Good morning SE Asia!: 05/11/13 - Tan Ky to Phu Phong

I got a thermos flask of hot water from the reception and we had some coffee in the room. We had bought a couple of coffee cup filters in Hanoi and a bag of coffee and individual condensed milk portions for it. Think it is the wrong type of coffee though as it takes ages to filter, maybe it is not the proper Vietnamese stuff.

We paid up and hit the road. The manager was a funny guy and thought we were pretty funny too. The girls who worked there didn't find him as funny though as he chased them about trying to grope them.

Another predominantly flat but undulating day of riding 145km in 8 hours in mixed weather around 28 degrees C - just another day at the office - arriving at our next random hotel in the next random town at around 3.30pm. The areas we cycles through were growing tea, something we hadn't seen since the North areas.

The hotel was massive, and had a restaurant for weddings that could hold over 1000 people! The room was also huge and for 250,000d (£7.50) it would be fine. Just as we arrived the unstable weather snapped and tipped a full monsoon down for a half hour. Quite impressive, better to watch from indoors too. The weather in Vietnam is strange, whilst it is considered Winter up north, the centre has it's monsoon season, and the south calls it dry season. All this in the same length as the UK. Anyway, we were entering the storm season in the middle section by now.

Dinner was a feast of Vietnamese staples like fried pork in chilli, chicken, rice and fried morning glory with garlic. Cheap too at £5 for both.

Not much else to note today, we watched a film and noticed big holes in the wall of the hotel room where they had scaffolded it when building but never sealed it. Only in Vietnam.