February 22, 2018
D19: Phủ Lý to Yên Thịnh
When I picked Vietnam for ̶l̶a̶s̶t̶ this year's Chinese New Year's Adventure, I didn't fully consider the implications of Tet being the same holiday as Chinese New Year. Other things I didn't consider include the weather and my route. All things being equal, I think this may be one of the least planned out tours I've ever done. Even the magnificently poor planning of my bike trip to Yunnan was still planned out well in advance. It just failed to take critical aspects of the terrain into consideration.
The only things I knew for certain about this trip were that I would enter at the Dongxing/Móng Cái border where I entered in 2006, and that I would go to Ninh Bình. Everything else, including what day I entered and how long I stayed in the country, was negotiable. I'd picked Ninh Bình as my probably southernmost point because I'd visited with Mike in 2006 and, although it suffered from the same "tourists as walking wallets" attitude as nearly everywhere we went that trip, we had mostly enjoyed ourselves there.
While in Hanoi, I looked up Ninh Bình on Wikipedia. Not for the purpose of knowing more about the province or the town or the karst formations or the caverns or the boat trips-no, nothing as thorough as that. I looked it up so I could get the correct accent marks in the right places. At the end of the article, Phát Diệm Cathedral is mentioned and I thought, we went there! So I added it to my itinerary.
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When I came into Phủ Lý last night I thought perhaps I would continue east southeast to Nam Định and then go south to the cathedral. However, it seemed that that would mean spending even more time on the flat flatlands which have an unpleasant tendency to be boring and gusty and there was a road I could take west that went winding through the karst and I thought that would be ever so much better. Sure, it would mean that when I doubled back to go to Ninh Bình and then onwards to Mai Châu that I would have to cross my own path but it is what it is.
After spending far too much time in the morning debating whether to go through the middle of the karst landscape or to hug the eastern edge and ride alongside the Sông Đáy river, I picked the karst. It wouldn't even be that hilly as the karst peaks tend to be less like hills and more like very large rocks scattered across the landscape.
For all of the morning and a decent part of the afternoon it was a good ride. Cool but not too cool. Misty but not quite mizzling. Limited traffic. It wasn't until well after lunch that the ride started becoming something less. I'm can't pinpoint exactly when. Sometime after the roadworks started on the QL12B for sure but even then, I just don't know exactly. Karst and mist and river and people planting rice. And karst and mist and river and people planting rice. And more karst and more mist and more river and more people planting rice. It was monotonous. Even with the parts of my brain that had to focus on things like not hitting giant potholes or sections of gravel, I was growing tired of the scenic mountains, the scenic mist, the scenic waterways, and the scenic people planting their scenic rice.
I turned the music off and the audiobooks on.
And kept riding, riding, riding.
Got to Highway 1 where I lasted all of a half kilometer before I turned back off again on a road that would soon enough turn to thick clay mud that needed to be slipped and slid through on foot because my wheels wouldn't turn. Mercifully, that only lasted about half a kilometer (but a very long half kilometer) before I was on pavement and heading north to back to the QL12B.
(QL's are national roads, DT's appear to be provincial and unnumbered are both a bad idea and a lot more fun.)
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I was well on my way to making it to the town where Phát Diệm is located and hitting a 100km day when the rain started in earnest. Serendipitously, it did this as I was passing a restaurant that was next to a sign for a hotel. I decided that 89km was enough for one day and went in to order food at random.
All things considered, both the meal and the lodging were quite alright. If not for the smokers at the next table irritating my cough, I could have sat and continued to order random things for quite some time.
Today's ride: 89 km (55 miles)
Total: 932 km (579 miles)
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