Yeah, we'll probably stick to east - less barren is better as we have no riding buddies and no backup. We'll probably go west up to the national park to see then caves and then come back east. Thanks for all the tips, how come you know that part of the world so well?! When did you ride it?
Wait, what I'm saying you're already past the East/West HCMH thing, unless you're talking about HCMH (west) and 1A (east), if so, I can't recommend highly enough that you avoid the 1A, as the HCMH is pretty, not barren at all, and you can still get to villages where westerners are rare and the people are incredibly kind. I promise, you will not go without. I spent 6 months last year going from Beijing down the coast all the way to Myanmar, and I'm one of those overly-methodical researchers before I budge an inch. There's tons of mis/out-dated information on blogs and out of people's mouths, so I tried to synthesize it all so I could actually make sense of it at some point :D