Lockdown bike ride to Monkey Mountain

We are currently quite limited in what it is that we are allowed to do thanks to some new Covid cases popping up in the city I live in. Simply going outside to get some exercise can expose you to a great deal of scrutiny and certain well-traveled paths are actually blocked off to people that are just trying to go for a bike ride.

Yesterday, a friend and myself has planned to ride along the coast to the end of the Son Tra peninsula only to discover there was a roadblock there. This makes very little sense to me but I don't get to make the rules here in Vietnam and I wasn't going to contest it. When we saw the blockade, we didn't even approach them but simply turned around and found somewhere else to go.

This is the view from the top but man oh man was it tough getting there.

I am not an avid bike rider and I do not own a super-awesome bicycle. I don't think that this journey would be terribly possible on a single gear bike unless you have a death wish. The signs said that it was a 10% incline and the pictures that I am going to show right now are not a fair representation of how difficult it was but trust me when I say it was tough!

The good news is that there was very little traffic up here because other than the viewpoint, there isn't really anything up here. I think the reason why the road is paved is because there appears to be some sort of scientific gear at the top of the mountain as well as some telecom towers. During our journey to the top, we only encountered maybe a dozen other people along the way. The first stretch is mostly uphill and it is 4km long

For all of you super fit people out there this probably doesn't seem like much but for me it was quite difficult and any time i reached a plateau of sorts, I stopped riding and had a breather. Of course, because I am sometimes a moron, we waited to leave on this trip until 2pm - the hottest time of day in one of the hottest times of year. Needless to say by the time we got to the top we both looked like we had jumped in the ocean with all the sweat.

The ride back down the other side is only 1km long and I don't think I will ever be attempting that on a bicycle and as a matter of fact they wont even allow you up that path on an automatic scooter out of fear that the gears can't handle it and even worse that since you can't step down the gears that your brakes will fail on the way down.

This is something that I was very worried about on my borrowed and very cheap bicycle when we went down this very steep decline back to sea level. My friend had a much better bicycle than I did and according to his Garmin watch he achieved speeds of up to nearly 80km / hour at one point. I took it more sensibly because one of my brakes didn't appear to work at all and the other one (the back one) was squeaking the entire way down. I was a bit scared.

We made it back to civilization as the sun was setting, so I guess that was pretty great timing on our part but then we made the mistake of going over to the other side of the bridge and there was just a massive amount of people around and a lot of police, military, and mall-cop types that were blowing whistles at anyone that was out and about for Covid reasons. At one point we had to ignore the whistle-blowers when they told us to turn back because well, our respective houses were past them. We really legged it and hit the backroads only to discover that they didn't pursue us at all. It was rush hour, so I don't know if they tried to chase us, but it would have been silly if they had tried to do so since there were hundreds of other people exercising along the river as well.

_{that's the bridge that the previous picture was taken off of, and Monkey Mountain is in the background}

All in all it was about 4 hours of exercise in a row, which is a real rarity for me and even though my legs hurt, and I slept very well from all the expended energy, I am very glad that I did it. Perhaps I will have to invest in a slightly nicer bicycle and see if that makes it easier.

If you ever find yourself in Da Nang or even better, if you live here, I highly suggest that you do this mountain pass. It isn't easy peasy, but I am not an athletic dude and I managed it - so you probably can as well.