Pleiku of Ngan

After staying with my friends in Danang City, I keep going on hitchhiking to the South of Vietnam. However the distance is still very far, around 1000km more to reach Ho Chi Minh City (I prefer Saigon to Ho Chi Minh city), so I decided to find some hosts on the way to Saigon. My friend introduced me about a girl living in Pleiku, the south-west of Vietnam, I sent a couch-request to Ngan then she accepted it. The days before living with my dear friends in Danang, I tried to hitchhike to Pleiku, yet it was freaking hard, I only did successfully a half of the way to Pleiku (200km out of 350km). Being too tired of hitchhiking, I decided to take a local bus and it was quite cheap (around 4-5$) to go to Pleiku.

My first thought about Pleiku was that city is a politic city, there are almost police everywhere and someone told me about traveling there, the police can catch you and ask you for no reason. However, when I traveled there, no police or even nobody bothered me. Sometime, the local people stare curiously at me because I don’t look like the local here.  There is one thing that I don’t like which is almost the time they call me that “Are you Chinese?” even I spoke in Vietnamese but they still couldn’t understand because of different accent. How hilarious it was!

 Pleiku is a non-tourist, there are still some foreigners, but they just stay there one night for transit to go to Hanoi or Saigon. Also, Pleiku is a mountainous city so the road in there is very funny, it likes a bald hill, going up and going down.

Ngan is a strong girl that I’ve ever met, talking about her stories makes me feel excited and admire her. According to her Couchsurfing profile:

In her CS blog, she wrote:

"I was born in 1996, in a mountain city in Vietnam. My father said when I was born my family didn’t happy and didn’t welcome me. Because my family was very poor. One year later, my mom had left me. My father was sad and became drunk. He cursing, beating everyone, everything and everywhere. Two year later, he passed away, cause traffic accidents. I lived with my aunt. And the first fun story is a donkey has been born and she knew she was abandoned."

I like Ngan because of her confidence and her strength which I haven’t ever had. In the period of time I stayed with Ngan and her roommate in a little room, just as big as my room, I had many experience in Pleiku. At night, on the way come back to her house, we usually have a little naughty game which is honking the ring-bell then run as fast as possible, in the next morning we realized that the house that we made fun of the day before had to set up a camera outside the house. We laughed a lot as we could die about this.

Moreover, I consider her as my younger sister, inside her eyes I can feel her sorrow, almost every night, after telling me that I should go to bed first, she’s often standing outside on the pavement to drink beer. It touch me and I feel so useless when I left her outside drinking beer alone, just want to stand by her and tell her that she’s not alone.

I still remember the day when she was drunk, she made a joke of me and this thing drove me crazy because she told:

“You are just a boy who is always under your mother’s wings”

in front of a lot of people. I was freaking mad, I jumped down from the 2 meter high cliff and intend to take my backpack to leave. After having a second thought, I change my mind because she was so freaking drunk that I had to sit next to her to look after. In the next morning, she totally forgot what happened.

I stayed with her 2 more nights then go. At this time, I met a women from India named Jaya, she was very kind and help me tell her that she should come back high school to finish her education then do whatever she want, but 1 month later I knew that she quit her school and now she’s traveling and mainly by hitchhiking.

Last but not least, we had a good time that is going to tribal village (Bana village) to give candy to poor children. So far, once in a while I often keep candy with me to give every poor children that I met on the road.

Pleiku is Ngan and Ngan is Pleiku