Where to Stay in Pleiku, Gia Lai

What is Pleiku known for?

Pleiku serves as the town of the Central Highlands, the former capital of Gia Lai Province and the centre of an urban district spread across some 260 square kilometres of upland. The Jarai and the Bahnar were here first. Both peoples farmed these highlands long before the town took its present shape, and outside writers once grouped them under the names Montagnards and Degar, while Kinh families later became the majority within the streets themselves.

What are the main landmarks in Pleiku?

The town keeps no roll of monuments. What it has instead is the Central Highlands themselves, the upland country of Gia Lai Province opening out past the last streets, with Jarai and Bahnar villages scattered over farmland that has been worked far longer than the town has stood. Roads out of town do the sightseeing.

Anything worth stopping for lies along them rather than inside the urban district, which is why a day here tends to end with more kilometres driven than steps walked.

What is the history of Pleiku?

The Bahnar and the Jarai were the first people of this upland. For many years they made up almost everyone living around Pleiku, farming the Central Highlands from villages that outsiders later lumped together under the borrowed names Montagnards and Degar. Those names came from elsewhere.

The peoples themselves kept their own, and Jarai and Bahnar remain the names that carry weight across Gia Lai. The make-up of the town changed. Kinh settlement gradually made the Kinh the main group inside Pleiku itself, while the older highland communities stayed strongest in the country beyond the built-up streets.

Administration followed a similar arc. Pleiku became the capital of Gia Lai Province and the centre of an urban district of some 260 square kilometres, and it held that role until the provincial reorganisation ended its standing as a city in its own right.

Where is Pleiku?

Pleiku lies inland, high in the Central Highlands. Gia Lai Province surrounds it on every side, upland farm country rather than delta or shore, and nothing here points toward the sea that central Vietnam is usually pictured by. Height keeps the air cooler than the lowlands.

The urban district takes in some 260 square kilometres of that upland, so the edge of town becomes farmland long before it becomes anything else.

What is the climate of Pleiku?

The Central Highlands take the edge off the tropics. Pleiku sits north of the equator in a tropical band, but the height of Gia Lai holds its nights cooler than anywhere on the coast at the same reach of the country. Wet and dry split the year.

Rain settles over the uplands for months and turns the farm tracks of Jarai and Bahnar country heavy, while the dry stretch is when the dust rises off them instead.

How do you get to Pleiku?

Roads bring in nearly every visitor. Pleiku stands well inland in the Central Highlands, so reaching it means climbing out of the lowlands and crossing Gia Lai Province, a run that eats most of a day from the coastal towns of central Vietnam. The town is compact once you are in.

Its urban district is wide, but the streets that matter sit close together, and the balance of those 260 square kilometres is country you drive rather than walk.