The ride from Ho Chi Minh City to Mui Ne: A traveler review

After a lovely week in Ho Chi Minh City celebrating my boyfriend’s birthday, it was time to head off on another journey in Vietnam, this time to Mui Ne.

We only planned to stay in Mui Ne for a couple of hours while we waited for our transfer bus to Da Lat, but first we actually had to get there!

Here’s what you can expect when traveling from Ho Chi Minh City to Mui Ne with G5Car.

Good first impressions

The night before we were due to embark on the journey from HCMC to Mui Ne, I received a WhatsApp message from a member of staff at G5Car confirming our luxury minivan the following day.

I thought that this was such a great touch as it felt incredibly personal and assured us that our journey would indeed go ahead (while traveling in Asia, we’ve experienced a few hit and miss car and bus journeys that we weren’t sure would even turn up so this was definitely comforting).

Ride on time

We ordered a Grab from our Airbnb in Ho Chi Minh City to take us to the G5Car office and we arrived there at 9:30 am, half an hour before the minivan was scheduled to depart. There were a few other people waiting for the same minivan as us so once we’d given our backpacks to the driver and showed him our confirmation email, we jumped on board.

The minivan set off at 9:55 am, just a couple of minutes before the scheduled departure as everyone was already there, ready and waiting to go. My first impression of the minivan was that it was undoubtedly the nicest and most luxurious van I’d ever seen in my life.

The reclining seats were fitted with a massage feature that was definitely a warm welcome. There was also gentle piano music playing in the van, as well as an accompanying birdsong soundtrack. It felt a little excessive for a relatively short journey but I certainly wasn’t complaining about the luxurious element to it!

However, unfortunately the driver didn’t seem to get the calming and relaxing memo as he drove like a mad man! By this stage, we were more than used to crazy drivers in Asia as we’d experienced it everywhere from Indonesia, to the Philippines, to Cambodia, but Vietnamese drivers really seemed to be in a massive rush to get everywhere.

At 11:10 am, we stopped at a service station for a 15 minute toilet break but no one else got off apart from us; I was more relieved just to be able to stand still for a second and not get thrown around!

I think on short journeys like the one from HCMC to Mui Ne, where there are very few people traveling, the driver should ask whether they want to stop as it seemed a bit of a waste of time considering the fact that no one really wanted to get off. However, I do appreciate that the driver needs to take a break as well, so it’s not really a big deal to stop for just a few minutes.

Once we set off again, the driver was back to his usual tricks of driving like a maniac and beeping his horn constantly. I actually felt incredibly travel sick for the majority of the journey, which isn’t really something I suffer from a lot but it seemed to be a pretty regular occurrence when traveling around Vietnam by bus, car and minivan.

I attempted to nap for a short while but there was no way I could drift off when it felt like the entire minivan could swerve off the road at any moment! We stopped for petrol just after 12:00 pm for 5 minutes but no one got off and we were soon on our way again.

The minivan arrived in Mui Ne just before 2:00 pm which was right on schedule and I was appreciative of the fact that we’d arrived in one piece and right on time.