Day 13: Thanh My – Kham Duc

Distance: 35.84 mph

Time: 4:00

Average Speed: 8.9 mph

It was nice to get back into the way of having Pho for breakfast again, after a run of hotel buffet breakfasts on the coast. Spotting cans of Pepsi in a display case, I soon regretted asking for one, as it seemed they were impossible to retrieve without the use of kitchen utensils and a lot of ingenuity.

Hitting the road with Pierre, at 9 o’clock, we quickly realised that Thanh My was bigger than we’d realised and perhaps our dinner options weren’t quite so limited as we’d thought. We were back on the Ho Chi Minh Highway, and were wending our way along the side of a river gorge. The day started with rolling hills, but we soon realised that, as the river was flowing in the opposite direction to us, the chances were that the road would be gradually working its way upwards.

Probably thanks to the hilly terrain, the scenery was fantastic, with green-clad peaks all around, and too many spots to stop for photos.

Early in the day, the roads were great, but after 10 or 12 miles, the tarmac disappeared to be replaced by concrete slabs, the rolling on the road being so bad that I checked my tyres for punctures.

We stopped and chatted to a motorcyclist from Michigan, for a while. He worked in the US for 6 months of the year and spent the rest of the year floating around South-East Asia, he was fairly certain, Vietnam was best! He was also fairly certain, the road ahead wasn’t going to get easier for us, so we pressed on.

The road climbed, and climbed with steepening gradient, to 370 metres, before a fast descent back towards the river. Then, while I was waiting for Pierre at the side of the road, a couple in a car pulled up. The female passenger wanted to know if I was looking for Guesthouse 21 in Kham Duc. ‘Yes’ I responded, slightly confused. It turned out that this was the owner of the guesthouse we were aiming for, and she’d stopped to ask Pierre if he needed somewhere to stay, even more fortuitously, we got the last two rooms.

Unfortunately, the guesthouse was still 5 kilometres away, and there was a 10% gradient climb to get out of the way first. Luckily the cloud was hiding us from the full force of the sun, and it was cooler than previous days, so we soon rolled into Kham Duc, to find the guesthouse owner waiting to guide us on her moped. Then, when she walked us to a great little restaurant and ordered our dinner for us as well, she’d really gone above and beyond.