I was up and putting the trailer on the bike by 5:30am, Ho Chi Min was already up and moving and it was time for me to say good bye. Well good bye took two hours, well that is how long it took me to get out of the city, well till I hit the next city anyway. The smog was up early as well, it is really bad, I had a face mask but still in was horrible. I think the only way to describe it is if you put a cigarette up each nostril and one in your mouth and smoked them all at once, maybe one in each ear as well.
My path out was pretty easy, hit roundabout take 3rd right, then take 2nd left stay on that road for about 15kms over a bridge, then turn left again and head into the rising sun for 25km and then right and head to the hills for 40km and then stop for the night in hopefully a town with a hotel or something. Or something, well that will come more to write first.
After negotiating the inner city traffic and heading towards my left turn in to the rising sun I nearly went the wrong way, the problem with the roads is you don’t know where you are and most of the time I am working by north south east west and 30minutes riding equals 10km or so. The road signs are all in Vietnamese and asking someone on the side of the road is generally going to get you in even worse position.
After a quick U-turn across a duel lane road which is no easy feat, and then negotiating the roundabout I was back on the road into the rising sun, so had to stop and put my sunglasses on. Then it was off again on the open road, which really was not that open as there are buildings on both sides of the road all the way to the next city and then about 10km out of that as well.
By the time I finally out of all the buildings it was time to make the left turn towards the hills. The hills had already begun but just small rolling hills, and that was the way it went for most of the day, I seemed to be doing more Ascending than descending so I was progressively gaining altitude as you would expect doing more ascending.
For a while now I have been riding through rice paddy fields and flat land now I was into the rubber plantations, it was a nice change. As I headed over one hill I dropped down to a bridge over a river, which is what their there for, but the different thing about this area was, there were houses on the river floating (which is lucky for the owners), a whole town of floating houses, it was pretty interesting to see. The people also row boats different as well, they use their feet, it is pretty cool indeed. I spent a bit of time doing some photo’s and then headed off. Also ran into a load of guys out for a weekend ride on old army bikes, there were about 12 in all, pretty cool to see.
The last hill into Dinh Quan was a right dog of a hill, it was hot and long so long, one of those hill were you go around the corner and start to cry when you see there is still more hill to go. Once at the top there was a small downhill and then I was in the town managed to find a hotel with some help from the locals and it was right next to the market, I could get fruit.
I got my room and jumped in the shower, I had just got dry and had just put some shorts on when I got a knock at the door, I open to find the manager at my door, now she cannot speak English and from the sign language she was see if I wanted a shag, which of cause it would have cost me, I politely turned her down, and then realized I would not get a lot of sleep that night as it was a brothel. Great, luckily it was not to bad and they seemed to be using the rooms away from mine. The funniest thing was I was up at 5:30 the next morning and had to wake them up to get my passport back.
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