It rained our entire short ride down the beach, but at this point we are getting used to it. In addition to walking around the city, we took care of retrieving our passports which were not returned to us by the hotel two nights ago. They sent them via bus. It was a bit of a runaround trying to intercept them and the bus driver tried to shake us down for 5 bucks, but we have them back.

Aside from that we had lunch at an all vegan place with some Vietnamese takes on western food. It was so good we are back there right now to try more of the menu. If you are ever in Hoi An be sure to stop at Karma Waters.

Our hotel has an indoor pool so that is the plan for the rest of the evening.

Today was probably the toughest yet most enjoyable yet. Started off in the rain but it didn’t last. This ride included Hai Van Pass which tops out around 1600ft elevation and made for some great views…

…that is until the we reached the fog and had maybe 50 feet of visibility.

We met up with a tour of 60 cyclist from Thailand on the hill. They were fun and all wanted a pictures with us.

We ended the day on China Beach in Da Nang, not too bad.

We took some video from this ride. We’ll try to post it here soon.

We went inside the inner citadel today. This is all Nguyen Dynasty era Vietnam.

Most of it did not survive the war.

Then we saw this guy.

Hue has been a great break with amazing food.

Today turned out to be a pretty great day, even though we had the first flat tire of our trip. We fixed it quickly and made it to the Google Hotel by 11:00. No affiliation.

The city is centered around a large citadel that was mostly destroyed during the war. We spent some time walking around inside.

Then we made a stop at a massive outdoor market. There are many exotic fruits here that we had never tried.

This is our bounty, including jackfruit, dragonfruit, mangosteen and the thing in the top right that may be a guava. We are not sure.

We found an amazing vegetarian Buddhist restaurant. Possibly our best meal yet and all this for 95,000 dong ($5 US).

To top that all off we are writing this over free beer, courtesy of google. We will be spending an extra day here for sure.

Another cool day with a little less traffic. We had a visitor while stopping for drinks today.

Hard to tell which dogs are strays since they just go about on their own and seem pretty much ignored by people. We’ve seen signs advertising cats and dogs as food which may explain the disconnection.

We have seen tons of these signs around. We wish we knew what they said.

Dong Ha is a town right on the Ben Hai River, the border around which the DMZ was formed. Today there are tours around the area, and many monuments honoring the North Vietnamese soldiers and their victory.

We met a man named Ting in town, who was very excited when we told him we were American. He said his father was a lieutenant for the South Vietnamese Army during the war, and had many American friends. He spoke candidly for a while with us about which side of the conflict he was on. Very interesting.

We made the most of our day off yesterday. First we went to Cuc Phuong National Park. There they have a primate rescue center. It is a place where they try to rehabilitate monkeys that have been rescued from the pet trade and release them back into the wild. This was the highlight of our day.

They also had a turtle rescue center.

From there we went on a hike through the jungle before leaving the park.

Next stop was Tam Coc. We were rowed down the river through 3 caves. Pretty nice scenery.

Last we took a short hike up a mountain side where there were Buddhist temples built into caves. Pretty nice views from the top.

After a week visiting Hanoi, we are excited to start our ride in the morning. While in the city we visited a few museums including a historic prison originally built by French invaders, then later used to detain US POWs. At the time it was known as the Hanoi Hilton.

Food has been pretty good although it is difficult to communicate. Fruit and bread is available on every street.

We did manage to track down a couple vegetarian/vegan places. Although at least one meal did not stay down for Jasmine.

We also left for an overnight tour of Halong Bay by boat with kayaking (our first time) and a quick dip in the water. The food aboard the boat was amazing.

For our last day in Hanoi, we decided to check out the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum and meet with Uncle Ho face to face.

We managed to get one of the phones setup with a local sim card so we should be able to update frequently.