– ODO- 19038-19164km
– Location- Pleiku, Vietnam
– Weather- 20-31 broken with drizzle showers
Each time I stop at a convenient Vietnamese town for the night a new adventure begins. The sun is setting and I’m damp from the shower in my least smelly clothes. Now it’s time to find dinner and food for tomorrow.
Google Maps says that a large Vinmart supermarket is on the other side of town. A good 30 minutes walk away. The directions take me down the busy rush hour streets as the last clouds of the day shower is all with feeble drizzle onto my already damp jacket. Students playing a kind of hand badminton say hello as I walk through their pitch on the cluttered pavement.
Next, the path drops through a valley into a park full of evening walkers and across a dam which creates a narrow lake with a restaurant and floating promenades with benches perfect for the summer days.
As I walk up the following side what Google thinks is a path is an impassable wall of scrub. I follow the diverging path to the right which takes me to a play park with families and children. A wall blocks me from my route. I spot the gap in a locked gate and, in front of several families, step through leg first. This brought me to a residential street. Thinking about it it was definitely too quiet an area for such a big store. I danced up an ally as the sun fully set and found nothing. Nothing but houses and small shops. Maps had stung me (and George) several times in Vietnam so far and today was no exception.
I continued walking down the street and came to a larger more populated road and managed to grab a taxi. Showing the driver the photo he took me right back over to just a kilometre from my hotel. The shop wasn’t even that good.
I booked a Grab taxi home and found a small Banh Mi place for my new staple meal and bought bread for the morning, all within 100miles of my bed. Now it’s time to tuck in!