Nha Trang - December 8th

Today is the monster day, 100km.  The transfer out of Da Lat is short, so it is early, and quite cool, when we get on the bikes.  Being 1500m up there is a noticeable temperature difference here, although it’s not quite cold enough for the woolly hats the locals are sporting.

The first two sections of 20km are the toughest so far (for me at least) with some long steep hills in them, and although there are descents, at the end of them we are 150m higher than where we started.  This is noticeable in two ways, first because my legs are hurting for the first time and secondly because we are now in the clouds, getting quite damp, and with poor visibility.  Our two stops provide us with the usual array of refreshments, before we start the next leg of the trip, the monster 30km that brings us to lunch.

Actually this isn’t as bad as it sounds because the 30km is all downhill.  We drop down a full 1500m and at times it is quite fast.  As we started off in the clouds with poor visibility there were some safety worries but we descended to dry ground pretty quickly.  During this section though there were 100s of waterfalls of all shapes and sizes along the road.  I stopped to take photos of a few but the rest of the group seemed to carry on and as I didn’t want to be last I started descending a bit quicker.  I may have taken a corner or two a bit quicker than I intended, and if the traffic police were policing the 30kmph zones, they might have given me a ticket.

We had a pho lunch at a restaurant and then headed off for 2 more 15km sections back to the coast.  But the rain up the mountains which had formed the waterfalls had followed us down and now it was bucketing down.  But off we set, although it wasn’t too long before I couldn’t see much out of my glasses.  I was going to give up with 15km to go, but as it turned out our bus had broken down so there was no choice but to go forward to the final stop.  It was a bit hairy at times, and very wet.  The bus eventually caught up with us and got us to our hotel in Nha Trang for hot showers, food and well deserved beers.