Slept amazing, woke up feeling sprightly and we ride the 45kms to the Cuc Phoung national park. On the way stop off at a mechanics and get an oil change, my chain tightened, my pegs tightened plus my gear switcher adjusted. After a while we find the park and I can’t get my bike out of neutral. After a quick inspection realise that after the adjustment it’s moved and the gear switcher is physically hitting my stand to stop it changing up a gear, so get a spanner and sort that out. We decide to stay in the park, 20kms deep, advertised as “as far away from civilisation as you can get”, it‘s not that remote though pretty for Vietnam. After some lunch we ride to the accommodation through the rainforest on a narrow road, stopping on the way to climb the slippery steps to a viewpoint. We’re staying in a ’stilt house’, not exactly how I imagined it, was a normal brick building where the ground floor doesn’t have walls, it’s pretty basic, has electricity for 3 hours an evening but does the job, we dump the bags and bikes and head off for a walk, a 6km route round to a big tree and a cave which was really cool. The whole place reminds me of Jurassic park and it is very bizarre to be surrounded by rainforest. No shower as no hot water, we read a bit then head out for dinner at the restaurant 500m down the narrow road, have a good simple meal and walk back. Stupidly we didn’t anticipate it being so dark once we finished dinner, it was pitch black, it was cloudy so no moon light and the trees formed a tunnel, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, plus there wasn’t any artificial lighting. Immediately I grabbed Michael’s arm as I didn’t want to be jumped up on/lose him, and we took ages walking back as we didn’t know which way was straight, we zigzagged until we felt soil instead of road, before finally arriving back at the accommodation, having had an arm-in-arm stroll in the dark on Valentine’s day no less! Spent the evening sat on the balcony looking out into the forest, reading and listening to the noises of the forest then putting my ipod in and rushing against time to get to bed under our mossie nets before the electricity cuts out at ten.
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| the road going through the national park, from the viewpoint |
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| for the Mother, this be Michael |
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| was so close to stepping on this, reminded me of the worm from James and the Giant Peach |
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| 1000year old tree, bottom half |
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| 1000yr old tree, top half |
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| the viewpoint |
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