Mui Ne to Bien Hoa - straight, good roads and amazing amount of km/day...

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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 and beauty queen respectively, but they were about to get married and move to Seattle.

And there to witness the wedding was an old friend of the groom's, an American veteran who had been running tours for both US and Vietnamese war veterans to go back to the sites where they fought, which more often than not helped them tremendously with their PTSD. He told us some heart-wrenching stories about veterans from both sides, and even though it is of course no happy matter, we were glad to hear some more stories about the war and its effects, as they are hard to come by...

We exchanged stories and we got autographed DVDs, as well as enough contact information to make sure that, should we get in a jam while in Vietnam, they would try and help us out of it.



Road driven from Mui Ne to Bien Hoa: Highway 1 (quick, but boring... lots of rubber plantations)

What you do when you get to a toll station when riding motorcycles in Vietnam: you just drive through!

Amount of rest stops by Highway 1 that sell exactly the same thing and have the same hammocks: billions

Mosquite bite count: Sadie is bathing in deet, so the bite numbers are descending. slowly.

What happens 90% of the time we have included breakfast at our hotel: we order banh mi op la (bread and eggs) without the banh mi (bread). The bread comes anyway, of course, and the eggs are just not enough to feed Øyvind the bear. We then order more, and make sure they understand we will pay for it, and then the second platter takes about 30 minutes... trying to not eat noodles or bread for breakfast is always a challenge...

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Photos

A perfect place for a coffee along the road
And there are so many like this one all along the road, no matter where you are (almost) you will find something like this in Vietnam

The average rest stop
As Sadie has commented on earlier - no rest stop without hammocks will do anymore. Even if its Norway and 20 below zero

Honey, could you check the antenna?
The only question is; which one of the antennas?

Biggest one so far
This is so far the biggest, and also most dangerous creature we have seen so far on our travel

Comments

[Jason]

Hahaha. & a question
I had a bug identical to that in a hotel in Vung Tau. Although against my buddha nature I had to do it in - no way was I sleeping with that thing running around. Lol. I can't imagine that you will get this but if you by chance do, do you know of any particular destinations to check out on the interior heading south from Dalat besides the iron triangle?

[Sadieandoyvind]

Hello
Hey Jason, and thanks for your message here. As we are well settled back in Norway now, it is nice to see that our blog still can give people som tips on what to do and what not do do. We must also admit that we don't remember all our destinations, but if you read through what we wrote, it should at least be som tips there :-) Sorry for not being of any more help on that side Øyvind