Uncle Ho: The Central Highlands Part II

Some people claim that the most important gadget on a bus travel is one of those inflatable pillows. Some others a blanket. In my case it's a multi-tool. Due to being partly retarded and not having asked for a two month visa from the start, I had to leave the highlands in a rush, go to the coast, get an extension and come back. That meant a 10 hour bus ride followed by 15 easy km of cycling to Hoi An. I went to the bus station, got me a ticket, paid an extra ticket for my bicycle-something quite irritating but no way of avoiding it- and got on a 15 seater minibus with another 20 people, loads of boxes, my bicycle squeezed under the seats and right when I thought there wasn't any space left, a motorbike. The driver thought that the louder the music, the better we'd sleep and no matter how much I protested he wouldn't turn it down. To my disbelief, soon everybody was sleeping except me. I took out my multi-tool, unscrewed the speaker right next to me, unplugged it, screwed it back in, problem solved. It still wasn't an easy sleep. The ride was bumpy and the driver wanted to brake a speed world record or something.

The payoff was great though. I reached Hoi An at 4.30 in the morning. Got to cycle around the ancient town when there were no tourists around, got a few glimpses of the locals waking up, some doing their morning gymnastics, some going to their jobs, the market getting ready for the day, fishermen returning from the sea to sell their catch and most importantly the empty colourful alleys with the old houses. Hoi An had been the most important port in the area for many centuries, until its decline sometime in the 18^th century. It miraculously survived wars and natural disasters that didn't spare the surrounding area and walking around is almost like entering a time machine. I spent 3 mostly rainy days strolling casually around the city bizarrely not taking a single photo, so the only ones you'll see are from that first morning.
Hoi An is famous for its tailors and is THE place to have a suit made. I entertained the idea of getting a 4 piece and having it sent back home but changed my mind, guess I'm not a suit guy. Got to hang out with Dimitris a bit, a Greek I had met in Saigon. Fed up with what's happening back home, he decided to find a house close to Hoi An and live here. I can't blame him. Inevitably half of our conversations revolved around the crisis. Context aside, it was nice to speak in Greek for a while.

  At some point I rented a motorbike and headed for My Son, the most important religious site of the Champa kingdom. After visiting the Angkor temples in Cambodia, My Son looked like the poor cousin at best with the additional disadvantage of having been bombed mercilessly by the Americans during the war, turning some of the temples into craters in a matter of a few days. Cham people's main religion was Hinduism-they later converted to Islam- with Vishnu, Brahma and the rest of the gang being the prevalent depictions in the sculptures and reliefs. What puzzled me the most were the linga-yoni sculptures, symbols of the connection of the phallus(linga) with the vargina(yoni), or, to quote the scholars "the indivisible two-in-oneness of male and female, the passive space and active time from which all life originates". Apparently, most of the lingas were gone, leaving the yonis all by themselves. I imagined a world full of yonis and for a few seconds it seemed like paradise.

A lonely yoni.

A crater, where once stood a magnificent temple.

Right by the site entrance was the obligatory traditional cham music show. Aesthetics notwithstanding, the players seemed to enjoy themselves-more than most of the audience anyway- in spite of doing the same thing three times a day, the highlight being the wind instrument player who finished the show with a breathless 1 minute high pitched crescendo using only the mouthpiece, reminding me of Yorgos Magas, an excellent Greek clarinet player who does the same thing during most of his shows.

 

On my way to Da Nang, where I'd get a bus back to the highlands, I stopped by the marble mountains, a site that's advertised as a “must see” and basically being a bunch of marble(what else?) hills with dozens of shops selling marble-anything around them. I rode around them, watched some modern sculpting with electric grinders, didn't even bother going up the hill to see a pagoda and left. Excuse the pun, not that marbelous after all.

Not having learned my lesson, I took a similar minibus back to Pleiku. This time the owners out-smarted me, using rivets instead of screws for the speakers. I wondered if it's worth buying a battery operated drill for similar occasions. Once again, all 20 of us got in together with enough merchandise to feed and dress a village plus the inevitable motorbike. The driver had a very twisted sense of humour and played the same Vietnamese love song cd over and over again for the whole night, adding it to the small collection of albums that I know the song order by heart. Suffice to say, I didn't sleep much.

I arrived at Pleiku at 5 in the morning, right when people went out on the streets to do their morning gymnastics. Before you start thinking that Vietnamese are crazy about their fitness, let me enlighten you. The state has installed speakers in all villages and the outskirts of big cities. At 5.30 sharp the national anthem will wake up even the most heavy sleeping comrade. News about provincial and national politics and new directives will follow and then a couple of patriotic songs will cheer everybody up. Then a soothing feminine voice reminiscent to the telescreen voice in “1984” will close the program with excercises, counting 123, 123, 123... After a couple of villages I learned that the further away I stay from the main road where the speakers are located, the better the chances of not waking up. 

I think it took me around 5 hours to do the relatively easy 50km to Kon Tum, the first stop on my way up. Not having slept more than 2 hours meant plenty of stops to doze off, eat and drink. I was entering an area with many different ethnic groups, so the following day I set off to a couple of Jarai villages to the west. As I was walking around a cemetery, a young man invited me to his house and for the first time I sat with both men and women to drink rice wine. They didn't speak English so it was hand signs mostly. Both women managed to get drunk quickly, followed by one of the guys who collapsed on a nearby bed and watched music clips with half dressed girls. Between them they spoke their language and switched to Vietnamese when talking to me, as if I'd understand anything. I feel like a bad student in this country, I gave up too quickly and have learned only the bare essentials.

A Jarai communal house

When it comes to the burial of the dead, the Jarai have a very interesting tradition. In order to honour the spirit of the deceased, they'll have a day long feast together with an animal sacrifice. If they can't afford it, the feast will be postponed until it's possible, sometimes for years. The graves are adorned with everything from bicycles to TVs and motorbike parts, as well as wooden statues representing people that played a part in their life. One of them looked like an American soldier, I guess the deceased had fought in the war.

Once again, I decided to try a secondary road on my way north, one that seemed to end after 100km or so, but I'd grown used to bad maps and felt optimistic. After asking around and getting equally negative reports, for some weird reason I still felt optimistic.

I left Kon Tum, did 55km on the main and in Dak To I turned towards Tu Mo Rong, hoping that a)I'd get to see a couple of nice villages on the way, and b)the road trail, or whatever, would go all the way up to Dak Glei, a town further north. As for the villages, everything went according to plan. Small and scenic, with their odd Jarai communal houses in the middle and friendly if somewhat clumsy people-one of them decided to have a ride on my bicycle and dropped half of his energy drink over my paniers, giving them an aufuly sweet bubblegummy odour for the following days.

Coffee heaven

Yet another war monument

As for the road? Nada. After a 650m climb and a nice descent through the forest, I reached Tu Mo Rong, possibly the ugliest town on earth. For some truly inexplicable reason it was decided that here, in the middle of nowhere, 90km away from Kon Tum with no road up north, an administrative town must be built. Huge ugly concrete buildings-one of them was the court, the rest I've no idea- with only a couple of trees spared around them and dozens of buldozers and trucks destroying what's left made the bleak scenery. Below the 4 lane road were a couple or restaurants with a few rooms in the back, their sole role being to provide the workers with food and shelter. One of them was kind enough to let me use a spare bed in his room. He also happened to be a topographer and reassured me that there was no way of crossing the pass up north. I decided that next day I'd head back and stick to the main.

I've met an alarmingly big number of men in both Cambodia and Vietnam, whose English vocabulary consisted only of the phrase “I love you, number one” and always wondered why. In Tu Mo Rong I had my best karaoke night to date for too many reasons, one of them being that I found the phrase's origins. After doing my worst at trying to read and sing Vietnamese, the guys went through a collection of more than 3000 songs and found the sole one that had a chorus in English and guess what, it was “I love you, number one”. We ended up playing it in repeat, the microphone doing the rounds and me contemplating a chorus-singing career in Vietnam.

Next day, after the inevitable backtracking I got to Plei Can and entered the Ho Chi Minh trail as is wrongly called by travelers, that a) is not a trail but a well paved two lane highway, and b) only some parts of it run where the old trail was, since most of it was on the Lao side of the border. Used extensively by the Vietminh and the Vietkong during the first and second Indochina wars, it facilitated the movement of troops and equipment from the north of the country all the way down to Kon Tum below the demilitarised zone, well into the south side of the country. Apparently the Americans did their best to destroy it throwing millions of tons of bombs, but all they succeeded in was converting half of Laos eastern side into an unexploded bomb zone, the price of which Lao people still pay. You can read the fascinating story on what NSA called “one of the great achievements of military engineering of the 20th century” here.

Nowadays, the Ho Chi Minh highway is the perfect alternative to the country's main artery connecting the two sides, the dreaded 1A highway. There is hardly any traffic, the tarmac is top-notch and the scenery among the best I've seen in this part of the world so far. Triple canopy jungle on both sides, cycling next to Dac Pko river for most of the ride and mountains as far as the eye can see, made sure I refrained from trying to find my usual trails for the extra excitement. Most importantly, no slash and burn practices meant clear sky and fresh air. Stupid me, I thought that following a river equals flat ride, but it's nothing like it. Lots of hills and at least one steep ascend kept my daily average to around 60km. The small towns of Dak Glei, Kham Duc and Thanh My were nothing to write home about, but all offered some basic accommodation, Dak Glei having at least 5 guesthouses thanks to a French gold mining company operating nearby.

A football game on the wrong side of the river.

Yet another broken-down bus.

One thing you can't miss in Vietnam: Power lines.

Gold diggers.

Findings of the day.

Imbecility strikes twice of course, once with the whole visa affair that sent me to Hoi An and back, and then when I realised I didn't have enough money for the last leg of the trip. Next day I'd planned to stay in a village much smaller than Thanh My, so no chances of finding an ATM there either. I didn't feel that adventurous. I felt sad leaving Ho Chi Minh highway so soon, but there was no other way than to head to the coast.

The road to the coast: Pineapple-land

Da Nang is yet another big city with no character and I was in no way ready for it. I kept going towards Hue, a more appealing alternative, from where I'd be getting a bus to Hanoi skipping about 700km of the country. I'd be meeting two friends from back home in Laos after two weeks and preferred to spend them up north, no time to do everything.

The two cities are just 80km apart, but the Anamite mountain range between them successfully blocks the cold climate of the north from reaching the more temperate south. While you're swimming in Da Nang, temperature might be 10 degrees lower in rainy Hue. There is another catch, bicycles are not allowed in the tunnel that cuts straight through. As if 100km were not enough already I'd have to climb a mountain. It turned out to be a breeze. The climb is just 500m high, the view to the sea and the mountain range quite pretty, and since everybody's using the tunnel, no traffic at all. At dusk, as I was reaching the pass, the mist came and I did the next 5km engulfed by it. Magic. Not surprisingly, the pass's name, Hai Van, means ocean cloud. I stayed 10km down the road-there's about 50 guesthouses to choose from- and next day did the utterly boring and completely uneventful 60km to Hue.

Not much to say about Hue, stayed there only for a day. It does look charming and certainly more interesting architecture-wise compared to the rest of the country deserving a few more days, but not this time. Here's a few photos of the imperial city built during the Nguyen dynasty that ruled Vietnam for 150 years or so. The Americans were wise enough to bomb it to smithereens during the war and only a few parts of it remain. The weather was shit, so the photos are a bit washed out.

A tied Elephant struggling to reach its food.Grrr...

"Please don't seat on the throne or palanquin when you have not bought ticket for wear loyal clothes". Wrong and funny in every possible way.

The long journey to Hanoi meant one thing for me: Sleeping bus. Three rows of bunk beds, or better said, reclining seats, long enough for locals but barely enough for me, not that I'm that tall mind you. Kept thinking of Dan, a friend who's as tall as it gets and wondered how he'd manage.

When cycling, I'd often see a bus coming my way, motorbikes strapped on top, tires screeching on a turn, and wonder if it's gonna flip sweeping me along the way or if a motorbike will get detached, most likely decapitating me. Being inside isn't much different. I'm pretty sure we broke the sound barrier but my seatbelt made sure I slept on my bed and not the aisle.

I'm including two high quality state of the art maps, one of the whole ride plus a more detailed one for the Kon Tum Province. The Jarai village with the cemetery is about 13km west of Kon Tum on your way to Ho Ya Li lake. The cemetery is not on plain view from the main road, you need to get in the village on your right side and wander around a bit. Bear in mind that this is a relatively remote area of the country, you might get up to 20km stretches without food stalls so plan accordingly.

Total distance: 505km

Pleiku to Kon Tum: 50km. Pretty simple, just go straight.

Kon Tum to Tu Mo Rong: 77km No reason whatsoever to go there. The ride is worth it but the place sucks big time, I'm just including it for historical reasons. Your best bet as far as accommodation is concerned, is Plei Can at 63km from Kon Tum. It's an easy ride with only a few hills on the way.

Plei Can to Dak Glei: 50km. The scenery is magnificent, take your time. Don't even consider pushing it to Kham Duc on the same day, there is a long ascent waiting for you. The road follows Dac Pko river so don't expect any big surprises elevation-wise.

 

Dak Glei to Kham Duc: 55km. As I said, it's a long way up. It will not be a long day but the next town with accommodation is another 60km away.

Kham Duc to Thanh My: 60km.

Thanh My to Lang Co:115km. It sounds a bit too much to have to climb the Hai Van pass after a 90km ride, but if you don't feel like staying in Da Nang it's the only option.

Lang Co to Hue:60km. Dead-easy and not that interesting as long as it's not windy. Or rainy.