Stories By Bob

It's hard to say what clicked that day.  I have never been a huge coffee lover, even back home coffee was not my go-to drink.  It is not something that came suddenly to me in Vietnam, either. I was offered coffee most days, and would take it some days, but never would I go out of my way to find it. 

Taking directions has not always been my strong suit.  Waking on the mountainside in a typhoon rain, I packed up my moto and rode down the muddy trail, without a map, off through the thick jungle towards the last village I had seen two days before. No, it was not going to be the day to learn new tricks.

Looping the Black Sea clockwise from Istanbul, you cross into Bulgaria, then Romania, Ukraine and Russia, before the final leg through Georgia and back into eastern Turkey at Sarpi. If...

The beautiful country around Buôn Ma Thuột captured my curiosity and began tugging at my heart the first time I rode through the central highlands, late one October.  Riding from the dappled sun below the jungle canopy into fields of ripe coffee fruit, I found a small village, eager for dinner and some rest.  Perhaps too eager for both, as the events of the next day might suggest.