Tag Archives: hilly

Bicycle Touring

Day 71: To the coast

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Distance: 106,50 km Time: 5:05 Total distance: 3651 km

Got on the road early and got a really nice landscape because of some clouds,  less traffic because it was not the main road and too small for lots if big trucks😀

Eventually the clouds got more and it started to rain again, but it was still warm,  so I just continued without a raincoat😀 it stopped quickly after 10 minutes,  so it was alright.






After 60 km I reached the end of that road,  and I got back on the main road which follows the cost line. Only 40 km left. From there on it got boring. Just straight roads with traffic,  no hills. I wouldn’t have thought that getting back to such a road would put my mood that much down… But I arrived as I was able to cycle quicker than in the hilly areas.

Now I am in Đà Nẵng and passed Hoi An because I will visit it from here with a motorbike,  which leads to one more day without bicycle 😊 not that I don’t like my bicycle,  but I currently use it a little bit to often😂 But I am visiting Hoi An not alone. Banh (the girl from Kon Tum) joins me tomorrow morning and shows me around Hoi An 😀

In the evening I was just walking around the city center. Got some food at a Vietnamese fast food restaurant. While walking next to the river I realised: they know how to put lights on their bridges around here. I just forgot to take a video, I will try to do it in two days when I am back here.

Because we stay over there for one night,  I don’t know if I will write a post tomorrow as I leave the stuff to get the pictures from my camera to my phone in Đà Nẵng with most of my luggage.

Bicycle Touring

Day 69: flat, flat, hilly

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Distance: 115,11 km Time: 6:34 Total distance: 3457 km

First of all: DON’T PANIC with flat I just mean flat roads,  NOT a flat tire😀

Secondly: Yesterday evening. Of course it didn’t went as I thought,  it got even better😀 Ban,  the girl who picked me up for dinner had to meet some people who wanted to do a trek today. They turned out to be from France and liked playing music. Because we promised to visit the cafe where on of the other two girls were working, we quickly said goodbye to the french people and went to the cafe. After that one closed,  we all went to a guitar bar where we met the french people again. The Vietnamese girls and the french people are really great at playing music and it was a really fun evening.

The evening was also long so getting up in the morning was a little bit hard. At 8 o’clock I then finally left the room and went on search for breakfast. I am really sad that suddenly all the rice places don’t serve rice in the morning… So I got phố again. Some noodles in soup.

So now to the title: in the beginning it the roads were inside a really big valley,  so it was flat nearly always. Eventually it got hilly again😀 As the Ho Chi Minh highway turned twice off main road (main road git to a different road and the Ho Chi Minh highway was a smaller side road), which resulted in less traffic for me😀

On the road then I realised two miscalculations of me:

  1. I was running out of cash,  I thought I would have had one more 500.000 Dong bill,  but there wasn’t. I realised it only the afternoon were I already passed the last town with an ATM. I checked the map: No ATMs until tomorrow at the destination…  I checked my wallet: enough money for a hotel,  dinner,  breakfast but no lunch for tomorrow…  I came up with some solutions. Either go as far as possible get food and the next morning try to get to the ATM as quickly as possible. Another method would have been exchanging or buying stuff with my remaining US Dollar from Cambodia.
  2. The villages I choose to stay in all had no hotels.

And now the solution to both of the problems: In the last village I marked on the map for today I saw a kilometer stone with another city marked in 25 km. I checked my maps,  no city,  no village not even side roads…  I thought the worst that can happen is me cycling the whole night 😂 Or somebody would just host me but I went to that village called Dak Lak. It’s actually a nice little town with everything a guest house and an ATM 😍. The only thing,  I had to cycle so much,  the last 15 km were just me dying up and down the hill,  rolling with 10 to 15 km/h on flat parts… But worth it in the end. Also the landscape was really beautiful,  as there are many hills and when the sun went down,  some were in the shadow and some were still in the sun,  sadly I didn’t took any pictures, I was too exhausted.

Tomorrow I will climb probably my last big climb. Because after celebrating luna new year in Hanoi with my brother and his girlfriend I will return back home. I will leave Thailand, Laos and the rest of Vietnam for another trip or multiple trips. Why probably? Well I never know what will happen on my way to Hanoi😂

Bicycle Touring

Day 65: The other way around

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Distance: 99,76 km Time: 5:45 Total distance: 3149 km

In the morning it was so cold because of the wind and the clouds blocking the sun that I had T-shirt and long-shirt both on. After 2 hours of cycling,  the sun came out and it was hot immediately 😂 The wind stayed though. It was so strong sometimes that I had to slow down while going down as it was hard to control my bike with the speed and the wind pushing me in the middle of the road…










The last few days were always going up first and then going down. Today it was the other way around. First I was going down, to climb again in the afternoon.

Arrived in Buôn Hồ I searched for a hotel. The first one was open but nobody at the reception for 5 minutes,  eventually somebody came shouted a name,  nobody answered and went away again. So I decided to go too. I found a second one, but as they saw me,  they waved with their hands to say noo. They showed me that down the street would be another one. Which I then took. After taking a shower I realized why there was so much dirt on the floor. The whole bathroom was under water. I got to the reception and they gave me new room,  which is freshly painted,  so it still smells in there…

Also I have the impression that people in this town are a little bit strange,  some of them hide and laugh. At least is that my impression of them.

Tomorrow I will just continue following the highway☺️

Bicycle Touring

Day 64: close to raining

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Distance: 70,43 km Time: 4:21 Total distance: 3049 km

Today was a shorter route. I decided not to do the trip to Đă Lat,  as I was told Hue would be better to visit. Todays route was not only shorter but also cloudy, windy and therefore colder. I even changed my T-shirt to a long shirt as it was too cold. I always thought it would start to rain,  but it never did. For the rest I was just climbing to 900 meters to get down again to 700 meters. But it’s never a constant climb,  always up and down and up and down.







When the road gets steeper and there is a fully loaded truck,  then they sometimes roll slower than me 😀


I arrived early in Đăk Mil. I got a room,  packed my luggage out and then was told that I had to leave as the hotel was already full… But they showed me another hotel at the end of the town, not in front of the lake, but the same price.

I walked up and down the main street,  ate an ice cream and waved back to people who waved to me. I found a place where they had fried noodles. Eventually some people from another table joined me to improve a little bit their english. When they left, the girl from the restaurant joined me and invited me on a milk tea😀 We made some funny pictures together☺️


Tomorrow I will continue again on the highway. The highway splits into two roads. One of them passes the Cambodian border really close, that close that it is marked on the other side. I checked in the Internet  and found out in forum posts from 2015 that foreigners are not allowed on that road and send back from military. So I will take the other road.

So here is again some little bit of my equipment. Today I will present the stuff around my head:

  1. Of course my helmet,  I always wear it on my bicycle.
  2. This little funny thing on the upper left side of my face is a mirror attached to my helmet to look behind me. I am so used to it,  that when I am walking in the street,  where I don’t wear the helmet, I sometimes want to look behind me with the mirror, which isn’t there😂
  3. My glasses. Either the normal once or my sunglasses 😎
  4. On can not see them, but they are always there while riding,  my earplugs. For those underneath you who want to shout up and say it’s too dangerous: Shut up,  I hear everything around me,  I even hear people saying “hi” to me😂 So everything is save.
  5. Today because it was so cold,  I started to wear my Buff again around my throat.

Bicycle Touring

Day 63: going up even more

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Distance: 94,59 km Time: 6:12 Total distance: 2979 km

Today nothing really special happened,  expect that I forgot to change the batteries of my GPS so it ran out of juice in the morning. It was no problem as I just followed the highway and my road computer told me how far I went.

Fir the rest it was lots of climbing to somewhere above 800 meters and going down a little bit to the town called Gia Nghĩa. The landscape while going up was amazing☺️

Just notice the smoke next to the truck  😂








When the highway hits a town then the road is transformed into an allay with some green stuff in the middle.


And these are just a few spots. Often there are electricity cables,  houses,  trees or something else in the way to take a picture of it but just by passing by,  the view is great. For example here are cables in the view


For breakfast: rice

For lunch: rice

For dinner: pizza…  wait what? Yeah I found a place where they sold pizzas and some kind of bubble tea😀 Luckily there was a girl who spoke english and so helped the waitress and me to make the order😀

This evening I will check if I should take the train to visit a city a little bit off the highway and get back or just continue on the highway and therefore visit some other places.