Two days ago, when I went out to Go Lao waterfall with Mark the Israeli, the condition of the road we took along with Google's inability to find any lodging along said tertiary road cemented my decision to instead take the QL6/AH13. Today, thinking it was going to be a very short day, probably going no farther than Mộc Châu, I decided it would be okay to take the tertiary road.
I should have taken the tertiary road the whole way. It's the Old Route 6. What took me 42km to do yesterday would have taken me 64km instead and almost all of those extras curves and wiggles which I would have had to put up with instead would have served the same role as switchbacks. I'm also reasonably sure that the highest elevation on Old Route 6 is a good 200 meters lower than the high pass on current Route 6. Furthermore, while I may have thought the scenery along the main road yesterday was stunning, that's only because I didn't have the scenery along the tertiary road to compare it to. Much of the earliest part of my morning ride today was stop and go and stop and go not because of potholes or bad pavement but because I simply had to keep stopping and taking pictures.
More really fancy dress being worn for really mundane activities
You can't see too well in this picture but I'm on some kind of plateau and the way things are all uppy downy, the world just sort of ends the other side of that hill
Even though it's not relevant for cyclists, I'm really glad both countries have started using jersey barriers and other sorts of modern highway barriers
Woke up. Limped my way down the stairs to the first floor. Because the stairway to and from the cave is in such bad condition, it was more of a full body climbing exercise than it was ordinary going up and down stairs. As a result, I am still capable of going up and down stairs after the equivalent of climbing to the top of a 74 storey building.
A few hundred meters downhill from the hotel and almost exactly at my turnoff I found breakfast noodles. The ramen from the night before hadn't really filled me up and, even after the twinkie cakes from the hotel mini bar, I was famished. Figuring that I wasn't going to find coffee on the tertiary road, I treated myself to a can of coke instead.
Left to stay on the modern QL6, Right to go to the old QL6
The tertiary road had some uphill but, overall, it was mostly downhill. A nice leisurely downhill, the sort where the grade doesn't push the bike too fast. I rode on the brakes more because of the unfenced cliff off to my right and the possibility of sudden potholes than I did because of a steep downhill. There was almost no traffic to speak of on the road and combined with my having gotten rid of the front fender the other day, the silence underneath my music was wonderful.
At the intersection to Mộc Châu, I had the option to go right or left. Right would mean heading north on the QL43 and taking a ferry across the Da River before eventually rejoining the QL6/AH13 about 120km later. As detours go, it looked like it would be a beautiful one. Left meant heading into Mộc Châu and visiting Hang Dơi—the Bat Cave—before almost certainly giving up for the day because I was so wiped from yesterday. Since I didn't see anything wrong with the idea of first turning left then doubling back and going right, I went left. It wasn't until I was about half way to Mộc Châu that I took a look at the possible lodging options.
I really like the sheer amount of useful information on a rural milemarker. Road I'm on. Kilometer I'm at. Distance to next important thing.
One of the rare older trucks I saw in Vietnam. Also, didn't see any of the secondhand Japanese trucks with the steering on the wrong side which were common 12 years ago.
By turning left, I had either committed myself to giving up today at Mộc Châu or, since the topo map indicated a fairly long downhill on the primary road, going about 50km past Mộc Châu to the next town of any size. Basically, there's very little lodging in this area and it's all inconveniently located. Go north on the QL43 and I'd have 80km from Mộc Châu before I had someplace to stay!
I made it as far as the Bat Cave ticket booth. I even bought a ticket. Then I saw the stairs. I didn't see how far up the mountain the stairs went. I saw that there were stairs and that these stairs continued up into the green until the trees hid how many more stairs there were. It could have been another 1000 stair climb. It could have been an 100 stair climb. It could have even been a dozen stairs. It was still too many stairs. Plus, even though I'd taken my pannier and my pedals with me, Mộc Châu is close enough to being an actual big town that I wasn't really comfortable just leaving my bike on the sidewalk.
The descent on the main road was beautiful. Generally not as steep as the crazy ridiculous horrible steep descents in Chonqing, it had a few nasty steep bits that had me grabbing the brakes. Most of the time, however, I alternated between coasting and using the brakes to slow myself enough that I didn't need to worry about oncoming vehicles overtaking in my lane.
I just kept going down and down and down and down. Sometimes I'd be on flat terrain long enough to pedal. Sometimes there would be a short steep bit of up. Then there would be more down and down and down.
Looking out over the emptiness to the road as it hugs the mountainside on it's way down to the bottom
By the time I got to Yên Châu the ratio of people wearing something approaching "traditional clothing" had gone from around 1 in 6 to 1 in 3. Even some of the men were wearing at least one piece of traditional clothing. Even some of the young men. There were concessions to modernity in that almost all the pleated skirts were printed synthetics instead of heavily embroidery hand woven brocade but brocades and embroidery also showed up. One young woman had a clearly embroidered skirt in day-glo green
In Yên Châu after dinner, I paid 20,000 dong extra to get a hotel room on the third floor instead of the fourth. As it was, making it up the stairs to the third was still a difficult task and remembering what it was like in the days after I climbed the stairs at Taishan, at Emeishan, and at that random mountain in Yunnan, I'm not really looking forward to going back downstairs tomorrow morning.
Today's ride: 83 km (52 miles) Total: 1,328 km (825 miles)
