Motorbike Tour

We reached Lak lake at about 5pm, just time for me to dump my stuff in the long house that was our home for the night and wander through the village down to the lake. It's a lovely place, the village is on a spit of land surrounded on two sides by rice paddies and on the third by the lake. Whether made of wood or concrete all of the inhabitants live in traditional long houses. The whole village was just teeming with children, human and otherwise. It seems as if the people here live very close to nature and the rhythms of the earth. Don't get me wrong, every house pretty much has a satellite dish, and the men watch premier league football but there every day lives probably haven't changed in decades. It was so peaceful, or so I thought. The bathroom was in a separate block behind the longhouse, I used our bathroom once and then refused to use it again. There was no light and it obviously hadn't been cleaned since Adam was a boy. I used the neighbours bathroom which was superior in every way. I had dinner with Tri and another couple and their drivers in the guesthouse reception. Tri and I had a couple of beers before bedding down for the night, that's when the peace disappeared, of course. The neighbours were watching T.V. and had a problem with their volume control, despite this I was probably asleep by 9pm. Unsurprisingly I didn't have an issue getting up the next morning, just as well really as breakfast was at 6.30am. I got to see elephants in the village and a camel on the road. The day wasn't going to be a long one distance wise, we only had to travel about 60kms to our stop for the day. The morning was spent taking a circuitous route to another set of waterfalls outside of Buon Ma Thuot city. Along the way I got to see so much that I would never have seen by myself. Firstly I don't have the transport and secondly my lack of Vietnamese holds me back from going to places like this. Also Tri never seemed to be in a hurry and to understand that I wasn't as confident on a bike as I would like to be. So we meandered for a while. About mid-morning we took shelter from a rain shower but otherwise the weather was favouring us and he decided to go on to the waterfall. It's in the middle of a national park, the "road" is another glorified concrete footpath and mostly we had it to ourselves. Again Tri dropped me off with directions and let me loose. He's a good guy, I feel safe with him, able to do my own thing and take my time with no pressure. It's probably better that I hadn't taken the tour with Viet. The previous night Tri had told me why he thought Viet had passed me onto him. Unsurprisingly my size was an issue added to the fact that Viet had a better offer to take another tour. I wasn't surprised. I had the waterfalls to myself and wandered around in peace. I am so glad that I came on this tour. It is still a "touristy" thing to do but I've never believed that was ever a reason for not doing something. The Taj Mahal is touristy but people still go there! And it wasn't as if I had to share the place with bus loads. Since Tri and I had got an early start and I had declined the elephant ride at the lake we had got the jump on any of the others doing the same route. We had lunch in a small village rice joint, just my kind of place and got to our hotel in Buon Ma City at about 2pm. The hotel had a computer so I killed some time on that and then went and got a coffee. I had dinner with Tri and then had beers with another traveller and his driver. I never learn my lesson, I have a couple of beers and then think it's a good idea to have a couple more when I should really stop at that point. And so it was that I ended up singing karaoke with a few other travellers as we were all staying at the same hotel. It was a later night then I would have liked. The next morning was another early one but it was a long trek down to Nha Trang, we had to go over a pass and the weather wasn't looking good. I think we left before anyone else and were on the road by 07.30, Tri taking advantage of the fact that I am generally an early riser. The weather held for the first couple of hours and then we were forced to stop and wait out some heavy rain. It wasn't too bad from there on in and before I knew it we had turned onto Highway 1 and were heading south to Nha Trang. Thankfully we were only on the main highway for a few kilometres, that road scares the life out of me at the best of times. I arrived in Nha Trang in one piece a little after noon.