Mountain Stage

Yes a real one. After a good breakfast we got on our bikes in bright sunshine and made our way back to the main road. We already knew that there were 800m of height difference to be climbed, but also it was a ratehr short stage (less than 60kms) but in fact we would have never dared to think that it is going to be this hard.

It started all nice and easy with a steady pace and gradient we climbed the first 200m in not time. After that the real climbing started. Not steady but in ramps. Ramps with 15% and more, between these sometimes a little descent just to tackle the next one. I took us a lot of time to get up there, including some breaks in between, but we made it! 🙂

The real pain however started once we started to descent, in my head this was all, don’t worry once your’re up it will be 10km down and you are done… Haha, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

This descent was simply a nightmare, it was either straight down requiring us to put the brakes full on (mine started to smell), or there were steep climb in between again with another 100m to go up… We even needed a longer break on the descent to recover. On top the road conditions unlike as on the uphill side were not really not that good, on some parts with huge pot holes and some gravel parts. We were just glad when we finally arrived at the bottom.

There we stopped again at a hot spring, much bigger facilities than the one on the day before, but actually the water was too hot 😀

From there we made our way to the last 8km to our homestay. This again was remarkable. Run by a very nice lady it was actually some houses built on what looked like a farm at the bottom of the mountains really beautiful. When they saw that we were actually three, they immediately brought another bed and blankets for Anouk. The lady ordered food for us and we enjoyed the calmness there.