Blog / Down to Sea Level

24 December 2011

This isn't going to be pleasant, this isn't going to be comfortable, but it is going to be. It's supposedly pretty much all downhill on good surface, so hopefully I should be in Hue well inside four hours.

It's been raining all night, and though it's eased off a bit, it's still raining now. As Hue's lower, it should at least be a couple of degrees warmer down there. I've scoped the route into town and have a hotel recommendation that I'm headed for.

Right!

So, good surface? Nope. All downhill? Nope. Rain all day? Pretty much. Another slog of a day, made worse by poor food planning.

I broke Matthew's first law of banh my today, namely: If you see banh my on the road, buy them. I paid for this on QL49, where food options were limited. I popped a gel at 33km down, but otherwise completed the ride on an empty stomach. The ride also contained some of the steepest sections of climbing in the whole trip, though fortunately only one of them turns into a full-on climb, and even that isn't huge.

Hue was a little impenetrable at first. My route in didn't go as planned, as my maps are less than perfect, but it wasn't hard to failover onto an on-the-fly route direct to the core. Just having an electronic map that can show your position is a complete game changer, even if the map is short on detail. Call me perverse, but being back in swarming traffic was fun.

The hotel recommendation was spot on (thanks Lesley!) and after cleaning up, I ate and ate and ate, something that'll probably be a theme of the next couple of days off the bike.

74km, 16.5km/h, 4hr28min, 2727km

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