First really long bike ride outside Da Nang is kind of a bust

One of the only friends I have made that is really focused on fitness wanted to go on a long bike ride with me on my new 21-gear bike and him using my older single-gear street bike.

This was a bad way to begin because even though this guy has much better cardiovascular fitness than I do, the difference in speed capabilities between a fixed-gear bike and a 21-gear bike is going to be immense... but this was just one of the issues we faced.

Since we didn't really have a great idea where we were going we were "flying blind" most of the time with just a general idea of what direction (north east west south) and that was basically all there was to it. We ended up primarily on two types of roads that are not very desirable for exercise.

I think we kind of bit off more than we could chew (well I did, certainly) and I will be a bit more cautious in how far I get from the shire in the future because by the time I got back I was just delighted to not be on the bike anymore as my neck and butt in particular were really not feeling great at that point.

The good news is that some of our semi-random turns off the main highways resulted in finally getting some quiet time in and being surrounded by rice paddies and that is something I will never get tired of. Perhaps it is because I have a penchant for nicely cut grass thanks to my father being a bit "yard obsessed" when I was a kid.

If you look at the road on the above picture though, you can see that the road itself isn't very smooth though and this constant rattling of the handlebars was pretty rough on my hands (which still feel strange today) and also my neck and butt. Still, because it was peaceful and we rarely encountered another vehicle partially because the road was not wide enough to accommodate a car at all.

This just carries on very far into every direction once you get a few clicks between two major roads and I believe it is probably pretty common throughout all the areas surrounding Da Nang's downtown - which is a miserable experience on a bike, on a motorbike, or in a car. What are you gonna do? If a million people all want to live in the same area, that is what you are going to get!

I expected that some levies or water-flow control systems would exist out there somewhere, but I hadn't expected them to have a peaceful little bridge going over them that anyone could just walk or cycle across. There is something majestically peaceful about the sound of flowing water and this was one of the few places that we stopped to have a breather and a banana during our journey. As much as the road conditions were taking their toll on my body, it was much worse for my friend who was on my street bike with the skinny tires. That bike was not meant to be on these sorts of roads at all so he certainly got the shorter end of the stick.

The smaller towns that we did encounter along the way had a much different vibe than Da Nang proper, there were far fewer people, the people that were there had lost all semblance of road rage tendencies and there was considerably less horn honking. There was still a ton of traffic though because at that point we were only about 2km from an entrance to a major highway.

While checking my fitness tracking app that my watch connects to in my phone I found out for the first time that my app has a strange method of motivation and it also kind of made me think about all those days that I ordered the bejesus out of fried chicken without even considering how terrible it is for you.

Also, it make me think of the one time that Nadi nearly died because of eating the bones in my KFC.

By the time we arrived back at our starting point, we had gone 37km and it took 2 hours and 45 minutes. That is not a good pace for that sort of distance on a bicycle but in our defense we didn't really know where we were going and a lot of the paths that we ended up on it simply was't possible to go very fast.

Overall I would say that this exploration was a bit of a bust and I think that in the future if I do go that far away from where I live and am familiar with I will put a bit more time into route preparation and perhaps get a little phone holder for the handlebars, maybe even get one of my headphones in my ears so that the navigation system can tell me when I am supposed to turn. We lost a tone of active time (probably 30 minutes overall) stopping and looking at my phone and I would prefer to avoid that in the future.

I'm glad we did it, but it wasn't a roaring success like I had hoped. Part of the problem was that I had to constantly be looking behind me to see if my friend was still there since we were on very different bikes - his simply not being capable of keeping up with mine. I am NOT in better shape than he is but this is just what happens when one person has 21 gears, and the other has only 1.

Next trip I plan to head a completely different direction because it has become clear to me that to the south of Da Nang there is almost entirely either nicely paved roads with thousands of cars on them, or roads with no one on them that are falling apart. Neither of these situations are desirable.

The good news is that I ordered an Indian dinner after this ride because I burned nearly 1500 calories... woo hoo!