D39: Na Rì to Thất Kê

March 14, 2018

I just wrote a long entry and had it disappear with a login screen when I clicked "save". Be careful people and make sure that the site realizes you are logged in.

Just a few switchbacks and curves, nothing too extreme

Even though the road from Bắc Kạn to Thất Kê is labeled the QL3B and therefore is a national road, it is not what one thinks of when one thinks "national road" for most any nation including Vietnam. It's got the possibility of becoming such a road but it's not there yet.

At least along the first part of the first stretch between Bắc Kạn and Na Rì, it's been upgraded. It's a full lane in either direction. There are narrow shoulders and drainage ditches and metal railings and all those things you expect to find. It's ridiculously unpleasantly steep and could never safely have any kind of truck traffic but it's definitely a main road. Somewhere, about halfway to Na Rì, maybe more, maybe less, it stops being a main road and starts being a "something else". There are signs visible that they intended for the construction to continue but they never finished and it's been long enough ago that they stopped work that the half finished work is starting to crumble and decay from being undone.

A butterfly in one of the paved drainage ditches

Looking down at the switchbacks I just came up

From Na Rì to Thất Kê, it's a whole nother level of undone. There's a thin strip of blacktop running down the middle of a three lane wide cut that has been cut and compacted and abandoned. It was like Construction Site Rapture with all the heavy equipment and workers being carried off to heaven. There weren't even piles of gravel or stone next to the sometimes half paved drainage ditches.

Judging by this cut, I think they plan on straightening the road

When I left Na Rì I was leaving a real town. It had hotels, hospitals, ATMs and roundabouts. I even stopped at one of those ATMs to get just enough money to last me through to leaving Vietnam.

Despite yesterday's big mountain and the knowledge that today was going to have a big mountain, I expected from the number of small villages to the south of Na Rì that I'd still be going through villages and towns. I was wrong. I was very very wrong. From the first minute that I crossed the urban rural dividing line and the road changed from two lanes with a sidewalk to a single lane, it wasn't just rural, it was very very rural. It was the kind of rural where I was able to count the number of 4 wheeled vehicles I saw all day. (22 in case you were curious.)

I love the way it drops from two plus lanes with shoulders to half a lane

At Cường Lợi commune, about three or four kilometers north of Na Rì, I initially took the wrong fork in the road because both the national road and the unnumbered, unnamed farm road were similar quality paving and a similar width. It was the lack of milemarker stones that clued me in. Google tells me I could have stayed on that road and after going 15km could join back up with the QL3B 10km down the road. Knowing what GoogleMaps Vietnam thinks is a perfectly acceptable road, I think it's probably a good idea that I didn't do that.

Shortly after Cường Lợi the switchbacks start. This is the first time in Vietnam that I've really seen any switchbacks and even with the switchbacks, it was still a 10% grade. Coming on the heels of yesterday's big climb and not having the width to add zigzags the way I had yesterday, I found myself walking.

The undone roadworks started somewhere around the time I got up on the ridgeline. The road I was riding on must have been paved after the roadworks started and stopped. With the sheer amount and scale of cuts made into the mountain, there was no way that the narrow not-quite-one-lane wide strip of blacktop and gravel which I was riding on had been the original road. There were hints here and there when it had a sharp curve or went down and up again in a place that almost certainly should have a bridge or a berm that this 100 meter stretch was original, but mostly it wasn't.

The roadworks that weren't roadworks went on for a very long time. Long enough that I stopped the music and started the audiobooks. Long enough that even riding most of the time I managed to go through a quite a number of stories on Escape Pod before I got to something normalish, old and ratty tatty instead of incomplete.

Funnily enough, this was one of the only pieces of earthmoving equipment I saw all day

I had plenty of sunlight left when I got into Thất Kê. Plenty of sunlight but absolutely no energy. I'd had a big breakfast and I'd taken leftovers with me but I never had lunch and two days in a row with big mountains had really taken their toll. I bought an incredible amount of meat from a market stall and ate protein and fat until I couldn't cram any more food in my overstuffed stomach. Then I drank glasses of iced Milo and waited for my digestion to allow me to eat more.

Tomorrow, I'm going to be in China!

Road's so new it doesn't have milemarker numbers yet

And it's definitely Chinese not old "written with Chinese characters" Vietnamese. I know cause I can read and understand it.

Today's ride: 56 km (35 miles)
Total: 1,927 km (1,197 miles)

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