over the river. At this point the heavens opened and our doorless jeep provided almost as little cover as the flight bags we tried to fit arms and legs in to shelter from the rain. All around us roads were turning into rivers.

Two hours of treacherous roads and we arrived in Jun village, home to the M'nong people where we stayed in a long house, a traditional rattan house on stilts with a space below for the pigs, cows, dogs, chickens, children, wood, and anything else that fancied sitting under there in a mosquito hell. A performance of gong music later where Charlotte drank her fair share of rice wine which tastes like canned ham and Hywel was dragged to dance around a wooden pole, we went back for dinner only to be regaled with stories of how to avoid joining the Vietnamese army!

At eight am the following morning, a normal Monday, we found ourselves on the back of an elephant which had been called back from illegal logging on the Cambodian border to ferry us around another local village and across a lake which was so deep the poor creature was nearly submerged. Before the smell of elephant had left our nostrils we were back in our trusty jeep and heading for Dalat, 1500m above sea level and a many a blind corner on mountain roads away.

We wandered into someone's house where there were trays of silk worms which Bao kindly gave Charlotte to hold and apparently they live in the same place as the silk cocoon factory. Then to Chicken village, a rather sad place but with a fantastic giant concrete chicken which the government gave them to combat their poverty. Nice. Great place for Charlotte to decide she needed the loo and I was lead into a stranger's house where there was a man picking lice out of his little boy's hair to a very pleasant squat.

Arrived in freezing cold Dalat, a city that could have been in Russia in the 1970s but that story is for another day...

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