D33: Hà Nội to Gia Khánh

March 8, 2018

It's not like I even stayed up all that late last night. However, my never very accurate internal time clock remains messed up from the bus affair and none of the windows in my nicely quiet fifth floor room especially point in a bedwards direction so I slept and slept and slept and slept.

11am. I woke up at 11am. Considering that I didn't bike yesterday, didn't tire myself out, didn't stay up past midnight, wasn't sick, that's a crazy amount of time spent being asleep. On the plus side, I feel as refreshed as I have at any time since well before this trip began.

Pack up my stuff. Somehow, even though I haven't added anything since the t-shirt I bought the last time I was in Hanoi, it doesn't want to fit as nicely. Eventually, I make it work though not as elegantly as I'd like.

If you have to stay in the big city, this place is quite nice

I check out of my hotel, get everything all set up on the bike, and head over to the Hanoi Bicycle Collective. I'd talked up my bike so much that I couldn't not drop in before I left and show off the spiffy bits like my quick release pedals, the coupler system, my funky handlebar extensions, or my bottle bags. Left the bike there while heading two or three doors down to a vegan buffet which only managed to redeem itself by virtue of being exceptionally cheap. Considering how much Vietnamese food comes vegan without even trying, I don't understand how it could be so bland...

I don't exactly remember the bridge I cross over the Red River but, since it heads to the airport, I must have crossed it in 2006 when I biked to the airport to pick up Mike. It's a train and car and bike bridge with one way bike lanes on either side of the train tracks and a car and truck bridge over top of that. Really quite spiffy.

Rail overhead to my left, highway swooping in the from the right and here I am on one of two (one each direction) two wheel only bridges

I don't think this suspension bridge was here last time I was in Vietnam

Down the other side I obstinately go straight whenever the road goes straight. I've spent enough time checking the electronic maps to know that pretty much all the little surface roads eventually connect to bigger things and I have no interest in riding on the bigger things until I'm forced to. Every so often when I get to forks in the road or T intersections or just feel like maybe I'm no longer heading north-ish, I pull out the phone, check where I am, and make an on-the-fly decision for where this now means I'm going.

I'm mostly heading for Thái Nguyên. I'm just not doing it in a straight north line. Unless I really wiggle all over the place, I figure I probably have no more than a week or ten days left in Vietnam. Honestly, for all that I like the food, the cheap hotel rooms with fans, and the beds that are hard but not painfully hard, I'm looking forward to being back in China.

Totally random mural about swimming. Does not appear to be a swimming pool or a place which sells pool supplies.

For some large portion of the day I end up the QL2A. It's a dual carriageway but, as these things go, it's not that bad. I arrive in Vĩnh Yên with 30 or 40 minutes to spare before sunset and, after confirming which directions I can go in and still find lodging, I head down a small road to the town of Gia Khánh. In theory, the road I've chosen to take is DT302C which means that even though it's not a primary motorway, it should be a pretty good road. In reality, the bit I'm on goes from concrete to absolutely delightful mountainbike trail before suddenly hitting ratty tatty two lanes of blacktop. It feels like the road builders got almost all the way in to Vĩnh Yên and then for some inexplicable reason stopped.

As divided highways go, this isn't too bad

I figured the surface road was going to go straight and that I didn't need to climb the bridge. I figured wrong. Since I refused to turn around and backtrack 500 feet, there was quite a bit of detouring involved to keep going forward.

Oh if only there wasn't so much litter everywhere, this country would be so pretty

Today's ride: 66 km (41 miles)
Total: 1,584 km (984 miles)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	1
Comment on this entry	Comment	0