Day 5 - Pho Chau to Quy Dat

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The Minh Tu resort hotel in Pho Chau turned out to be very good and we got a really good nights sleep and ate seafood and chicken fried rice for dinner followed by a breakfast in the morning. It was also an opportunity to get laundry done which we handed in all our cycling and some personal clothes and they were ready at 8am the following morning. We set off cycling around 8.20 and headed down the HCM trail south. After about 10 minutes the Austrialian guys who we met on day 3 passed us on there mopeds and sounded there horns, we couldn't believe we are still level pegging with them. For then next 40ks the landscape was rural with houses but it wasn't pretty like the day before, there was distant forest covered mountain ranges either side but nothing spectacular. About 25ks in there was a guy running up the road in front of us, kitted out with Lycra, vest and running socks / trainers pushing  a three wheeled trolley with his belongings in. We ridden along side him and he spoke little English but he said he was running from Hanoi all the way to Singapore!!!!!, we couldn't believe it. We wished him luck and we peddled past him and when we discussed it we actually recognised the guy as he was staying in our hotel and we had seen him in the restaurant the previous evening. We also recalled a conversation with Donald from the Bikers Rest Cafe that he had seen him a day or so before we called through.

Further down the HCM it was more rural and we had a few issues with dogs chasing us today from out of people's front houses, we hadn't had this before so couldn't understand why this was happening now,  but we got chased literally about five or six times today and it was like we were doing interval training every few kilometres. We stopped for coffee after a couple of hours and then continued through various towns were we went past a guy stood next to his parked car outside a barbers shop. He had made the most ridiculous attempt to convert his car into a replica Lamborghini, we actually went past and decided to go back to have a look. We parked our bikes at the side of the road and he seamed really happy we came back to check out his ride. We asked him what type of car it was, he gave no answers, he got in and reversed it so we could take a better look. By this time we had attracted a large crowd, we started taking pictures of the car and the crowd took pictures of us taking pictures of the car. We had a picture with the car owner and we asked if we could sit in the car and he nodded. Being a "Lambo" I tried to open the door upwards but his engineering skills didn't stretch that far. We got in and had our pictures done with the crowd laughing at us with our cycling gear on and helmet sat in the car. He'd ripped the dashboard speedo out and put a Tablet in its place, not a clue if it was connected.

We continued down the HCM and the road really opened up either side with the main Hanoi / HCMC train line at the side of us, to our right was a huge mountain range with a hydro plant which was the second one we had seen today. We then turned back south westwards and went through limestone mountain ranges, the scenery was spectacular and the riding was pretty tough because the temperatures were hitting 31 degree today with baking sun, four days ago it was 22 degree and raining. The last climb we did was around 4ks with 10% ramps, after doing plus 130ks today it was pretty tough with a loaded bike and by the time we arrived in the town of Quy Dat we were certainly ready for a good shower and major food intake ready for tomorrow's ride.















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