№ 01Why go, and why 2026 is the quiet year

Buon Ma Thuot is the capital of Vietnamese coffee. Not in a marketing sense — in the sense that the red basalt plateau around the city grows most of the robusta the country exports, and the farms begin where the streets end. If you drink Vietnamese coffee anywhere in the world, there is a fair chance it came from within thirty kilometres of this town.

It is also 537 km from Hoi An, which is a long way for a place with no famous single sight. What it has instead is a plateau: waterfalls, the largest natural lake in the highlands, M’nong and Ede villages, and coffee everywhere.

A useful piece of timing. The Buon Ma Thuot Coffee Festival is biennial. The ninth edition ran in March 2025 and the tenth is expected in March 2027 — which means there is no festival in 2026. Most guides do not mention this. If you wanted the festival, you have the wrong year; if you wanted the city without the crowds and the doubled hotel prices, you have exactly the right one.

№ 02Every way from Hoi An to Buon Ma Thuot, priced

The short version: fly if the schedule cooperates, take the sleeper if it does not. This is the only highland destination from Hoi An where that first option is real.

№ 03The flight: the one highland route where it works

Kon Tum has no airport. Pleiku has one but no Da Nang service. Buon Ma Thuot has both — BMV is served from Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Vinh, Haiphong and Da Nang, and the flight takes about an hour against twelve to fourteen on a bus.

The catch is frequency. The Da Nang route is by far the thinnest on the board — a handful of departures a month rather than daily — so it is a flight you plan a trip around, not one you catch when it suits you. Check the actual schedule before you fix your dates, and book early; on a route this thin, prices climb fast and there is no second flight that day.

№ 04The bus in detail

Buses run from Da Nang, so allow 30 km and 45 minutes to reach the departure point; operators generally arrange a pickup. The pattern is unusual and worth knowing: most services leave in a cluster around 16:00 to 16:30 and arrive in Buon Ma Thuot somewhere between about 03:20 and 07:45 the next morning, depending on the operator and how many stops it makes. There is also a morning departure around 08:00 that runs through the day and arrives in the evening.

Fares spread widely — roughly 380.000₫ at the cheap end to over a million for the better sleeper cabins. On a fourteen-hour overnight run the gap between a basic berth and a good one is the difference between arriving rested and arriving wrecked.

№ 05Riding it, and whether you should

Honest answer first: 537 km each way is not a there-and-back ride. As a straight out-and-return it is four days of your holiday spent almost entirely on a bike, most of it repeating the same road, and there is no shop in Hoi An that will let you leave the bike in Dak Lak.

Where it does work is as the far end of a highland loop: Hoi An to Kon Tum, Kon Tum to Pleiku, Pleiku to Buon Ma Thuot, then back to the coast at Nha Trang or Quy Nhon and north along the sea. That is a week, it never repeats a road, and it is one of the best rides in the country. Our Kon Tum and Pleiku guides cover the first two legs; Pleiku to Buon Ma Thuot is a further 190 km or so, about four hours.

№ 06Coffee, properly

Do this in the right order and it is one of the better days out in Vietnam.

The World Coffee Museum, run by Trung Nguyen, is the obvious start — entry around 75.000₫, open daily roughly 08:00 to 17:00, and worth about two hours. It is a genuine museum with a large ethnographic collection rather than a shop with signage, and the building itself is worth seeing.

Then get out to a farm. Several specialty producers near the city run plantation visits by appointment and have cafés open to the public — ask your accommodation to call ahead rather than turning up. Seeing robusta on the branch, then drinking it fifty metres away, is the thing you came 537 km for.

№ 07Waterfalls and Lak Lake

Dray Sap and Dray Nur, about 30 km south-west, are the pair everybody goes to: a multi-tier waterfall complex on the Serepok river, big and loud in the wet season and merely handsome in the dry. Half a day, easily reached by scooter or by taxi.

Lak Lake, 50 km south, is the largest natural lake in the Central Highlands, ringed by M’nong villages where several families run homestays. A night there — stilt house, the lake at dawn, no traffic — is the part of the trip most people remember, and it is a far better use of an evening than another bar in town.

№ 08The elephants: what changed, and what to do

Dak Lak is the province people associate with elephant riding, and the situation has changed in a way that is worth understanding before you book anything.

Dak Lak signed an agreement with Animals Asia in 2021 aimed at ending elephant-riding tourism, and issued a directive to end it completely after 2026. The Buon Don tourism centre stopped offering rides around 2023 and replaced them with feeding, bathing and observation. Lak district has continued to offer rides, because until the ban is complete there is no regulation forcing it to stop. So the province is genuinely inconsistent, and what you are offered depends on where you go.

The context matters: the province has around 35 domesticated elephants left, most of them over forty years old, and the population is described by the authorities themselves as at very high risk of dying out.

№ 09Dak Lak now reaches the sea, and when to go

On 1 July 2025 Vietnam cut its provinces from 63 to 34, and Phu Yen province was merged into Dak Lak. The combined province keeps the name Dak Lak and is still run from Buon Ma Thuot — but it now runs all the way east to the coast at Tuy Hoa. A landlocked coffee province acquired a coastline overnight.

For a traveller that has one real consequence: an address, a hotel listing or a bus ticket saying “Dak Lak” might now mean the plateau or the beach, 190 km apart. It also makes a highland-and-coast trip a single-province affair, which is how the region is increasingly being marketed.

November to April is the dry season and the time to come. November and December bring the harvest, March brings the blossom and the last comfortable weather before the heat. From May to October the rain is heavy in the afternoons — good for the waterfalls, hard on everything else.

Two nights is the minimum that justifies the journey; three lets you add Lak Lake without rushing. And if you are combining this with the rest of the region, our Quy Nhon guide covers the coastal route back north.

№ 10FAQ

The road distance was measured from Hoi An Old Town to central Buon Ma Thuot; times assume normal traffic and no long stops. Bus and flight fares and departure times follow operator listings current at the time of writing and change with the season — the Da Nang air route in particular is thinly served, so confirm before booking. Coffee festival dates, museum admission, the elephant-tourism directive and elephant numbers follow Vietnamese official and press reporting. The Phu Yen–Dak Lak merger follows the 2025 provincial reorganisation effective 1 July 2025. Anh Khoa rents motorbikes, e-bikes and bicycles in Hoi An; we do not sell bus or air tickets and we do not offer one-way drops to the highlands.