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Thursday Day Four
Apologies for not posting for a while folks. It turns out that the iPhone's accepted range of operating temperatures does not include the normal air temperature in South Vietnam!
105 Kilometres today coming out of Da Lat and down to Nha Trang, split
20 20 30 15 15. Yes I know that doesn't add up. Pedant.
The jewel of the day is that block of 30km, which is an unbroken rapid descent, almost without hairpins coming down off the mountain top. The hardcore cyclists of the group, Tristan and Karel, say they have never seen anything like it.
Only Karel is excited about the ascent to get up there, which will involve a couple of 2km hills, but then he is an ascent specialist. Fortunately the air is cool, and I only partially dehydrate/die on the way up.
The shoot down is astonishing. God's finest work on earth to my eye (so far). Neither of my cameras can capture the scenery alone, let alone the astonishing speeds we can get up to. To cycle downhill for c34 minutes, of which you only pedal for about 30 seconds is freakish.
Please note: Chi, our guide, warns us that there MAY BE a FEW SMALL HOLES in the road. Presumably you can only see them when you get a ladder and climb out of one of the big holes.
Eventually we calm down in the outskirts of Nha Trang. There's a drunken night there, starting with a bbq your own fish place and ending at the Sailing Club, but I won't bore you with it. They don't do buckets of G&T, so I had buckets of vodka and 7Up. Eurgh.
What I must tell you is the absolutely true, and carefully checked, tale regarding the US base by Nha Trang. The sea drops away really deeply and really quickly here, making defence against VC divers impossible. So the US trained a squad of dolphins to bring anybody found swimming under water to the surface. Genius. And obviously true too.
Another aside: regilion here is superficially strongly Buddhist. 80% in fact. Then 10% catholic, a legacy of French colonisation, with the remainder a mix of Hindu, Cao Dai (local religion - a blend of the other religion's greatest hits), protestant and atheist/agnostic.
That's not all, one of the legacies of Chinese rule is ancestor worship. Then there are a spectrum of Hindu-Buddhist hybrids.
That's quite a lot of god bothering for a communist country, I would say. The whole communist movement has imploded here now: you can set up your own business, own your own land, practice any old religion (actually it was always tolerated here), make profits, and there's almost no welfare state to speak of.
But, there is only one party, and a few too many words against that party will get you in hot water. Oh, and Facebook is banned.
I quite like it actually.
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