Vietnam - Dalat to Mui Ne

After spending the day with the Easy Riders around Dalat, we elected to stay in a hotel and have our guides drive us from Dalat to Mui Ne the next day. Although a sleeper bus was available, another late night bus speeding down the highway system truly did not interest us. The intimate experience through the mountain roads with local guides stopping at beautiful locations was much more appealing.

One of the first stops was to an ethnic minority village, famous for this giant statue. The story is that a long time ago a girl and boy were in love, but his parents wanted her to prove how capable a wife she would be by going into the forest and finding a chicken with perfect feet. In the end, she is unable to produce the chicken and they cannot be together.

This is a school funded by the government. I saw many more children outside than inside the school house, so I suspect it isn't mandatory.

Rice paddies

Mushroom farms

This bridge was destroyed by American troops during the war to stop supplies from getting to the north. Since then, a new one has been built next to it.

This is a brick factory. At the moment, the production was at a stand still, because the coffee bean prices had gotten very high and the employees were helping their families and neighbors finish the coffee production. It literally looked as though in one moment every employee stopped - tubes of bricks sliding down the conveyor belt were hardening before they were ever cut and mix was half sifted together.

These bricks are drying in the heat.

These have finished drying, been baked in an oven, and are set out to be sold.

I am not sure if you can tell from the size of this picture, but that is actually a refridgerator on the back of a motorbike.

I wanted to include a snipet of the actual mountain roads. The infrastructure was well maintained and roads were twisted, but smooth.

We went off the main roads at time, which was mildly terribying and very exhilerating.

Li Liang is an ethnic minority group, we stopped at a waterfall they allow tourists to frequent. We grabbed a picnic lunch in the market beforehand and ate at the falls.

This is another ethnic minority village. They are drying out coffee beans on plastic sheets in their front lawns.

Raking the coffee beans to rotate them while drying.

The closer we got to Mui Ne, the more often we had to drive through herds of livestock. It was an adventure, to say the least.

I wish I had taken a video through the first herd, this was one of the last times (and therefore the least scary).

We stopped by a dragonfruit farm! The plants are as funny looking as the fruit.

Dragon fruit stand - we went and ate about 5 each. It was delicioius.

Finally arriving in Mui Ne, we stopped to look at the fishing village.

We snuck into a resort to shower, hung out by the ocean in Mui Ne, then got an enormous meal. Then we waited around for the night sleeper bus - which was only 2 hours late. We arrived early back in Ho Chi Minh City, and I spent the day shopping, eating as much amazing Vietnamese food as I could handle, and getting one last massage.