I was very close to exactly 100km from Mai Châu town when I stopped last night in Nho Quan. Mai Châu was the stunning highlight of my 2006 trip to Vietnam. After being nickled and dimed, shortchanged, baited and switched, and just about every other unpleasant tourist tactic you could think of (including a guy who attempted to charge us 100,000 dong to use the free toilets near the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum), the guesthouse owner in Mai Châu was pleasant and consistently gave us what she told us she would give us without changing the price or the product mid deal. We had found out about Mai Châu from another tourist who gave us her business card and, in turn, we passed along the handful of cards pressed on us at departure.
These ongoing road repairs are some of the first really truly bad road quality I've seen in Vietnam. The roads are amazing.
Being as it's been 12 years, I didn't remember the name Mai Châu but Reddit's /r/vietnam came to the rescue! I thought it might be Sapa but someone recognized the town from my description and an image search confirmed it. Of course, I had to go.
The great and powerful Oz (by which I mean Google) showed some scattered lodging along the QL12B but the way it was spaced meant I would either have to do ~50km for the day (probably too little) or at least 80km. Although the terrain on the topo map looks like it'd probably be flattish and karst the whole way, I wanted options that gave me more chances to stop. Of course these options came with more mountains but, I'm okay with that, mountains are pretty.
Unlike most of the temples that involve climbing, this one had what I felt was safe parking so I decided to explore
I decided I would turn south from the QL12B on to the Ho Chi Minh Road to Cẩm Thủy then take the QL217 west along the south bank of the Nam Ma River. This was an excellent decision on my part. The early part of the day I got misty mizzle and cloud shrouded karst while most of the afternoon I got mountain roads that were generously graded such that it wasn't until nearly sunset and pushing fatigue that I really had to bother shifting down much.
This is a piss floor on the women's side. The foot pegs are to keep you from stepping in the pee on the floor. The squat toilet with the door is only for people who are shitting.
To provide a gentle grade up and over the mountain, this incredibly overbuilt berm stretches far out into the plains. I'd have thought switchbacks would make more sense.
When I turned off the Ho Chi Minh road for the QL217 the road quality, which had already been dropping for a while, got preciptiously worse. The scenery also got more interesting. Not beautiful mind you. Just interesting. Things to look at that weren't like all the other things. Chickens to dodge. Potholes to avoid. Water buffalo giving birth.
The non-pregnant (possibly male) buffalo is totally unconcerned by the whole process
I'm not a huge fan of soup noodles and, even thought they are delicious soup noodles, I've gotten quite tired of Phở and I've started making a point of trying to order anything else. Some people are remarkably resistant to the point and smile method combined with short sentences from Google Translate like "All Vietnamese food is delicious." and "Cook delicious food please." while others immediately seem to understand and accept what I'm trying to get across.
For breakfast I had fried noodles with chicken. For lunch a tofu dish and an already fried thing I'd pointed at in the kitchen. Dinner was beef with pineapple and a vegetable soup. Funnily enough, dinner was at the second restaurant I tried because the first just wasn't getting my meaning and my pointing and smiling at the first had involved both beef and pineapple!
Point and smile got me fried tofu, what appear to be deep fried rice balls of some kind, and coffee
After dinner, I went straight across the street to the closest sign I saw for a Nhà Nghỉ and got a very very cheap first floor room that was also among the less comfortable places I've had the fortune (or misfortune) to spend the night.
Today's ride: 90 km (56 miles) Total: 1,133 km (704 miles)
