Double back to tour The Demilitarized Zone

Taking back roads West outta Hue.

My compass tells me that I'm on the right path, but this road looks and feel untraveled
"lets just see whats around the bend"

Seeing that our road is keeping us on the right path we continue on avoiding the regular pot holes and cattle

Taking the occasional moment to stop
breath in the views
exhale, "this is happening"

Feeling as though we had taken a wrong route, we pull over to examine our map
a local man (pictured here) pulls beside us to help.
He's a local English teacher (lucky us!) who hardly speaks English. He wants us to follow him to his school... As for why escapes me now.
We ended up hanging around for about 30mins while he called a friend how spoke better English to give us directions. It didn't really help so we just ended up waving him and his many onlookers farewell---

*sigh*
So beautiful-

Into DaKrong-
It takes us a minute to find the one Guest house within 75km or so, and pull in just as it starts to rain. I love it when that happens
I dismount my bike and see a huge praying mantis on the steps in front of me... as I approach it for a pic, something much bigger catches my eye...

Say hello to the worlds largest moth
Attacus atlas a.k.a. Atlas moth
I estimate this ones wing span at 9 to 10 inches

Looking out from Nha Khach's into the country side

The same direction but from the balcony upstairs
showing the locals market and passing DaKrong river

So far the wildlife of this guesthouse is a step beyond the rest.
Here we have our bathroom guests.
"whats that humming?"
"OH!"
The good thing is that these little guys got us a nice little discount on our room rate.
200,000d if I remember correctly

Something we ran into occasionally at guesthouses was the understandable request to see our passports.
A little less common is the request to hold onto your passport.
To this I always did my best to avoid- change the topic, distract, snach it back and refuse, whatever I could within reason. I don't like giving my passport away to anyone.
This was a real rarity... This woman insisted on personalty taking our passports to the police station to record. Must be a strict precinct, or she's a stickler for following the law-