Vietnam Part 6 (Dong Hoi, Paradise Cave, Hue and Hai Van Pass)

We arrived in the morning, dodged the tuk tuk men and walked into town.  Its only around 4km.  We found a hotel in the centre and it turned out that everyone who comes to Dong Hoi seemingly stays there.  We even bumped into Jessica and Zoltan, but it was fleeting as they were leaving when we arrived.  We figured we would run into them in Hue.  We took another motorbike and set off for Paradise Cave.  This time we would be riding down the famous Ho Chi Minh highway.  Its about 70km in total to the cave.  We had decided not to do the other cave as it sounded like Kong Lo and these caves were expensive.  The road to get there is really beautiful and I did most of it at 50km/h to savour the scenery.  We arrived at the National Park entrance and didn't know where to go from there.  We didn't have a lot of petrol, but it was apparently 12km away so we decided to go for it.  If you arrive on the highway and see the sign on the hill (a tacky Hollywood touch to the Park), just carry on for another 12km and take a left.  Here its another 16km or so through really beautiful scenery to the cave, with the last 5km in a river valley, with stunning turquoise water.  Its really photogenic and you kind of want to stop all the time.  The ride here alone was worth it.  We were almost in the red about 5km into the last road and we still had no idea where the cave was at this point.  Useless LP.  We kept asking locals and in the end we got some petrol from some random women who were curious to know if we were married.  Everyone we met out in the countryside on our bike rides were really nice. Damn this piece of shit computer from crashing twice now.  Once you get to the cave, you have to ride over and down some steep little parts and then you are finally there.  Its quite expensive (120,000) and you have the option of walking to the cave entrance or taking a golf buggy.  The buggies are expensive and the walk is around 10-15 minutes and not tough, so the choice is yours.  You then walk up some steep stairs to the entrance and finally we were there.  We entered and the cavern is huge.  Really big.  You descend down some stairs and that's when you realise how pretty the place is.  What a riot of colour.  There are greys, blues, oranges and all sorts of other colours.  The colours almost blur into purples and pinks.  The stalactites and shapes are wondrous.  It is truly breathtaking.  This is by far the prettiest cave I have ever been in and one of the undoubted highlights of Vietnam.  What a wonderful place.  You can only visit around 1km of the caves unless you pay a lot of money, but I would be tempted to see more.  When they open up the newly discovered largest cave in the World I will come back again for another visit.  The scenery is stunning on the way and the cave will blow you away.  Well worth the trip.  Cannelle still continues to say that she will stop doubting me as to what is worth visiting, but she still questions my choices all the time lol.  We took the bikes back at a faster clip as we had seen the scenery already and went and got a really nice dinner.  The city itself is also a really cool place.  Very pretty.  Cannelle especially liked it.  You have the beaches and also some former walls and a hollowed out church.  Pretty place.  We could get a very cheap train at 6am the next day, but we were too lazy and decided to get the bus around 8am to Hue.  The hotel wanted 108,000, but its only 80,000 from the bus station.  Those commissions will add up and we still like the local buses.

So naturally the next morning we walked the 1km and grabbed a bus to Hue at 8.25am.  The bus was full of only locals as it was not the one that also goes to the hotel.  Some local guys offered us some free beers on the bus.  I love the people here.  Shame I don't drink anymore, as I could have got quite drunk on all the free alcohol offered to us in Vietnam.  When we arrived in Hue, we followed our route on the map and leaped off at the hospital.  Much less hassle.  We had been warned that in Hue you get hassled everywhere so we were prepared.  We had booked into Valentine Hotel in Hue from hostelbookers, as it had a good reputation and it is by far the best place we have stayed in on our trip so far.  I can't recommend it highly enough.  Go there,  You won't be disappointed.  We had planned to spend just the one night in Hue and leave for Danang the next afternoon, but we had the pressing problem of the visa extension.  Jessica had submitted her passport for one, but it was saturday and they would need 2 days they said (though she got it done on Monday as well) and had paid $28.  Our hotel said he could do it in one day on Monday and for only $20.  It ended up being $22.  We were skeptical, but we had read online that there were some seriously corrupt police in Danang.  We decided that we could do Hai Van Pass from Hue and looked around for more stuff to do.  Ok we were going to have to spend 3 nights in Hue so we decided to just visit the Citadel on our first day.  We arrived and were told we had to go the long way round.  Don't listen to the stupid fucks around the Citadel.  You can use either bridge to enter and you can walk through the barriers that are just for cars and get in.  Don't do what we did, which was to walk all the way round the outside of the citadel and come back round on the right, because we believed the stupid tuk tuk drivers.  At least they did not get any custom from us.  At the back there is another entrance and if you sneak in past the guard (which Zoltan and Jessica did) then you don't have to pay at all.  If you are on a tight budget you could consider it.  There is a third entrance on the right hand side, but this is well patrolled.  The citadel is nice, but quite samey.  Most of the places look the same.  It is just about worth the entrance ticket, but if they raise it too high you might want to reconsider or use the 'economical' back entrance.  We met Jessica and Zoltan and arranged to meet them for dinner.  They did everything so slowly that having arrived a day before us, they had done exactly the same things.  They had done what we did in Ninh Binh but it had taken them 3 days and Dong Hoi had taken them 2.  We had met a young rickshaw driver outside and he had chatted with us for around 10 minutes and asked us to teach him some French for his customers.  Never once did he ask us for a ride.  We then met an older guy, who accompanied us to the free military museum, chatting away and only offering a ride at the end.  We were finding the people really friendly, except for the dicks who sent us round the Citadel.   Lots of tourists were treating the locals like shit though.  Reputation preceding them.  They all said we were nice and smiley.  I think your predisposition affects your response and your response affects your interaction.  We try to stay friendly until they try the sale, but here in Siam Reap they are really pushing my limits of toleration.  At the museum (which is crap) we met a guy from LP who was one of the Easy Riders.  Really nice guy.  He chatted away with us for 20 minutes and even worked out that we were perfectly matched for each other due to our Buddhist calender, with Cannelle being a snake and I a rooster.  This year is a good one for us apparently as we could have kids.  We said too early, so he said in 4 years or in 2021 which would be the best as the kid would be a buffalo and we would have the full set.  Cool, I thought.  Perfect timing.  We were looking to have kids in 8 to 9 years and there was the perfect excuse to wait.  We would have a buffalo.  It would leave us with a dilemma though as we would then have to wait another 4 years or the second kid would not be in harmony.  I guess we need twins :-).  Anyway he eventually asked us if we wanted a tour, but I told him I don't like riding shotgun on a motorbike and that we preferred to rent our own ones.  He said they could show us back routes.  They could, but its not that difficult.  Just find out where all the best sites are and plot a route to find them and if you want some off the beaten track riding, just head off the beaten track and ride.  Its not rocket science.  They have some nice parks along the waterfront of the river in Hue.  Its a very pleasant town.  Much better than we had been told.  Too many tourists focus only on how fucked up they can get at night and don't appreciate the day time.  I miss the travellers in Latin America.  They were so much more interested in visiting the places around them.  Here the drinking comes before the visiting.  In Latin America its the reverse.  We met Zoltan and Jessica for dinner.  He seemed like a bit of a dick.  Everything revolved around him telling stories of his greatest hits of travel.  By the end of the evening I knew everything he had done that was cool, but he knew none of mine.  I mention them when they are relevant to the conversation, while he will start conversations to make them relevant.  'Have you ever been to Africa' . 'No well let me tell you of the time I climbed a volcano there....etc...etc.  Also while most travellers who do risky things tend to emphasise how easy they are for the ordinary man, he was keen to show how amazing he was and how it was such a godlike feat.  I had mentioned how it was good Cannelle had walked 15km with her pack at Ba Be.  He asked how heavy they were.  I said around 12kg and he said his pack was 34kg and he carried it up every mountain with him.  I asked him why he would do that.  I mean what idiot climbs a 5000m plus mountain with 34kg, to which he admitted that he left it at the camp and did the climb without it. He didn't like being called out and he was clearly keen to impress everyone.  Peter reckons it is game theory and he uses his stories to bag and impress young female travellers.  I think its possible.  Cannelle doesn't think so, but neither of us liked him much.  He did have some cool stories amongst the bluster though.  He had camped in the middle of Africa with a spear to ward off lions, he had climbed a volcano in the Congo with soldiers for guards and had had to carry his own weapon, he hikes back trails in parks (though in places that are still touristy) and he had climbed a mountain in a lightning storm and almost died.  I am sure if you ever meet him he would be keen to tell you the details.  Just make sure you show the appropriate awe at his achievements and you should be fine.  I will contrast exactly why I think his style is shit in part 8, but I don't want to jump the gun.  Half impressive, half dick, he certainly leaves an impression and Jessica had been travelling with him for a while.  I don't think in South East Asia he came across many travellers with a lot of experience and who can call him out on some of his absurdities.  I also am a little resentful at someone who is so patronising as to tell me when I get to Indonesia I will find it very difficult to Vietnam and Thailand and its not as easy as here.  Fuck.  Really?  Thanks for the advice, but at 72 countries I am aware of that (having been in the Darien, Haiti, the Guyanas and many places with not much tourist infrastructure).  Next I expected him to tell me that you get wet when it rains or that water is good for you when you are thirsty.  Who travels with a 34kg pack?  and what the fuck is in it to make it that heavy?  Anyway enough of him.  Back to Hue.

In the morning we got our scooter on time to set off around Hue.  I love this hotel.  They even give you free glasses of ice tea whenever you are using their computers.  First of all we set off for the Japanese bridge east of town.  Its about 12km and not to hard to follow.  Follow the road they recommend, then when it ends go north and east at the next junction.  Then you follow a progressively smaller road until you eventually get there.  Not too difficult.  Lots of people were helping us with directions again as normal. The bridge is quite a cool little place and we grabbed a drink there.  Walking around town a small old woman just started chatting with us in perfect English.  Really nice.  I love the countryside here.  After we headed across town and west to the Que Nguyen fighting pit.  This is ok and not too impressive, but worth a quick drive.  We stopped off at the esplanade on the way to the Tu Doc tomb.  Its ok and there is a little forest pagoda on the way as well.  All of these sites are worth visiting.  They wanted us to pay for parking at the forest pagoda so we just drive through the agte and visited the whole site from the back of the motorbike.  Suckers.  Eventually we got to Tu Doc tomb and parked the bike up for free alongside the wall.  Again this place can be visited for free as Zoltan and Jessica climbed over the wall.  Zoltan claimed that it was ok to enter these places for free as the Vietnamese didn't really do any maintenance on them.  Of course, because why would UNESCO make them do that?  The tomb is better than the citadel in my opinion.  It was the only tomb we visited, but it was really pretty and we were really glad we went.  Well worth the constantly increasing entrance fee.  People were complaing, but really how can you.  We spent $4 on the tomb and $4 on the citadel.  The palace in Bangkok is $13 and its so much shitter than these two.  Well maybe not than the citadel.  In the tomb there was a caterpillar being savaged by ants.  We decided to save him and carried him away from the ants, but they were everywhere.  We had to keep rolling the ants off and moving him all the time.  Eventually we got the ants down to one dead one that was hanging onto him and he could get away from the fight.  We had saved a caterpillar and probably killed about 20 ants, but it wasn't a fair fight.  I hate bullying.  We grabbed lunch at Lotteria and then went to the pagoda west of town.  Its nice, but again nothing special.  We had finished all that by 1pm and decided to head out of townn to the hot springs 26km North of Hue.  They are on wikitravel for the city.  Our hotel had even written the directions in Vietnamese as a question so that we could get help on the way.  They are that good.  It was a long drive out there, around 12km out of town on highway one you head west and then its another 15km or so.  The scenery is again really nice, passing a cool iron bridge, rice fields and a stunning cathedral (not sure what its doing in the middle of nowhere).  We had to stop at one point to check and a local guy stripped off his top to tell Cannelle we were 3km away.  He spoke impressive English for the middle of nowhere and Cannelle thought he was cute.  Our motorbike was sputtering a bit and if you didn't keep the accelerator down then it died in the middle of nowhere.  Quite irritating and revving the engine burnt petrol.  This was a problem in the city as we had to stop and start a lot.  I was getting very Vietnamese in my driving though and handling all the traffic effortlessly.  We eventually arrived at the centre and went in.  Its really cool and we went in the escalating temperature pools.  The final one is really hot.  I loved it, but it was too hot for Cannelle to enter.  She had left her t-shirt on as we didn't want to offend locals, but right at the end a local girl came in with only a bikini on.  The place was full of just locals.  Really cool.  A local kid kept trying to creep up on me and splash me.  We played along (he was only 3 or 4) and had some nice interaction with the locals.  When we came out an hour or two later our bike smelt of petrol.  It was low when we got on, but now it was virtually empty.  Either someone siphoned off our petrol or it drained away.  The bike was too shit to tell.  We needed petrol and we needed it fast.  We eventually found a local guy while running on fumes.  It looked empty in the tank.  We put in 20,000.  Its great that you can put in as little as 10,000 at one time in Vietnam.  It should get us back.  Then again it looked a bit watered down.  Lets try it.  We were riding back and the tank was getting lower and lower.  In the red, under the red, way under the red.  We were close.  I didn't want to buy any.  We were coming into Hue.  Just a bit to go.  We had done 16km under the red.  How far could it go?  There was the river.  Putt, putt, bang.  Slowing down.  That far....16km is what a bike could do in the red.  Great.  Good to know, but we were now at one of the busiest intersections with no petrol.  My record of getting bikes back in one piece was again 50-50.  We had to buy a bottle of petrol from the side of the road.  It got us back though.  Spurs won 1-0 against Swansea and we were on the up again.  New Orleans won, but it was fairly irrelevant by this point.  We needed all the results to go our way next weekend to have any chance.  Basically we had to win both games and everyone else (five teams) had to lose both games.  Odds were long.

Our hotel were so nice.  They left in the morning and came back at 8am with the paperwork for the visa extension.  We paid for it and he said it was highly likely we would have it that night.  In the end he stayed for the full hour to make sure it was done.  We took the bike again (same pile of shit) and we were off to Hai Van Pass.  Not sure how much petrol this gas guzzler was going to need for this trip.  We took the bike east to start with and did the 13km to the coast and nearest beach town.  Its quite nice there with the pine trees running along the sand.  We then drove all the way down the coastal highway until it reconnects with highway one.  This is apparently where the Easy Riders come for the back way to Hoi An.  Yes, its such a backway.  Can't be found by a normal tourist.  How they get away with charging so much is beyond me.  Especially when its so much more fun to ride it yourself.  We rode through green rice fields and graveyards filled with white sand, finally coming over a bridge and winding round a beautiful body of water over some rolling hills.  Its a really nice ride.  We then linked up with highway one, which is scary with the lorries and buses, but they always leave you a motorcycle lane to hide from them in.  I find the lorries are quite good drivers and ok, but the bus drivers are nuts and dangerous.  They will almost run you off the road sometimes.  They usually give you a beep of the horn when they are close though so that you know they are coming.  We carried on down a very pretty highway one.  On the way back we took highway one all the way to Hue and its a very pretty road all the way as well and its good to have too different routes.  We eventually arrived at Hai Van Pass and took the road over.  Its really pretty.  Really, really pretty.  Well worth the trip.  In fact the whole ride is really cool.  You wind up with the sea and the cliffs to your left and the railway line below, you crest the hill and ride down with the bay and Danang before you.  The view over Lang Co on one side is beautiful and the view on the other side over to Danang is equally beautiful.  You can do this route by train as well, though its lower down and you don't get exactly the same view as from the bike.  Buses go through the tunnel.  This was another one of our highlights in Vietnam.  We decided to take the train the next day as well to see another angle.  You can really race the road as well and it feels great to fly round the curves on the road.  I was really enjoying it and Cannelle loved it.  On the way back we stopped in Lang Co and rode over to the beach.  White sand with noone there backed by pine forests.  Really nice.  We got some food (I had some great squid) and rode back.  On the way back we stopped at Elephant Springs.  There is a 4km road or so to the springs, but it feels much longer as it is total shit.  Bumpy, up and down, potholes, rough, full of rocks.  You know.  Shitty.  I bounced the bike all the way there.  Rough on the suspension but ok.  When we got there you can bathe in the pools, but the water was really cold.  The elephant part of the rocks is overplayed but its a nice spot.  Not worth a special trip, but if you are passing by why not pop in.  Back on the road we powered back to Hue.  The locals really don't like being overtaken by foreigners in Vietnam, so often you pass them, they speed up pass you and then slow down again, so you pass them again.  Repeat about five times and you get the idea.  Passing back into the city there was a lot of traffic.  We weren't really sure why and then we saw a body in the middle of the road, trailing a streak of blood across the road.  Someone got hit and hit hard.  They weren't getting back up.  I was more careful after that.  We put in some more petrol and picked up our visa extension.  Knowing that we could leave, we went and booked a seat on the 8am train.  It was only 46,000.  A bargain to go to Danang.  Hard seats are so cheap in Vietnam that if you travel in the day its the only way to go.  Not sure why LP only ever includes the soft options so the train always looks expensive.  Its much cheaper than the bus in hard seat.  We met Jessica for a sushi dinner and would meet her the next day, but she was going by bus.  She was going to miss the pass which was a shame.  One more thing on our hotel.  The price of $12 included breakfast and the night before you chose your order and your time so it was ready bang on time for you.  I love that hotel.  Anyway we were off to Danang the next morning and would see the pass again from the train.