Woke to a light drizzle. A quick brekky, then on the road again. Here’s the profile we did today:

Cycling In the misty mist…
Up at pretty good elevation still, we started to do with a nice long downhill through a river valley and then flat continuing along the river. While the mist was so thick I could barely see through my glasses most of the time, I could tell that we were in an incredibly beautiful magical place with limestone cliffs, carsts, the clear green river, and small villages all along.

You can definitely see the people look a lot more Chinese where we are now compared to where we started. This day probably had the greatest numbers of kids yelling hello out to us as we rode by. Often times, you would hear these groups of kids off in the distance and you have to look around to see where they were, and they’d be across the river working in the field all standing together screaming helloooo and waving and you had to yell pretty loud back at them hello! I’ve often had that experience in other parts of rural SE Asia. It makes you smile happy big time!

We are in Yen Minh, not huge town, but big enough to have a reasonably nice hotel. In Vietnam, the tourism board requires all hotels to maintain on-site crowing roosters and/or barking dogs to ensure quality Asian ambiance and to alleviate confusion for occupants about where they are if they inadvertently happen to achieve sleep and wake up in the dark. This hotel is assigned a barking dog which seems to be conveniently located below my window. I hope they don’t try to charge me extra…

The temperature here is cool enough that you need long pants, but not long sleeves at least for me. Some of the other people have their heavy coats on already, but I’m pretty comfortable in this temperature. We got here mid-day, so a stroll around the town is possible, for a change. Clearly Chinese influence here; we’ve been seeing more cars with Chinese license plates.

Came across a bunch of bee hives…

Then came across a shaman type with a horn growing out of his forehead. No, really!!

A cool but scenic day!

My buddy Paul and me chilling’…

As you may recall, Redspokes is the bike tour company based in the UK, so Brits are dominant in the group. Therefore, chips are always desired. Here’s me enjoying chips and red chilis, Vietnam style…

Tomorrow is a big day; 70k and climbing 7400′!! Yikes!! G’night…