"Hunged Out" in the Central Highlands

Vietnam Trip - Days Six, Seven and Eight

Before embarking on our tour of Vietnam's Central Highlands, Tianne and I went back to the Veranda restaurant for breakfast. T had the Pho and I had three crepes wrapped around bananas and smothered in chocolate sauce. Delicious. On the way there was some sort of military road race. We're not sure what the distance was but the runners looked very tired at the finish line. While it was interesting to see, it sure made getting through traffic to the restaurant a challenge. We piked up an 8-litre bottle of water and headed back to the hotel to finish packing.

The van and driver picked us up at 8:30am. It was a bit disappointing to see that the guide had changed from the night before. It was supposed to be the nephew of the tour operator -- someone we had met the day before. He apparently had some family issues, so our new guide was a man named Hung. We loaded up the van and began our journey from the beach town of Nha Trang on the Pacific Ocean and into the Central Highlands towards Laos.

I knew we were in for an interesting journey when Hung showed me a video clip on his cellphone of a waterfall we would see on our trip. The falls were nice enough, and the video then panned to a female tourist in a bikini lounging by the falls. Okay... tourist enjoying the falls, I thought I got the message. Then the video zoomed in on her cleavage, where it remained for the rest of the clip. Definitely an interesting message there! I think Hung had forgotten what was on the full clip, and who he was showing it to!

On Day One of our central highlands tour we travelled from Nha Trang to Yok Don National Prk. It was a very long drive, but the scenery was amazing. It gave us an excellent opportunity to see rural life in Vietnam.

We saw many shrimp farms as we were driving (dug into the fields) and stopped for some photos. Well, really it was just a smoke break for the guide and driver, but at least this was better than having them smoke in the van! We saw salt farms where farmers flooded the fields with water from the ocean and collected the salt after it had dried. We also stopped at a brick factory to see how they were made. I won't try to explain the process here, but there will be many photos posted on Flickr at the end of the month.

On of our stops in the mountains showed the site that was a forest 25 years ago -- before it was bombed with Agent Orange. The effects on the landscape were devastating -- only some scrub grows in this area today.

We saw lots of different kinds of agricultural production, including pepper (the spice) trees, mango trees, sugar cane, cashew trees, coffee plantations, corn fields and rice paddies. There were also many animals like chickens, ducks, cows and water-buffalos -- many of which enjoyed hanging out on the roads.

Hung was a very crappy tour guide. He stopped doing any kind of guiding by about 10:30am the first day. It was also annoying that he didn't seem to care that I was vegetarian. There are less options for me in the highlands, but I can always find something in a market -- and every small town has one. I explained this, but he had a listening problem (and was quite chauvenistic). At least I managed to get my hands on a plain bun for lunch on the fist day.

At about 3:30pm we arrived at Lak Lake, where we spent our first night. We went to a small palace built by Emperor Bao Dai. It was quite small and very run-down, but the views of the surrounding villages were quite nice

Our itinerary said we would stay in a "minority village", which is how the Vietnamese refer to the hill tribe communities. While we did stay in a wooden "Rong House", it was located in a resort with cottages and camping. We had a foam mattress on the floor with a blanket and a mosquito net. For those who are wondering, Tianne was up for the adventure and was willing to rough it :-) We shared the Rong House with Celine, a woman from France who was doing some touring after teaching French in Nha Trang for five months.

We relaxed and explored for about an hour before taking a short drive to the beautiful lakeside village of Jun, where an Ede minority group lives. It was quite interesting to walk through the village, and there were a few stalls selling hill tribe handicrafts.

Hung wanted us to eat a crappy nboodle dinner at the village (which, of course, contained meat) and we insisted on going back to the Floating Restaurant at the resort. On the way back to the resort we discovered that there would be a folklore show by local hill tribe that evening, which sounded like something we wanted to see. Then we learned that a tour group of about 20 people were going to watch the show in OUR Rong House. As you can imagine, we were surprised and not very impressed. We insisted on having our bags locked in the van, and it was like pulling teeth to get Hung to do it. We had an "okay" dinner at the resort, and enjoyed the company of Celine for the meal.

When I asked Hung about when we would do our elephant ride, he said they had to be booked days in advance and we couldn't go. This was, of course, not true and Celine informed him that she had booked early that day. She also offered to share her elephant with us, which was very kind. Hung retured five minutes later and (surprise) we were able to book an elephant ride. It was clear that he wanted to keep to his own schedule without any consideration for what his paying customers wanted to do.

We caught part of the hill tribe performance, which was very nice, and went to sleep. Staying in a Rong House is a lot like camping, even through it is on stilts above the ground. Unfortunately, we didn't think to hang the bag of bread we had bought earlier in the day. Some animal (I'm assuming a rodent) chewed trough two layers of my new Saloman backpack to get at it, which was very annoying. What is also a little bit disturbing was that the bag was located in between our beds by our heads. Gross.

The next morning we had a very quick breakfast and hopped onto our elephant. It was just the two elephants -- ours and Celine's. The ride lasted for an hour. We took the road along the water, went though fields of cows, carried on through the Jun village, and even went into the water. This ride will definitely be a highlight of our trip. T pointed out that riding an elephant is sort of like being on a teeter-totter. As always, I took way too many photos. Hopefully a few of them will turn out with all of that rocking!

We spent a few more minutes wandering the village and went back in the van for another heavy day of driving. Celine had ridden to the Lake on the back of a motorbike, and we gave her a lift to Buon Ma Thuot (on our route - about 60km away) where she could catch the train. It was nice to have some company other than our idiot guide.

It was a very long day of driving and, much like the day before, there was a lot of pollution. Tianne swears we had first degree carbon monoxide poisoning, and she just might be right! Again our guide didn't do any guiding, and didn't give any consideration to my dietary requirements. In this case, however, there was a market near the lunch stop. While the others had some Pho, I checked out the market. It was a very small town (I think it was called Earding) that does not see very any tourists. I quickly became the centre of attention as I bartered by 20 bananas (couldn't buy just four) down to 5,000 dong (33 cents) from 10,000 dong. I really have enjoyed these opportunities to meet the locals despite the language barriers.

We pulled into Kon Tum, the northernmost region in the highlands, at about 3:30pm. We stopped at a wooden church and spent some time at the Vinh Son 1 Orphanage. The multi-ethnic children were adorable. Our guide wanted to rush us through for a quick photo op, but we instead met two very friendly female collenge students who were waiting for the rain to stop before heading home. Bahn is of the Bhanar minority group and Y-E is of the Jarai minority group. They agreed to be our tour guide and took us through the church and the orphanage. It was heartbreaking, but the kids all seemed to be happy and healthy. Tianne and I played with the toddlers for about 45 minutes and made a donation to the very elderly sister who runs the orphanage.

We spent the night at a one-star-at-best hotel called the Family Hotel in Kon Tum. There we met Lindsay from Toronto who finished her Master's degree last year and is a few months into a year-long tour through Asia. We had soup at a vegetarian place and then went for mango shakes at a very cool cafe (that took forever to get to) called Eva Cafe. Tianne and I had already decided to cut one night from our tour to minimize our time with Hung, and planned to drive straight to Hoi An the next day. We invited Linday to come with us.

The next morning we bought breakfast in the Kon Tum market where four pasteries cost 8,000 dong (about 50 cents total). Tianne told Hung that we weren't feeling well, and that we wanted to cut the trip short. We visited another village in the morning, and then headed for the Ho Chi Minh trail. The scenery was very different along this route -- very lush with lots of trees -- and the road was much more curvy. The different styles of houses along the way were also very interesting to see. I caught Hung taking photos of us with his camera during a brief road side stop and insisted he delete them. He deleted some of them but I'm sure he still has many. Guess he's an ass man in addition to being a boob man.

One thing that I didn't mention was how crazy it was to drive through the highlands. Skinny roads with lots of big trucks and mopeds and animals everywhere. Our driver was quite skilled, but on day three he became more aggressive. Both he and Hung were yelling what I can only at everyone -- including children on their bikes. We had thought about giving the driver a tip but scrapped that idea. We were very unimpressed.

I know I am leaving out some good stories that are escaping me right now. There are many many Hung stories to be sure. We arrived in Hoi An at about 4:30pm and Hung tried to dump us off at a hotel we didn't want to stay at. We made them drive us into the old town where they literally through our stuff out of the van and took off. At least we managed to get $10 out of him towards a hotel.

It's clear from talking to other people that the quality of tours in Vietnam is quite poor. Even though we payed a pretty low price for our tour compared to the other prices quoted, we don't think it would have been any better if we had paid more. There is definitely a niche that someone could fill.