Weather report: 39˚C (feels like 42˚C), sunny. Night 22˚C.
The idea was very simple: Ride to Pleiku, but take the longer, more interesting road. Sounds good? Boy, did we underestimate this day…
Let me start from the beginning though. Normally we try to leave at around 7 in the morning, since it’s a lot colder then. This allows us to lay down the first 200km without a heat stroke. This however was not possible. It’s been a week since we started and we only brought clothes for 7 days, so we had to use the laundry service at the hotel. While waiting we had another one of the excellent Ca Phé Dén (black coffee), this time sweetened. I never drink sweetened coffee, but it was actually surprisingly good. The clothes were returned at 9 so we started at around half past 9 with temperatures like 33˚C already.
We quickly left the city and went on to Krông Na. The main attraction here is an elephant park which we wanted to see. The park was built on two islands in a river, connected with bamboo rope bridges. We’ve seen around 8 elephants on the main island. All of the had riding gear on them however, since most people seem to enjoy riding them more than just watching. I don’t think the main attraction of the park was really worth it, but the bridges were quite cool although always full of people taking pictures.
We left the park again and quickly had some lunch nearby. The menu, which was the first one with English translations as far as I remember, had like 40 dishes on it. Half of them were not available though. In the end we both settled on Pork Rolls. Turns out that was some kind of pork sausage served cold. Not something either of us would have ordered or expected, but it was pretty good.
We left the village and continued on. At first, google maps was very helpful in trying to get us back on the main highway even though I just told it to take the long way 5 seconds earlier. After trying like 5 times we just drove on without any navigation until we hit the dirt road we wanted.
Finally, some real dirt trails. We started very enthusiastically and quickly finished the first hour having loads of fun. I started trying to drive around most bumps but after a few kilometers I just didn’t care enough any more. It was a very bumpy, but still quite fast ride. We still hit close to 40 kph on average.
After a few hours though our mood started to change drastically. We realized that we brought too little water for the whole stretch and that petrol would also get quite low until we’d arrive back at civilization. Knowing that the locals would definitely help us if we would break down we soldiered on. After another hour we entered a small village where we bought two large bottles of water. Soon after we also found a petrol station and refilled our tanks.
We entered Pleiku at early dawn with about 1 hour left until the no-go time. We were advised by multiple people to never ride in the night and from our experience walking around, that is a very good advise. Vietnamese people don’t ride with lights during the day and about 30% of them don’t turn them on in the night either. Why bother…
We went to our hotel, checked in, got rid of the very dirty clothes and took a shower. Afterwards we quickly went out to have dinner, another coffee and bought a few beers. We’ll probably go to bed early tonight, since we plan to do another long day tomorrow.
