Quy Nhon - December 10th

Today we started from our hotel instead of being bussed out to a starting point.  Luckily it was along the sea front so there was no traffic approaching us from the right hand side, which is the side you worry about.  It was quite a nice ride, although there was one point where myself and one other took a wrong turn and added a few hundred metres to our journey.  This was a 90km day and we did 50km before lunch in a 20km, 15km and 15km split.

I would like to say the ride was along the sea the whole way, but after our first 20km we turned onto NH1, which is the main road between Saigon and Hanoi.  I was a bit worried about cycling on this busy road, but it wasn’t as busy as it could have been, and it was wide enough to have a lane for bikes and motorbikes.  As I was just relaxing after my cycle on this road, I realised there was no Dorota so I began to worry again.  It turned out that her chain had come off and she had to walk 2km while waiting for the mechanic to arrive to fix it.

After lunch in a local restaurant where the idea was that we could go to the beach and have a quick dip, but given the wind offshore the waves make it far too difficult to do this.  So we just eat another of the Vietnamese 5+ course meals and then we set off in the bus to start cycling again.  The cycling this time is not on the main road, and is back by the coast.  We get to see lots of fishing boats and then some great costal scenery, but it got windier and windier.  At one point we came around a headland and ground to a complete halt on the uphill part.  I had to get off my bike and walk, but the funny thing was that when I got back on for the downhill I was still at a standstill.

The last leg of this session was also 20km, but Dorota and I decided that we had had enough of the wind in our face, so we skipped the session ad got on the bus.  This turned out to be a great idea because it started raining very heavily, and we still had 2 hours on the bus to get to our next hotel when we were finished.  We arrived at our hotel at 7pm, our latest finish, and we were treated to the joint karaoke sessions of a wedding and a Christmas party that were going on.