Today was overcast most of the morning. We tried to stay parallel to the main highway along the coast, and had some nice tailwind for a while.
The route planning took us again along some dirt roads and a lot of country roads through small villages. At one point, the navigation tried to convince us to go down something that looked more like a game trail than a roadway….
But the day was mostly flat with lots of coastal towns that made fo interesting cycling.
About the last 2/3 of the trip it started raining on us – not a short downpour, but a steady drizzle, that just soaked everything. On top of that, the last 5-10 km into Hue was a really nasty cement/rocky road, where the top level of cement was gone, and all that was left were lots of stones sticking out – no potholes, just lots of mid-sized stones sticking out that you could not avoid – just drive over. I felt like my kidneys got rattled down to my ankles during the course of the last hour.
In the end, we arrived in Hue – former Imperial Capital of Vietnam.
First thing, was to take a shower, and rinse out all the clothes…..
As a major tourist site in Vietnam, Hue had a farily large tourist / backpacker quarter in town – closed on Sunday to traffic, which made it quite pleasant to wander through the bars, and restaurants catering to western tastes.
But, since Hue is regarded as also one of the culinary capitals of Vietnamese cooking, we went to a local restaurants restaurants highly recommended (expecting to find lots of tourists, but hardly any there) and had some of the local treats (that they had to show us first how to eat).
While here, I researched a bit about Hue and the American War – this was the site of some of the bitterest battles during the American War – it was about 10 days of door to door, house to house battles with major losses on both sides.
(84km / 140m)