We woke up at 5:30 am, in a mad rush to get to the tunnels before the tourists. We had decided to visit Ben Dinh and not Ben Duoc tunnels. Ben Dinh, sadly, is not part of the original networks, but made just for tourism and education (of course they pretend it's real when you visit). Ben Duoc is more remote and part of the original system, and includes a memorial temple. We decided to visit Ben Dinh because of two practicalities: there are no maps, road descriptions, or indications anywhere as to how to get to Ben Duoc, and judging by how long it took us to find the right road to Cu Chi, we thought we would spend most of the day tring to find it. The other point was the temple in Ben ... read more

Finally energised and tan enough to leave Mui Ne, our last (luxurious) hotel had given us a gift, Ut Nyugen, the lovely manager at Paris Mui Ne de Plage and a tour guide, originally from the Mekong Delta. He offered to help us plan our route and did he ever! He even made us maps, which we followed the whole way. It was so unexpected and so generous... So, he was right, even though we couldn't believe it, and the 200km to Bien Hoa only took us about 5 hours, inlcuding lunch! Having found a nice place to sleep, we thought our night would be rather uneventful. But coming back from dinner, we discovered that the nice English-speaking Vietnamese couple who helped us find a place to have dinner were not only a famous recording artist ... read more

We left the luxury and quiet of our resort and began our first leg on Highway 1, the long stretch of coastal road road, home to all the dreade open-tour buses. What we didn't know was that the road was in great condition, and was mostly flat, wide and empty. After buring through 40 km in an hour, we were feeling pretty confident until for no apparent reason, Sadie's chain came loose on the middle of a bridge. We wheeled it to the roadside, and before we had a chance to look at it ourselves, there was a small army of young guys on their way to go fishing pulling Sadie's bike appart. They sent a guy off to get some tools, took the chain aprt and had us going again in no time. We convinced ... read more

We decided our first beach destination would be Phang Rang-Thap Cham, a small stretch of beach more popular with the Vietnamese and not marketed to Western tourists, conveniently located straight down the mountain from Dalat. We heard the road from Dalat was in bad shape, but it was beyond anything we could have imagined. We didn't get the earliest of starts, but we never could have anticipated we would spend 8 hours driving less than 70 kms. The views were stunning, and it was impressive to watch the scenerey, architecture, and even the people, change on our way down. However, every turn down the mountain hid a new stretch of excavated road, where the dips engulfed our wheels and the rocks were so big and abundant, it was no wonder the only shacks on the way ... read more

The next morning in Buon Ma Thuot, while we waited for the bike we indulged in the unexpected middle-class atmosphere and went shopping. After having seen nothing for sale for days except bare necessities (and most of the time not even that), the novelty of fashion proved too overwhelming, and we left empty-handed. We had high ambitions to see Dray Sap and Dray Nur Falls, as well as drive to Dalat, but as usual things took longer than we hoped and after the seeing the waterfalls our shadows became too long to dare to drive any further. We stopped on the outskists of Buon Ma Thout, at a little guest house where we caused a huge commotion again. People were running around, fixing the room, spraying it with air freshener, they unpacked our bikes for us ... read more