It's that time again (Can you believe it? Already the end of the second month on the road.) I began the month of November in Luang Prabang, Laos, traveled over the mountains and into Vietnam, stayed for wayyyyyyyyyyy too long in Hanoi, where I had to wait for a visa extension to come through, see the sights, and drink a lot of coffee. I spent the last few days of November, including Thanksgiving, at Cuc Phuong National Park, camping, hiking, and monkey spotting.
You can see from the chart above that there were a lot of rest days in November, mainly due to having to hang out in Hanoi for 10 days while my visa extension application was processed. Average speeds on riding days continues to hover around 20km/hr, and on a good day I can go almost 100km, but most days don't make it farther than 60-80km.
I did pretty well budget-wise in November! If I hadn't had to replace my crankset in Hanoi, I would have been well under my (arbitrary) monthly budget of $400. That's pretty good considering I was stuck in Hanoi, where prices are high relative to smaller towns.
Finally, my November nights were spent in much the same ratio as in October. Mostly hotels/guesthouses, with a significant bit of camping and mooching (couchsurfing, random strangers included) thrown in. Camping in particular is hard in Vietnam, partially because the population density is so much higher than in Laos or Thailand, and partially because people don't seem as freewheeling about letting dirty foreigners sleep just wherever. Once we had south a bit more, I'm hoping to camping on the beach quite a bit, and there are also several more national parks to visit, so hopefully December will be full of camping goodness!
