The highway leaving Bai Xep is as expected – beautiful. But from there out the ride wasn’t anything spectacular, just a lot of dirt, trucks, and motorbikes.
The following day we cheated on Didge. With him away at the doctors we played in the city on 2 automatic bikes, and decided to ride to Da Nang to see the beach there and play a little in traffic (sorry mum.) This resulted in very few photos as the click-a-holic who is normally a passenger on the motorbike was in charge of a big rig herself, needing both hands to concentrate.
After a day of fun on the road and with Didge safely back home, we tucked ourselves into bed and hoped that the rain we could hear would clear for the following day's ride to Hue. The following morning didn't go as planned. We set off with rain clouds lurking above for our ride but after a 30km ride into Da Nang we realised it was too unsafe/too bloody miserable to keep going, the rain was torrential, we were soaked despite our trusty ponchos and the roads were quickly turning to lakes. We pulled in for the night at Funtastic Backpackers for a night's stay and prayed to the rain gods to cut it out. The afternoon cleared enough for us to head out to the headland at Da Nang. Although those pesky clouds were looming above the view was still pretty amazing. We woke up the next day and after a tough conversation over banana pancakes we decided to take the risk to jump back on the road again, regardless of what the skies were telling us. We left Da Nang just as the rain started to fall and somehow managed to dodge it for the rest of the day. We were pretty excited, as today was the day we would ride the Hai Van pass (as seen on Top-Gear). We very quickly fell in love with the road and were like love sick puppies over the views. Admittedly, the road took us way longer than it would have if it were not so beautiful, but we are very willing to give up our time for views like this. |
I better go, we are arriving in Dong Ha, a town of little interest to tourists but where tourists are of a lot of interest to locals. I must wave, we're pretty much royalty.