A Hike Into The Clouds
As Vietnam is quite lush, and full of tropical jungles, there isn't a hell of a lot of opportunities for hiking in the forest without thrashing your way through the super thick bush. With so much water and so many nutrients and such an explosion of life, the plant life is prodigious and you can hardly move amongst it, let alone hike through it and make progress. Still, some gems are out there, and some of them can be found by using dirt roads that go off into the green abyss. These roads exist for a variety of reasons but they can often hide some real treasures if you are willing to look.
One of these roads had interested me for a long time. During my initial explorations in Vietnam, I had explored up the valley of the Cu De River, and whilst in the valley, I looked up high into the Truong Son mountains to the north of me, and was surprised to see what looked like a road twisting it's way amongst the high peaks on top of the mountain chain. This led me to do some research on Google Earth and ArcGIS, and was surprised to see a road going all the way from city level to the top of the ridge, a road built by the power company to access the power lines that cross the ridge to Lang Co and Hue here. This immediately captivated my attention and I set out to find out how to get to this mystery mountain road. It looked like it was possible because there was a long toe of a ridge that dropped from the crest of the range all the way down to city level in one long run. A chance to hike up into the heart of the Annam Mountains? All thanks to the main energy corridor in Vietnam?
The first step involved finding where the road began. It obviously had to start somewhere, so I zoomed way in on Google Earth, and found the road, and then traced it back to it's beginning, which was at the end of a road sandwiched between two huge factories, in the northern industrial district of Lien Chieu. So, one day, my friend Piotr and I headed out in the afternoon to find it. We looked kinda silly, two whities on scooters, looking around like tourists, in the middle of a bunch of tire and steel factories. But we did find it, and found that you had to drive up a really shitty hill, through a tunnel under the Hai Van Pass road, and then park because the road got real shitty after that.
The next step was to go and hike it. For this I enlisted my friend James, who was one of my top exploration partners in Vietnam. He was in immediately and we jumped on our first opportunity. The road up the hill was a mixture of dirt, concrete pavement, and a homemade "pavement" of large, square cut rocks laid down together. Climbing quickly, the first two kilometers are amazingly steep as the road switchbacks up the mountain. At this point it is actually switchbacking up the side of the ridge that spills down from the mountains above, and it was kicking our butts. Needless to say, it was a relief to finally gain the top of the ridge.
Once we gained the ridge, we came across a cabin that was there for the construction of the power lines, the maintenance of the power line, or both. Either way it was deserted and only a little creepy, so we hung out and refueled for the next part of our hike. We nicknamed it "The Stabbin' Cabin" and shuffled off. Above here it was quite nice because the trail was a lot easier to walk on. Gone was the homemade pattern of square, replaced with sparing pavement and now dirt. But other than a few short steep sections here and there it was mostly nice, fairly gradual dirt walking. As it was winter, (it was December, after all), we soon ended up inside the clouds, looking down at the city. Breathtaking sight, and also a little chilly.
We hiked for a couple more hours, and gained a lot of the ridge. We were kind of pressed on time, so we unfortunately had to turn around about 2/3rds of the way up the ridge. We weren't quite sure how far away the top was because it was quite misty, but there is still much more exploring to be done. On the way down we were surprised as hell when a van full of Vietnamese came hurtling down the hill behind us. We narrowly jumped out of the way, but it was a very interesting, and very unexpected sight. Like many of my projects, there is room for further missions to be done here!
All photos copyright Kit Davidson unless otherwise noted.