Feb 16: Pha Din Pass

aliceesor

Mường Ảng -> Thuận Châu

Distance cycled: 86 km
Ave: 16.6 km/h
Max speed: 64.9 km/h
Elevation gained: 1431m

Are you sure you want to leave the Mường Ảng hotel this early in the morning?
What a honking big day.
After the first 40km, for which we averaged 19km/h, we started climbing this beast of a hill, which just went on and on and on.

My queasiness didn’t appreciate all the smells of roadside burning (strong stench of chemical garbage, as well as the much less repugnant cooking fire smoke) coming along the flats, so while the others stopped for coffee and snack, I found some relief continuing to climb higher where the air was fresher.

We are not the only people on pedal bikes, but other cyclists are rare.
Scenic rice patties all over the place… it is quite the feat of water management engineering.

It would probably have been a bit easier going if we hadn’t had those really strong coffees at 5pm last night. None of us slept well or long. Also, I hadn’t bothered to eat dinner, and my breakfast was half a bowl of noodle soup (I passed the beef to F).

After 10km of climbing, I was pulling over every 200m to rest.

After 2.7km of that, I parked at a small restaurant, ordered cold water and then lay down on the dirty wooden floor. The proprietor was a friendly guy, who had seen other travelling cyclists, and he didn’t mind. The handful of other patrons seemed perplexed.

When F & J joined me, we shared 2 bowls of what the translation app only helped us identify as ethnic minority specialty phò. Our best guess is organ meat.
After declining the owner’s invitation to stay and celebrate New Years Eve singing karaoke with him, we continued on.
Nobody was tempted to stop and do opioids on the way to the summit.
Top of the pass – the patriotic language is prevalent.
At the top of the pass, a man insisted on selling us celebratory balloons. He was obviously not a cyclist as he was also committed to tying them to the handlebars despite our attempts to redirect.
Once out of view, we revised the balloon positioning before barreling downhill.
We weren’t sure if we were going to make it to our planned hotel, but the last 15km were a delightful coasting grade.

We were bouyed up by much roadside encouragement (I think people liked the balloons, 4 of which had survived the descent – F went downhill so fast, she busted both of hers :p)

In the hotel lobby, we had the good fortune to bump into Bao, a Vietnamese man who lives in Edmonton and recognized us as Canadian thanks to Jeannie’s riding jersey. He helped us find the hotel operator, and pointed out that it was NYE and we wouldn’t be able to get food anywhere tonight or tomorrow. His solution was to invite us to his family dinner. It was his wife’s family; he and their 14-y-o daughter were staying at the hotel because the Edmonton raised daughter couldn’t handle the family bathroom situation. Bao had a lot of interesting observations about cultural differences and trends between Vietnam and Canada. His dad, 94, still travels back and forth between Edmonton and Vietnam every year on his own. He worked as a heavy duty mechanic and joked that he was getting a great deal out of the CPP as he’s now been getting pension for longer than he’d worked!

We shared a delightful feast, and were sent home with a chung cake for sustenance tomorrow. Cảm ơn! (thank you!)
We pulled together the dregs of our energy reserves to stay up and go out to watch the lunar NYE fireworks.
This turned out to be a whole overwhelming and festive sensory experience with crowds of people.
More people than I had thought possible in this smallish town. (Spot Jeannie if you can!)
There was music and dance performance clashing with the beat of rhythmic drumming.
We were quite literally pulled into collective dancing and whooping around a bonfire, and were urged at midnight to slurp from urns of mystery alcohol with cummunal straws.
(Urn with straws visible behind the bonfire) The promised fireworks were an epic 20-minute production.

A record number of people wanted to take selfies, etc… it was like being a fake celebrity at a celebration we knew nothing about.

One heck of a day.

Alice (with the usual input and photos from the usual suspects)

2 thoughts on “Feb 16: Pha Din Pass”

  1. Colleen's avatar Colleen says:

    WOW! Enjoy the warm sunshine – though Koodoo keeps telling me that the snow in Victoria should stop soon, it is clear and crispy cold. Your photos are great. Thanks a LOT XXXMom

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  2. Omg that puppy is adorable !

    Yuk! Repugnant garbage smells on a queasy nose would be extremely unpleasant…

    I like the helmet style of the rare other cyclist. 😉

    Shocked that you didn’t stay for karaoke… Hahaha You were definitely not in the right mindset!

    hahaha mandatory celebratory balloon dec!

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