STEP 1: PREPERATIONS

We booked our flight with AirAsia, return from Perth, cost us around $500 – and this included taking my own bike, I decided to do this because A. It was only $50 extra on the flight and B. I would be more comfortable on the trip with my own bike.

After some very good advice from a childhood neighbor, Hugh, who completed an epic world cycle from London to Rio in 2014 to raise money for UK based charity TackleAfrica, I started to get my arse into gear and prepare myself, starting with knowing how to fix my bike. I booked it into a service with some local legends from South Beach Cycles, they took me through a full service and equipped me with some info I might need on my trip (tuning the gears, fixing spokes, etc), needless to say my shitty memory discarded all of the information as soon as I left the shop, so I am now googling ‘step by step guide to tuning bicycle gears’ and downloading the info into a printable document which I can take with me (and probably forget I have when the moment arrives).

So next thing on the preparations list was – Watch loads of videos and read loads of blogs.

I found a couple of ok blogs on the area we want to cycle, the most helpful was A cruising couple , these guys did Hanoi to HCMC, which took them 6 weeks. We are only doingNha Trang to Hue, the route they chose is not the route I want to go on but alot of the information in their blog is relevant and helpful.

90% of the videos on cycling Vietnam are shit, boring and not that informative or exciting. I will be recording our journey, so I will try and not make the same shitty videos.

I’m going to leave it at that and get back to you once i have all of the stuff ordered off Ebay (panniers etc)!

This is the route we will be taking: