Cycle Touring

As our first proper foray into unsupported cycle touring, Vietnam has been a bit of a crash course, which will hopefully serve us well for longer trips.  

We’ve learnt some of the touring basics (the level of planning that we feel comfortable with; a finely drilled routine for packing the panniers; how much water to carry; that route planning is fun, but also boring!) and the Vietnam specific ones (what makes the best breakfast - bahn mi op la of course!; what sort of mileage feels doable given the heat; when a toot-toot is a motorbike speeding by and when a HOOOONK-HOOOONK is a massive lorry, so brace yourself).

Initial Route Planning

Subsequent Route Planning

But we also confirmed, and were confronted by, some of our expectations.  Most importantly that touring is as much about the body as the mind.  We both suffer from niggles, and at times downright agony, from various parts of our bodies.  We’ve been working in unison with them for enough years to listen hard, play nice and sometimes beg when we are asking a lot from them.  The mind is a different, and a delightfully/infuriatingly changeable beast.  It is where our minds might take us, and frankly how to handle them, that this trip has provided a taster for!

We’ve been working for a while now on the understanding that life is about the journey, not just the destination, but my goodness that can be hard when you’re tired, a bit bored and you are counting down the miles in front of you as you edge towards the one thing that is certain - the destination. Remind me, why we are doing this?

A helpful mile marker

The counter to that is that happiness exists right here, in this moment, as I give my all to grind up this hill, as I watch the sun climbing into its morning pose, as I catch the eye of an inquisitive motorbike rider peering at me as they chug past, or better still, the squeal as I free wheel past on a long smooth, blissful down hill.  It’s the deep satisfaction as we pull into town, the sheer pleasure of observing the passing landscape as my legs work happily away beneath me and I know that we made this happen, we made a plan to get on our bikes and cycle in Vietnam and here we are, with everything we need, bloody doing it!  And then the next moment is has gone.  How many more miles?

Lovely View 1

Lovely View 2

We know those ups and downs, and that on our cycle journeys they will both be with us often.  

We’ve embedded a link to Ali’s Strava profile so that you can see our route.

Vietnam

Three years after we set off from Cairo to cycle to Cape Town, we have dusted off our touring bikes (there was a lot of dust, most of it was red and far from home) and decided to do some more exploring by bike.  This time without the brilliant support of the medics, mechanics, lunch truck and flagging tape from Tour D'Afrique, we’ve donned the panniers and are riding fully loaded for a few weeks in Vietnam.

Fully Loaded

We anticipate this being the start of a new phase, with bigger plans afoot.  More to come on those later, but for now, we wanted to share what we have found in Vietnam.

Language

It was a few days before we realised that no word in the Vietnamese language has more than 6 letters, and most of them have only 3 or 4.  Our main source of words has been menus and we were quick to learn the favourites - Bahn Mi op la (delicious baguette with egg, coriander, soy and cucumber for our morning feed on the road); Bo Pho (soup with vermicelli noodles and meat) Mi Xao Hai San (noodles with veg, prawns and other seafood).

Our fave - banh mi

Not our fave

Using so few letters means combinations are often repeated but with different accents or emphasis.  There are a huge number of accents, which mean that pronunciation is key!  We witnessed a great conversation between a kind French man helping us with some route planning and his Vietnamese colleagues.  I alerted them to the fact that there are two towns with the name My Tho (my-toe) when he shared this with his colleagues he received denial, confusion, accusation of lying.  It took some time for us to discover the tiny dot below the o; ‘Oh, My Tho (my-tow), yes of course we know that place’.  It was an entertainingly French reaction to a Frenchman (sorry French readers - but it is true!).

Transport

The Vietnamese are often thought of as a nation of bike riders.  Indeed, when Lizzie visited Vietnam in 2001 this still felt to be the case, but the number of people sedately pedaling through the city as they go about their business have been far outstripped by their noisier, speedier, motorised friends.  In some ways this makes the road quite an alarming place to be, with the seemingly unending surge of motorbikes buzzing around us, not least because roundabouts and crossroads are in effect massive free-for-alls. However, what we have discovered, and what any pedestrian trying to cross a road must, is that, slowly but surely, you need to push out and hold your ground, road users are in fact pretty courteous, anticipating one another's moves, creating space and allowing other vehicles through.  I can't say it always feels water tight, but at its best, this methods is respectful and generous (which seems to match the nature of Vthe Vietnamese) and here at least, it works!

Bikes in Saigon

Weddings

The thing that we have been most surprised, and entertained by, is the huge number of weddings that we have seen.  We lost count at 25 on the Saturday we rolled out of Ho Chi Minh City. The demographic of Vietnam is very young, with an average age of 19, so it’s hardly surprising that they are all getting hitched.  We amused ourselves observing the gauche street parties that they hold in celebration, with huge bright and brash awnings under which to seat the guests, and on display to any a passer-by, an enormous picture of the bride and groom, in full wedding regalia, posing adoringly in front of a waterfall, a sunlight meadow or a field bursting with flowers.  It’s a certain type of tacky you need to develop a taste for.

As always when traveling by bike, we've had the pleasure of noticing so many little nuances and wondering about interesting features along the way.  It leaves us with hundreds more questions than answers, and excited to continue to explore.