Good morning SE Asia!: 12/11/13 - Dong Ha to Phong Son

We were awakened by the Vietnamese guys who were sharing the hotel with us communicating with the usual room-to-room shouting match. These guys get up early and had already been up for an hour when we went for breakfast at 6.45.

We were not expecting much from the breakfast, but it turned out to be a feast. Three egg omelette, a couple of baguettes each, jams and a selection of fruit including bananas, dragon fruit and pineapple. It just kept coming. Maybe they were surprised how much we ate and decided to see how far we could go.

We braced ourselves and set off onto the AH1 - first day when we would have to spend some serious time on the road. At first it wasn't too bad really, very busy but with enough of a shoulder to keep away from the worst traffic. The worst parts are when the shoulder disappears perhaps when crossing a bridge or a narrow section. Then you need your wits about you as the trucks, and particularly the buses will give you no quarter and without conscience shave past your elbow at full tilt with the cruise-ship-spec horn blaring. Generally though, it wasn't anywhere near as bad as we had anticipated. The plus points were that it was mostly smooth and fast, and we had a good tailwind. We kept a 25-30kph speed most of the time.

We were headed towards Hue, the old Dynastic capital of Vietnam and a hub of Tourism. We were first going to cycle directly, but we found a nice looking natural hot spring online a while ago and had fancied it as we failed to find one in the North. So we planned a detour to the Alba Thanh Tan Hot Spring to stay one night and spend the afternoon in the waters.

Once off the AH1 highway, the road got worse, most of it unpaved dirt road and we slowed considerably. We still managed to cover 64km in 3 hours 10 mins, including 50 mins of stops and we arrived at the hot springs before midday. It was a cool place, but totally empty. We had a bit of lunch in the restaurant and had a laugh with the chef who was a funny guy with good English. We got loads of vouchers including one for a free beer between 5-7pm. It turned out after speaking to the chef that it was actually UNLIMITED free beer between these hours! Also a 20% discount on spa treatments and massages.

The water park was plainly Vietnamese, obviously never under Western management. There are a few swimming pools and lounging areas and a kids water play area, but all were full of green water and needed a bit of tending. The spring itself was still clear though. There are interesting signs around tourist places like this out in the countryside urging the locals not to make fires, trap animals, remove plants or otherwise generally behave like they would in the outside world when in the park. Read the sign in the picture below, it's quite funny. I suspect that 95% of Vietnamese who use the park in the summer would not do any of these things. Similar signs are present at the caves we visited and the other national parks.

From the 65 degree C source, the spring water was hived off into two smaller man-made streams which were then dammed up in regular intervals to allow pools of different temperature. The coolest was 34 degrees in the Autumn (as it was now), and the hottest you could enter was 48 degrees. The hottest one was too much to bear. I managed to get my feet in only. I managed the second level one for about a minute. We eventually spent our time in the middle level ones. It was great, no other guests at all. It was a bit like being in a hot bath of mineral water that never went cold. It was difficult to cool down though once you got out as the ambient temp was still about 32 degrees and 75% humidity, and after a couple of hours we called it a day and went off for a cold shower and then an hour massage with our vouchers. I am sure the hipster-backpaker crowd would never indulge in such shallow and unworthy activities as this, but it epitomises our own trip ethos entirely :)