Off at 6:00 on the nose from Nha Trang; other than a few modest hills as the road skirted a mountain, the road was as flat as straight edge. With no wind and the sun blocked by clouds for a major part of the ride, I rode fifty miles in four hours. I stopped at a church for lunch for 20 minutes and then finished up the last ten miles. 11:25 I rolled in to Phan Ranh and I had been spared by the heat and mountains. As I bicycled into town, I passed a guy scooping ice cream from his bicycle concession stand. It looked so good that I turned around about half a mile past him and returned hoping to find him. A girl was there on her motorbike eating one of these delights. Taking a shucked coconut, the man cut the top off the nut, scraped the white inner liner off the walls and then heaped on several scoops of coconut ice cream sprinkled with chopped cashews. Unbelievably delicious, doubly better given my hot sweaty body. The girl on the motorbike asked me if I wanted another, not speaking a word of English. She got up as the man was making another for me and paid him. Amazing, one of the many kind acts throughout my trip.
After a stop at a coffee shop, I found a nice hotel in an area that looked like a completely new neighborhood was being built on land recently leveled of a former neighborhood. Modern houses and no trash littering the area. On my way back from a bank to get more Dong, I watched some of the house construction going on. In a few years this neighborhood will be nice upper middle class enclave totally devoid of Vietnamese culture.
Tomorrow, I am up at five, off at six with seventy-nine kilometers to Phan Ri.
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