Quảng Uyên (day 12)

A typical start to the day, but we decided to opt for a lighter breakfast of fresh fruit with our black coffees. The street was bustling again with vendors displaying their wares. The shop between the hotel and cafe had skinned pig heads smoking 🐷. S said it’s a delicacy, and used thinly sliced in various dishes around Lunar New Years. A spotted a vendor with deep Fried bread balls. They had a little sweet bean paste inside, chewy and delicious 😜

We left town, destined for Khau Coc Cha Mountain pass. We were excited as the photos in the hotel lobby looked like we were in a for an epic ride. S mentioned that some tourists had issues riding the road and were injured 😵 so they were improving the road to widen the turns 😔 Sadly, the whole area was under construction repair, and very rough. Thankfully no one was working, so our ride was fairly unobstructed. The continuous mountain ridges and cascading valleys provided a number of smaller steep passes with multiple tight corners for our riding pleasure, making up for the anticlimactic initial pass…

Our trajectory kept us close to the China-Vietnam boarder where we found ourselves on an intermittently muddy track with the occasional "Vietnam Boarder Beltline" sign we can only assume indicates the road is primarily used for patrols. We connected with the main road and veered through the Vietnam boarder town, Sóc Giang.

Heading east for a short stint brought us to Ha Quang, where we stopped in the 24C heat for a quick lunch of the usual fare. After our break we zipped along a narrow track highway, and various single track concrete roads. S decided the ride was in need of a little more off-road action, so took us on a detour through a very rugged and rocky trail meandering through some of the local farms.

Eventually we found ourselves in a lush green rolling field scattered with various herds grazing. We wondered why there wasn’t much farming in the valley, only to find out it floods into a shallow lake during summer. After a couple bends in the valley, we had an amazing view of a mountain with One Eye (Nui Mat Than), the eye. We waved to the group of Aussies and Brits we had met a couple days earlier, but they were going the other direction. We soon found out why. A nearly impassable short section that took all three of us to maneuver the bikes through the slippery muddy rocky path, one at a time. We were exhausted and drenched in sweat after 30 minutes of slipping, lifting, and pushing. The effort paid off as the valley continued to open up in a heavenly lost-world fashion.

One final steep muddy slope, and we were on a flat mucky track back to the main road. We stopped briefly to hose off the mud and manure before meandering through the twisty flat valleys, and into Quảng Uyên for the night at our hotel.

It's the first hotel with a shower stall of glass! Only half the bathroom got wet as it still leaked a bit. Amazingly the beds are not rock hard 🥳

Dinner was scrumptious! "KFC" chicken, as S called it; very tender too! Sweet and sour mini ribs, greens with garlic, pickled cabbage and fried rice.Read more