Cycling Vietnam: Step 1: Preparation

Danny  and I will be cycling the coast of Vietnam in May from Siagon to Hanoi, I only have three weeks so there will be a little train travel but the distance covered on my bike should be over 800km

Once in Hanoi I will cycle to Ha Long Bay and back which will finish the trip.

Help me raise funds for beyondblue - a supportive organisation for anyone affected by anxiety or depression. I want to support beyondblue because I want people who may think they are depressed or suffering from anxiety that there is a place to go for help or advice.

This bike ride and fund raising will be in memory of my Brother, Jake Walton who left us in June 2012.

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 doing Nha 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:

Trekking Colombias Lost City (Ciudad Perdida)

After a short flight from Medellin to Santa Marta I arrived at a dream of a hostel, and a great spot for relaxing before a 4 day hike into the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

The Lost City treks starts at a small town nicknamed 'Machete' (it's actually called El Malmey) due to the towns reputation of locals drunkenly holding machete fights in the streets, my guide, Carlos, told us there were many deaths amongst the young men and severed digits of the people who tried to get involved.

We set off from Machete around 2 pm, full of anticipation to get going and make it to the 1st camp for the night. I didn’t look up details or read about other people’s experiences of this trek so I really didn’t know what to expect, so when we stopped after about 40 minutes to swim in the fresh water river I was pretty happy, little did I know that we have an hour ascent, the hardest part of the trek, yet to come. 

Yes. It was hard. I think I got my first blister on that part of the trek. After the initial pain and suffering of having to walk uphill for over an hour the scenery is worth it and the path gets easier, allowing us to pick up the pace abit. We did 6 km that afternoon and arrived at our camp, Alfredo, at around 6 pm.

Day 2 involved a 14 km hike to the base camp near the Lost City and after an awful night’s sleep in a smelly hammock, this, to me, sounded horrible.

This day ended up being my favorite, after walking over fields and mountains we eventually hit the jungle, making the heat more bearable and the sounds around us more interesting. At lunch Carlos took us on a cliff jumping tour of the river which was hilarious, he is like a big kid (with a machete).

We got the chance to meet the (spiritual) Shaman who actually looks like Naboo, the Shaman off the Mighty Boosh, but with abit less bling. I bought a handmade bracelet off him and he said this would bring me luck, so I'm not taking it off.... apparently he predicted that a village would be flooded and told one of the kids to go and tell them, when the kid went to the village they told him to stop being silly and to go home, they didn't move and a year later they were wiped out by a flashflood, Carlos also told us that he has predicted that 3 Cities on the coast will be wiped out by a Tsunami, including Santa Marta.

Anyhoo.... Day 3 involved getting up at 5.30 am to start trekking to the Lost City for 6 am. We climbed 1200 steps before 7 am! I have NEVER done that before and will probably never do it again (I mean exercise before 7am not climbing steps).

 The Lost City is massive, the area that everyone takes pictures of is where the richest people of the City used to live and this is the most maintained area, it is also used as a heli pad for when politicians want to visit.

There is so much interesting history here, but I’m not going to tell you, you should just go! Our guide, Carlos has been running tours since 1982 and is also a local farmer, he has hundreds of stories from the area and the history of the Ciudad Perdida, plus he is a funny man (I think. He spoke Spanish and I did not). Enjoy the pictures!

Flying high in Medellin

Having spent around 35 hours travelling on 5 different aircrafts across the atlantic and down the east coast of America I was pretty happy to be in Medellin, Colombia!  Wasting no time, we booked onto some parapenting over the City. The cost was around 80,000 COP ($40 USD) for 20 minutes, this was ample amount of time to take in the vast amount of landscape around you and for your instructor to do some tricks.

Getting to the parapenting site is another small cost, if you are staying in Medellin you can normally get a taxi up there and back for around 30,000 COP per hour (getting the taxi driver to stay is a good idea, there might not be as many taxis up at the site). 

 My pictures really don´t do this area justice, it was spectacular.