Pleiku: lake and coffee country
Pleiku · Bien Ho · tea gardens · Minh Thanh Pagoda
Illustrative regional or transport photo; not a promised stop. ©
Give the plateau a full day of its own. Ride out to the lake and cultivated hills, then return to town for the pagoda and a slow coffee rather than pressing on to the next province.
The village north of the dragon's jaw
Pleiku sits on a basalt plateau 700 to 800 metres up, high enough that the air is dry and cool in a country that is mostly neither. The name is Jrai and it is a description rather than a title: plơi means village, and kơdưr means both "north" and "high up". Both readings fit, because the old Jrai country lay to the south and this was the upland settlement. The longer form the French wrote down, Plei-Kou-Derr, comes from Plơi Kơdưr Chư H'Drông — the villages north of Chư H'Drông, the extinct volcano the Vietnamese call Hàm Rồng, the dragon's jaw. That mountain is still there, 1,028 metres, twelve kilometres south of the centre beside the junction where Highway 14 crosses Highway 19 at 785 metres. Jrai and Bahnar people make up about an eighth of the town's population, and their villages are not somewhere out in the countryside: they are wards of it. Plei Ơp, Plei Ngol, Chuêt 1 and Chuêt 2 are all inside the city limits, each with a rông house at its middle.
A lake in three craters
Seven kilometres north on Highway 14 the road runs along the rim of something that does not look like a crater until somebody tells you. Biển Hồ — "sea lake" — is the Vietnamese name; the Jrai call it T'Nưng, the sea on the mountain, and say the waves get up when the wind does. Echo sounding has shown three old volcanic vents joined together, the two larger ones connected by a broad neck, and the raised lip you ride along is the crater wall. The water covers about 228 hectares and spreads past 400 in the rains. People used to call it bottomless; the floor has silted up and flattened, and the mean depth has fallen from around twenty metres in 2000 to nineteen now, with the third vent down to about twelve. Nothing flows in — there is no river — and yet the level holds and a small stream runs continuously out. The town drinks from it. The Ministry of Culture listed it as a scenic monument on 16 November 1988. Kingfishers and coots work the reed beds, and the Jrai tell three separate stories of a village the ground swallowed.
Red earth and what grows in it
The plateau is old lava weathered down to deep red basalt soil, and that is the whole local economy. Perennial crops in Gia Lai covered 294,011.9 hectares in the 2025 figures, and coffee is the largest single block of it: 108,389.6 hectares producing 340,600 tonnes, ahead of rubber at 85,717 hectares, cashew at 40,230.6 and pepper at 8,420.3. You ride past all four within half an hour of the centre. North of the lake the ground rolls into tea, clipped green tables that run over the skyline, and the lanes between them are working access rather than a viewing platform: if there is a gate and nobody at it, stay on the public lane. The rains run May to October and the dry season November to April, and the annual mean here is 20–25 °C, which is why people who have spent a month in the delta arrive in Pleiku and put a jacket on after dark. Coffee is not a stop on this route; it is the background to all of it.
The pagoda that borrows from everywhere
Chùa Minh Thành stands two kilometres from the centre at 348 Nguyễn Viết Xuân in Hội Phú, and nothing else in the highlands looks like it. It was begun in 1964 under the abbot Thích Giác Đạo; the present building is the work of Thích Tâm Mãn, who studied seven years in Taiwan and was the first Vietnamese monk to take a higher degree in Buddhist art and pagoda architecture. The plan of the main hall is a simplified maṇḍala — the circle read as a fully opened lotus, the ground of the Esoteric cosmology — and the elevation puts Lý and Trần dynasty forms together with Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese work. The hall is sixteen metres tall with a pơ-mu wood ceiling. The Vairocana Buddha inside is six metres and sixteen tonnes, with eighty-eight Buddhas carved into the wall behind it and thirty thousand more along the sides; the doors are six metres high with six bodhisattvas cut into them. Outside, a stone Amitābha of seven and a half metres and forty tonnes stands in a lotus pond, the great bell weighs four tonnes, and a nine-storey relic stupa rises seventy-two metres.
How the day works
Fifty kilometres, almost all of it tarmac, and the riding is not the point — the plateau is flat and the roads are good. What makes the day is the order you take it in. Go north first, while the light is still low over the lake and the coaches have not arrived; give the tea an hour on foot; come back into town for the two-bowl phở at lunch; spend the hot part of the afternoon inside the pagoda, which is cool, enormous and takes longer than anyone expects; and finish at the Hàm Rồng junction in the late light, where the crater rim reads clearly from the roadside. Two things to plan around. The rain from May to October arrives in the afternoon, hard and brief, and the red mud on the field lanes is slippery for an hour afterwards. And Highway 14 is the main north–south lorry route through the highlands: it is a good road, and it is not a quiet one.
We lead this ride ourselves.
The guide is from our team, the route is one we have ridden, and you have one chat with us for the whole trip.
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