Aug 6, 2010

The Road to Cau Phu My

By the 'road to cau phu my' I don't mean some spiritual path of contemplation that somehow ends up by the Phu My bridge, I literally mean the actual road to cau Phu My. It's terrible. Now, the elevated stretch of highway on the Phu My Hung side which I mentioned before as being shoddy turns out to be shoddy. The road has already started to subside.

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That was taken in the morning on the way to work. The real disaster is on the other side of the bridge called Thanh My Loi. It's falling apart in places. Already...!

The view looks nice enough, as we start heading towards the bridge.

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The toll gate:

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So here's a video I took taking the approach up to the bridge. After I started filming I thought what the hell and continued going over the bridge. Best turn the volume down cause the wind just howls into the microphone! Everyday I see trucks breaking down on the bridge. The incline is steep and a lot of the container trucks just can't hack it. They crawl up there at 20km per hour before finally overheating. Kind of similar to the highway they built to My Tho - 50kms straight - and it had an incredible amount of breakdowns because people could actually drive fast for the first time and blew the engines on their old busted trucks! Anyway - broken down truck does appear at the top of the bridge here too...

4 comments:

anne said...

That's not looking good. I never liked the closed in motorbike lane,especially at the apex of the bridge, but the approaches now look really bad too. Are you going to have to cross this on a daily basis now with your new job?

Jon Hoff said...

Yeah, everyday. Well it's that or go from Phu My Hung to D2 via Saigon. The bridge route is nicer - in the morning its beautiful up there, and the road is bad in just a few places.

Unknown said...

Thats really sad. I had hoped that a little more robustness was being put into these projects but it appears not. How are some of the other parts of the ring road holding up?

Jon Hoff said...

Phillip, the east-west highway seems ok, have to see how well the tunnel has been constructed and the highway that runs on the other side through Thu Thiem..