The neverending van ride

In front of rice fields

Yesterday we left Pleiku and said goodbye to Jess' parents. We will meet up with them in a week in Bangkok. Dad gave our drivers instructions on getting us to Mui Ne. Our drivers spoke no English, so we pre-arranged a few hand signals to communicate and off we went. The first several hours of the trip took us through some breath-taking scenery. We stopped at who-knows-where for lunch (a different who-knows-where than on the way to Pleiku) and ate who-knows-what that our drivers ordered. There was some fish complete with head, chicken, pork and some horrible, bitter unknown round thing in some soup. The squat pots were right beside the pig pens so the aroma was less than pleasant. When we arrived just outside of Nha Trang, things began to heat up - literally! Our driver suddenly became concerned about obeying the speed limit and seemed worried about the radiator. The air conditioning although functioning was denied to us by the driver. When we were 200kms away from Mui Ne, I took out a pad of paper and tried to convey that we needed to travel more than 50km/hr to reach Mui Ne. The driver told me we would get there at 11:00pm - making our projected hourly speed 30km/hr. It was especially frustrating and became increasingly obvious that he really didn't know where we were going. Luckily we had a map and directed him e v e n t u a l l y to our hotel and we arrived at 10:00pm, 13 hours from our departure. We have done quite enough road trips in Vietnam to last a lifetime. We arrived at our hotel with time to freshen-up and go to bed. Today after breakfast, we walked down to the ocean. Mikayla was delighted to find so many beautiful shells and we were able to walk quite aways out into the ocean as the tide was going out. We then swam in the pool for a couple of hours. Currently, we have just completed some fantastic shopping after an amazing meal and will head back to our hotel to swim in the ocean.