The Central Highlands, five days
Two nights in Buon Ma Thuot for coffee country, Dray Nur and Lak lake, one in Pleiku, one in Kon Tum for the wooden cathedral and the villages on the Dak Bla river. Provincial towns, long straight roads, and very few other foreigners.
At a glance
- Duration
- 5 days, 4 nights
- Party size
- 2 to 8, private
- Starts
- Buon Ma Thuot airport, flight from Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City
- Ends
- Pleiku airport
- Effort
- Easy on foot; the road day is about 4 hours
- From
- USD 1,190 per person
Who this is for
The Central Highlands are the emptiest thing on this website. Four provinces of red basalt sitting between 500 and 800 metres, planted end to end with coffee, pepper and rubber, with three unremarkable provincial capitals in the middle of them. Almost no foreign traveller comes here, and the reason is not a secret: there is no beach, no old town, no lantern-lit street, and nothing that photographs well from a hotel balcony.
What there is instead is the country that pays for the rest of it. Dak Lak grows the robusta that makes Vietnam the second largest coffee exporter on earth, and in Buon Ma Thuot you can stand in a drying yard and follow a bean from a red cherry on a branch to a sack on a truck in one morning. North of that, the plateau flattens out into the landscape that half of the American war was fought over, and in Kon Tum a French mission church built of ironwood in the 1910s still stands beside communal houses whose roofs are eight metres tall. Five days is the right length: enough to see how the region works and to sleep in three different towns, short enough not to test your patience with the hotel stock.
Take this as a second or third trip to Vietnam, not a first. If this is your first, put the days into the seven-day central heritage route through Hue and Hoi An, and keep the highlands for the visit after that. If you want the plateau with a coast attached, the seven-day Da Lat and Mui Ne route gives you highland air with hotels to match.
Day by day
Fly to Buon Ma Thuot, into the coffee
Buon Ma Thuot has flights from both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City; the southern leg is roughly an hour in the air, the northern one closer to two, and we confirm exact times with your quotation rather than guessing here. The airport sits about 8 km from town and the transfer takes twenty minutes on an empty road.
The afternoon is deliberately close to base. We drive out to a working estate on the edge of town — not a visitor centre with a gift counter, a farm with a drying yard — and walk the rows while somebody who does this for a living explains why robusta is planted here and arabica is not, what the pepper vines between the rows are doing, and what a kilo actually earned last season. Then the processing side: washing tanks, concrete drying yards, sorting, roasting. You will taste four or five cups and one of them will be a cup of the thing Vietnamese people actually drink at seven in the morning, dripped over condensed milk, which is not the same drink at all.
Dray Nur falls and Lak lake
Out at 07:30 south-west to the Serepok river and the Dray Nur falls, about 25 km from town. This is the honest part: the Serepok is dammed upstream for hydropower, and the volume coming over the ledge in March and April is a fraction of what comes over it in September. It is a broad curtain of water in a wooded gorge with a path behind the fall and a lot of steps, and in the dry season it is a modest one. We tell you which month you are getting before you book, and if you are here in April we will say the falls are worth an hour, not a morning.
From there it is an hour south-east to Lak lake, the largest natural lake on the plateau, with M’nong villages along its northern shore and a hunting lodge on the hill above it that Bao Dai built in the 1950s. We take a small rowed boat out for an hour in the late afternoon when the light is low and the fish traps are being set. We do not book elephant rides. Dak Lak has been moving its captive elephants away from riding towards observation-only models, and separately from that we think putting eight travellers on the back of an animal for a photograph is a bad trade. If you want to see the elephants, we will drive you to where you can watch them from the ground, and if you want to ride one you should book with somebody else.
North to Pleiku on Highway 14
The long road day, and one worth doing in daylight rather than sleeping through. It is roughly 180 km and about four hours north on Highway 14, the spine road of the plateau, through Ea Hleo and Chu Se: coffee, then pepper, then rubber in ruler-straight rows, red dust on everything, and a great deal of truck traffic during the harvest months. We break once for coffee at a roadside place with clean lavatories. There is no jade showroom on this itinerary and there will not be one, here or anywhere else.
Pleiku is a garrison town at about 800 metres that was rebuilt after the war and looks it. We use the afternoon on Bien Ho, the crater lake seven kilometres north, and on the ridge above the tea and coffee estates outside town. If you have a reason to be here — a father who flew out of Camp Holloway, a grandfather who walked the road to Kontum — tell us before you come, and your guide will read up on the specific ground rather than giving you the general version. The plateau is where the 1975 withdrawal down Route 7 began, and the local museums treat that in a way you may or may not want to spend an hour on. We will say what is in them and let you choose.
Kon Tum, the wooden cathedral and the Dak Bla
Kon Tum is only about 50 km on, an hour at most, so we leave at 08:30 and are there for the middle of the morning. The town sits on the Dak Bla, one of the few rivers in the country that runs east to west, and it is the most interesting of the three towns on this trip by a distance. The wooden cathedral was put up by French missionaries in the 1910s in a hybrid of Romanesque massing and the communal-house roof line of the Bahnar, and it is built of ironwood on stilts. Next to it the old mission seminary holds a small ethnographic collection: back-baskets, gong sets, funerary carvings, looms, labelled in Vietnamese and French and worth an hour with a guide who can read both.
In the afternoon we cross the Kon Klor suspension bridge and drive the last few kilometres east to Kon K’tu, a Bahnar village on the river with a rong — the tall communal house with a thatched roof pitched like a blade — standing in the middle of it. We go there because the buildings are worth seeing and because the village has a stake in visitors coming; we do not book a gong performance, a costume change, or a welcome ceremony staged for eight people. Gong music here is ritual music with an occasion attached, and hiring it for an afternoon turns residents into staff. If something real is happening while we are there and the household is content for you to watch, your guide will ask, and you will be told plainly if the answer is no.
Kon Tum to Pleiku airport, fly out
A slow morning. The Kon Tum market is at its best before eight and it is a produce market rather than a souvenir one, which is the point of going. After that we drive back down to Pleiku airport, about 55 km and an hour and a quarter, and hand you over in time for an afternoon flight.
Pleiku flies to Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City, but not many times a day, so the shape of Day 5 is set by the schedule rather than by us. If the only flight is at 11:00 we will tell you at the quotation stage and rearrange Day 4 to give you the market the evening before. If you are carrying on to the coast, Da Nang connects straight into the four-day Hoi An and My Son route.
What it costs
| Party size | Comfortable | Excellent | Exceptional |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 travellers | USD 1,550 | USD 1,980 | USD 2,250 |
| 3 – 4 | USD 1,330 | USD 1,700 | USD 1,930 |
| 5 – 6 | USD 1,240 | USD 1,590 | USD 1,800 |
| 7 – 8 | USD 1,190 | USD 1,520 | USD 1,730 |
The three columns move less on this trip than on any other route we sell, and you should know that before you pay for the third one. Buon Ma Thuot, Pleiku and Kon Tum are provincial towns with provincial hotel stock. Comfortable buys a clean three-star with hot water and a working lift. Excellent buys the best business hotel in each town, which in Buon Ma Thuot is genuinely good and in Kon Tum is merely fine. Exceptional buys the best available room in that same building, plus the lakeside lodge at Lak if you take the option. There is no five-star resort anywhere on this itinerary, and anybody selling you one is selling you a room in Da Lat and a very long drive.
What the money is really buying here is the car, the driver and the guide, and on a route with a four-hour road day and no rail alternative that is the whole product. Two travellers carry a whole vehicle between them, which is why the top row is a third higher than the bottom one. The supplier-level breakdown is on what a Vietnam trip costs, and the sequence from enquiry to confirmed dates is on how to book.
Included and not included
What the price includes
- Four nights: two in Buon Ma Thuot, one in Pleiku, one in Kon Tum, in your class
- Private air-conditioned vehicle and driver for all five days, airport to airport
- A private English-speaking guide for all five days
- All meals shown day by day: 4 breakfasts, 3 lunches
- Estate visit and tasting, Dray Nur entry, the rowed boat on Lak lake
- Seminary and cathedral entry in Kon Tum, and village entry fees where they exist
- Drinking water in the vehicle and a local SIM or eSIM on request
- A 24-hour number answered by a person in Vietnam
What it does not include
- Domestic flights in and out of the highlands — quoted separately, not marked up
- International flights
- Vietnam e-visa, USD 25 single entry, applied for at evisa.gov.vn
- Travel insurance, which we require you to hold
- All dinners, and drinks with any meal
- Tips for guide and driver, which are customary and never invoiced
Because in these three towns the good eating is a hotpot place with plastic stools and a menu on the wall, costing about USD 6 a head, and building it into a package at package prices would be dishonest. Your guide walks you to two or three of them on the first evening, writes down what to order, and you go back on your own if you liked it.
Pictures from this route
Who this trip is not for
This is the route we talk people out of most often, and we would rather do it now.
- First-time visitors to Vietnam. Five days here instead of five days between Hue and Hoi An is a trade almost nobody should make on a first trip. Come back for the highlands.
- Anyone who needs a good hotel every night. The best room in Kon Tum is a decent four-star room in a small town, and no amount of money changes that.
- Travellers who want to photograph village life. We do not arrange staged performances, costume sessions or house visits that turn a family’s morning into a set, and if that is what you came for you will be disappointed by what we actually do.
- People who will not sit in a car for four hours on Day 3. There is no train, no internal flight between these towns, and the road is the trip.
- Anyone travelling between roughly June and September who cannot accept an afternoon lost to rain. The wet season here is heavy, the red earth turns to slurry, and the falls are impressive at exactly the time the roads are worst.
Why this region stays empty
Three towns, no old quarter
Buon Ma Thuot, Pleiku and Kon Tum were fought over and rebuilt. What is old here is in the fields and in one church, not in a preserved street.
No commission stops
No jade showroom, no lacquer factory, no shop where the driver waits outside for twenty minutes. The route has none and never will.
The harvest window
Coffee picking runs roughly from November into January. That is when the yards are full, the town smells of it, and the trucks own Highway 14.
Thinking about the highlands as a second Vietnam trip?
Tell us the month and where else you are going, and we will say plainly whether these five days belong in your plan or not.
Questions travellers ask most
Is there anything to do here if I do not care about coffee?
Yes, but less. Take away the estate and the processing and you are left with a lake, a waterfall of variable volume, a crater lake, a church, a seminary museum and two villages on a river — four solid days rather than five.
If coffee genuinely does not interest you, tell us and we will move the Day 1 afternoon to the ethnographic museum in Buon Ma Thuot and give Lak lake the whole of Day 2, including the shoreline villages we usually only drive past.
How do we get in and out? There seem to be no through routes.
You fly in to Buon Ma Thuot and out of Pleiku, both from Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. That is why the itinerary runs south to north rather than looping back.
Driving in from the coast is possible — Nha Trang up to Buon Ma Thuot, or Quy Nhon across to Pleiku — but each is a full day on winding road, and it only makes sense if you are already on that coast and have the day to give. We will price it either way and tell you which we would choose.
Will we meet ethnic minority families, and how is that arranged?
You will pass through Bahnar and M’nong villages, look at the buildings, and buy nothing. Where a household is willing to have visitors and is paid properly for the time, your guide will ask on the day rather than booking it weeks ahead as a fixed stop on a schedule.
What we do not do is arrange a performance, a costume, a welcome ritual or a handicraft demonstration for your party. People here are not an attraction and the staged version is obvious to everybody involved, including you.
When is the best month to come?
Late November through February. The rain has stopped, the harvest is on, the nights at Pleiku’s altitude drop to something like 15 degrees, and the roads are dry.
March and April are clear and hot and the waterfalls are thin. June to September is the wet season, with heavy afternoon rain and green country; it is not unworkable, but it is not what we would book. There is more on the regional split at when to go.
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