Our breakfast was a little disappointing, but it was enough to start us off. Today it was the start where we needed lots of energy.

The view from our bungalow door

It was straight in to a climb for 6 km nice and steady.

This is today’s ride profile dominated by the first hill

The views steadily improved, there were two good viewpoints on the way up to the top.

View from the top

View from part way up

We did manage to capture a couple of butterfly pictures.

Excuse the state of the shoes

A small butterfly 2 cm across but fabulous electric blue

Right at the top there was a collection of old broken shrines, in the middle a pitcher plant stood waiting for one of the millions of bugs to make a mistake. Speaking of bugs, the noise coming from the jungle each side is incredible, you compare it to the almost silence you get from the palm oil plantations lower down it is obvious how the palms upset nature here (they are a West African palm).

Pitcher plant with it’s own shrine

The descent was quick and soon we were turning off the 401 on to very quiet side roads.

Passing a temple

It continued as lovely cycling until near the end when we joined our old friend Route 4, this was busy and here there were lots of westerners riding scooters, some without any road sense at all!

Finally we turned off onto a side road taking us to Lake View Bungalows, this is a very quiet resort. The room clean with plenty of space, we did have to eliminate a small population of ants though.

Passing a very mean looking ox

By around 5:00 pm we were ready to eat, but the skies opened and it was like a wall of water for the next hour and a half. Fortunately the resort has a restaurant were we ate and watched the rain. It is forecast to dry up tonight and be a reasonable day tomotrow.

The Strava route today.