Just a quick update on the “Shut Up Legs” t-shirt order.  The suppliers have informed me that they’ll be shipping the shirts to me early this week and I’ll be distributing them as soon as I get them.  I’m aiming to have them in your hands before the weekend (international orders will take more time for shipping. I’ll email you folks to let you know that it’s been shipped).

It’s taken slightly longer than anticipated and I thank you for your patience. The supplier tells me they look awesome and I’m excited to get them out to you.

I hope you’re enjoying your weekend.  I’m certainly enjoying getting back into the swing of things in Australia.

We’ve made it.   We rolled into our final destination this afternoon and it feels great to be done.  We couldn’t have timed things any better.  This cycling vacation was just long enough to get into the rhythm of things but not so long that we were at each other’s throats.  I’ll definitely be leaving wanting more which will guarantee that I come back to Vietnam sometime soon.

Here’s the damage done over the past couple weeks:

• 9 days of riding
• 2 rest days
• 1191kms
• 39:54 of ride time
• 6583 m of climbing
• 5 crashes
• 8 punctures
• 212 cafe sua da’s
• 104 sugar can juices
• 53 Cornetto ice creams
• 47 bowls of Pho
• 1.2 tons of rice
• 50 cocaine bars (recipe to be posted – these things are great!)
• GPS Files: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9

Some people have asked about what we brought along with us on this trip.  I intend on posting this but thought it would be more useful to do it after we finished so we have an idea of what we wish we had brought, and what we wished we had left at home.    Some interesting findings.  I’ll get this done next week.

Tomorrow we make our way home with stop-overs in HCMC and KL.  There’s a good chance that I’ll be taking the rest of the week off posting but I’ll check-in if possible.

Just out of curiosity, what’s your feedback on me posting this type of content here?  Is it interesting? Boring?  Could you not care less about my cycling vacations?   Is there something you may have been interested in hearing about that I didn’t touch on? (keeping in mind that I don’t have 4hrs a day to write blog post).  Be honest. You won’t hurt my feelings if you tell me that this trip was a rip-off for you.

As soon as we saw the beach today we all threw our shoes and jerseys off and ran straight in!

This is our driver for the past 2 weeks.  His name is “#8″.  Why #8 you ask?  Well, in Vietnam the families are quite large.  It’s not uncommon to have 10 kids in the family.  The family will informally call their children #2, #3, #4, etc.  However, there’s a superstition to never call the first child #1 because long ago sometimes the first born would end up dying at a young age. Therefore they call their firstborn #2.   Our driver was the seventh born and it was easier for us to call him #8 than by his real name.  In fact, none of us know his real name…

Final group shot of the trip.  We’re all smiling because we had a ripping tailwind for 150km today.  The Parlee Bitsa has been a fantastic bike and has proved to be tough as nails against some of the best and worst roads I’ve ever ridden on.

Climbing the 30km, 1600m ascent to Da Lat

Over the past few days we’ve ascended and descended some high mountain peaks in the highlands of Vietnam.   This past weekend we arrived at this mountain town called Da Lat.  I couldn’t believe my eyes when we rolled in.  DaLat used to be a French resort in the early 1900’s and still has the colonial villas, boulevards and charms in amongst the chaos of Vietnam.  There were times where we thought we were in Paris.  It’s a surreal place high up in the middle of nowhere with some terrific riding.

One thing that has stood out at us as being a massive and obvious difference here in Vietnam is the motorist’s attitude towards each other and us.  We’ve been advised to take up an entire lane to give ourselves some presence on the road.  This way the trucks have to go around us instead of trying to squeeze by us. Sometimes we’ll hold up a line of trucks and buses for a few minutes.  Rarely have we been on the receiving end of an aggressive honk or dodgy move.  Everyone passes us in due time with a wave and a smile on their faces.  They don’t have a choice.  Many of these Vietnamese people in the rural areas we’re riding through are extremely poor.  They have too many other things to worry about.  Getting stressed about the traffic is just one more thing that will make their lives even harder than it already is.

I realize we’re a novelty to the Vietnamese motorists and therefore they cut us some slack, but we haven’t seen one sign of road rage between drivers either.  Everyone gets along on the road and things just seem to work.

I don’t want to give the impression that driving is safe here. It isn’t.  We passed 6 chalked outlines of scooters on the road today.  There is an order to the chaos however.  You just have to flow with the sea of traffic and you’ll be okay for the most part.   The expectation that everything is unpredictable is what makes it predictable.  If there were hot-head drivers who got stressed out at every hold-up the entire system would fall apart.

Here are some photos from the past few days.  Only a couple more days of riding and then we make our long journey of stop-overs back home to Melbourne.

View from our hotel in Nha Trang.  From there we rode inland to Da Lat.  GPS file here.  Massive climb with spectacular views.

At this point on the climb to Da Lat it was 36 degrees.  After a week of even hotter temperatures this felt like a relief.  Amazing how the body adapts.

Danny in the hurtbox

When we got to the top there were two military guards who were very curious of us.  This guy was very fond of the Parlee Bitsa.  Unfortunately he needed a 40cm frame.

It was easy to mistake Da Lat with Paris when we rolled in.  The familiar feeling of civilization was refreshing for a couple days

This surely cannot be Vietnam!

This view of Da Lat is more like what you’d expect in Vietnam.  What a beautiful city

The markets and fresh fruit here were sensational.  They could grow many different kinds of produce up in the highlands in cooler temperatures than what you’d see at sea level

I gotta get me a scooter when I get home.  We’re trying to find Danny a Vietnamese girl to marry so we can get 3 motorpace sessions a week.

Riding down from DaLat back to the coastal roads.  We descended from DaLat to Phan Rang (GPS File)  for 110km!

This is typical of the Vietnamese towns we’d pass through on our way to our destination

It’s a tough life here for many of the Vietnamese.  It’s amazing how friendly everyone is to us.

Every single kid would go bananas yelling “HELLO!” to us as we passed.

The second most significant part of our day – eating.  The baguettes here are fantastic.  The French left a few gems behind.

Today we rode from Tuy Hoa to Nha Trang. It was the most magnificent ride we’ve done so far. Much of the 150km’s was along twisting coastal roads off the main highway.

We’re now in Nha Trang which is a tourist city north of HCMC. I’ve been quite excited to visit here for a while now because everyone who’s been here raves about it. I guess that raised my expectations too high because it looks like an emerging Surfer’s Paradise to me. It’s the first touristy place we’ve visited and I’m quite keen to leave and get into the mountains tomorrow. I’m really glad we’ve been able to see lots of rural Vietnam without much Western influence because a place like Nha Trang doesn’t do a good job at representing this amazing country.

I’ll keep it short today because internet access is painfully slow, but I’ll leave you with a few pictures of our ride today.

Enjoy your weekend and ride safe. If you don’t hear from me much next week that means that we’ve gone deep into the jungle and there’s no internet to be found. Over and out…

These goggles are the new fad in the Vietnamese scooter clans

Some great climbs up the roads along the coast

A momentary lapse in pavement which always makes things fun

The Parlee “Bitsa” has been a fantastic steed throughout this trip. I’m not getting all the souvenirs and attachments I hoped for because of the lack of tourist markets in the places we’ve been visiting. I’m certainly keeping it well lubed and spotless.

Beautiful sunrises every morning

We’re now about 650km away from our final destination HCMC, but in a couple of days we get to the deciding mountain stages.  This is where I’ll unleash my assault and take the yellow jersey.  I’ve been playing the food poisoning card up until this point and the peloton will suffer once we reach the high peaks of Da Lat.

Today we had an extremely enjoyable 100km ride along the coast from Quy Nh’on to Tuy Hoa.  It all started with a stupidly steep climb up a 20% gradient that I had to get off and walk! I wasn’t going to be soft and use my little ring like the other guys  ;-)  A couple of our hardmen made it all the way to the top without stopping which was very admirable.

The whole ride was very disorganized with the group split into three for the entire ride.  It was a comedy of errors which looked more like a 100km madison than a touring ride.  We forgot the golden rule: start a ride together; finish a ride together. Disobey this during any ride and it never fails to cause more trouble than it’s worth.

We ended up stopping at a mind-blowing 5 star resort (Vietstar Resort) for $35/night.   The rooms are stunning and the swimming pool and grounds are immaculate.  Isn’t it wonderful when you stumble on something completely unexpected?

The suspicious thing about this place is that we’re the only ones staying here.  It almost seems like it’s a Russian money laundering operation.  Oh well…works for us.

Tomorrow we have a 130km jaunt to Nha Trang along rolling coastal roads.  Nha Trang is supposed to be a much more touristy city with night markets, pubs, beaches, etc.  Everywhere we’ve been staying up until now has been very rural with very little Western influence.  It’s astounding how friendly and inviting all the Vietnamese people have been to us.

Sugar cane juice is sensational.  It’s squeezed straight from the cane with a little bit of kumquat, lime (I think) and salt added.  Makes for a great sports drink during a long, hot ride!

Nothing like a bowl of pho after a ride and some Saigon brew to wash it down

Much of our day is consumed by eating.  We really don’t need the second or third serving but it’s hard to say no.

This is how the moms drop the kids off at school.  No streets lined up with soccer moms driving BMW SUV’s here…

It didn’t take long for the kids to spot me with the camera

Next thing I knew there were dozens of them going bananas trying to get into the shot!  The Principal quickly came over and gave me a scolding for getting them all wound up.

This lady gave us a really nice soy dessert on the side of the street

I’ll never get enough of the cafe sau da beside the pool!

Life is good

The best thing about today was a clubhouse sandwich with fries.  I’m loving the Vietnamese food, but it sure was nice to have something familiar for a snack!

After about 650km ridden in the past four days it was definitely time to kick up and relax.  That didn’t mean that we stop logging more kilometers though.  It was scootertime!

While the rest of the guys were in their comfort zone sipping cafe sau da on the beach Pikey and I ventured into the unknown armed only with a camera and 110cc’s of raw horsepower.  It was time to graduate from boys to men.

Here are a few photos from our rest day.

No one gets a free ride in Vietnam.  Everyone has to pedal…

All the kids love the camera!

It was a bit of a fight for attention from the camera. Even some punches were thrown!

This kid looks like he’ll be a great climber

Off to our next destination…

More kids flocking to the camera!

Never in a million years did I ever think we’d see this!  They didn’t take us up on the motorpace offer though…

One of many wounds

Another casualty of yesterday’s EPIC

The best remedy for road rash is to take a soak in the salt water.  Doing it tough out here in Nam….

Well we’ve completed day 4 of our cycling tour around Vietnam and all I can say about today is that it was EPIC.  By epic, I mean that it was long, hot, humid, 3 crashes, 4 punctures, headwind, etc.    How the word “epic” ever got associated with such punishment is beyond me.  However, the final kilometers we rode into the city we’re staying at (Quy Nho’n) made it all worthwhile.  I’ve never seen such a busy place with narrow roads in all my life.  Not exactly a peaceful experience but we’re getting used to riding in this type of traffic and it’s quite amazing being amongst all the action.  If there were a ProTour of Scootering, this place would be the Tour de France.

A few things I learned from today:

1. We have to take our rest days more seriously.  This was the fourth big day of riding we’ve done and everyone is starting to get fatigued.  There’s no room for mistakes here.  When we’re riding near the cities your concentration needs to be as intense as when you’re racing. It’s absolutely nuts.

2. At first I thought it was overkill to bring a set of spare wheels between us all.  As it turns out this was one of the best choices we made.  A group of 10 guys are bound to get a few punctures and it’s so much easier and time efficient to simply throw on another wheel and change it later.

3. Motorpacing behind a big dump truck at 55km/hr is an absolute blast until someone hits a pothole and goes ass-over-tea kettle.  Once again, the spare wheels came in handy.

4. Incessant honking is either to let you know that a big vehicle is coming up behind, or to get your attention so you can see them waving at you.  Every single bus or semi-truck that passes us wants us to wave at them so they lay on their steamship sized horns.  After the 160km mark and 7 thousandth honk today a couple of us nearly lost the plot.  They could have won the Vietnam War with honking alone!

We’re going to take a rest day tomorrow, sit on the beach and pamper ourselves STFU style.  Spas are extremely cheap (only $6 for a 90 minute massage), However, we just learned not to call them “massage” or else you’ll be asking for something with a happy ending…

Also, I have to apologize for the poor updates.  I’m taking lots of photos and trying to caption them all, but sometimes the internet cafes have horrible computers or there’s very dodgy internet access.  Please be patient with brevity and spelling mistakes  ;-)

Here is the GPS file of today’s ride.

…and a few photos:

Sean, our guide/friend has been taking us out to the good street food places for dinner.  We pass so many regions that the food and flavors are dramatically different every day.   I was skeptical about how inexpensive people were saying Vietnam is, but it’s turning out to be just that.  The portions aren’t massive so we usually each get 2-3 main courses for our main. It comes to less than $5 (with a few beers or softdrinks). I’m in heaven!

We all got shaves and haircuts last night for less than a dollar each.  Leg shaving was extra…

The hotels have been incredible.  For $15/night each we’ve been staying in some beautiful places.

We’ve now completed stages 2 and 3 of our tour of duty in Veitnam.  Yesterday was one of the most fun days on the bike I’ve ever had… 

It all started with a nice easy ride from our hotel (which was a palace) in Da Nang to our guide/friend’s relative’s place who put on a feast for us.  Fortunately for us we had someone show us the way through the maze of side roads and and villages to get us there.  All the food we could possibly eat was put in front of us and it was all cooked fresh that morning straight from their backyard.

After a belly full of food we got back on our bikes to retrace our steps and onto our next destination through the back streets like you see above.  About 70km of them!  It was like riding Paris-Roubaix with swarms of scooters rushing by for us to catch a motorpace from.  Everyone caught their own random scooter and we raced through these twisty roads through small villages and rice fields.  We’d leapfrog to faster scooters if they came by or get stuck looking for another lift if one turned off.   We were absolutely flying the whole way home and was probably the most fun and exhilarating “races” I’ve ever done!  We were absolutely shattered by the time we rolled into our next hotel at about 6pm.  Alas, there was copious amounts of amazing food to be eaten on our arrival.

We have so many Vietnamese people yelling “Hell0!” to us and making us feel so welcome.  We haven’t been almost killed by a bogan rickshaw driver once!

Scrumptious coconuts!

There’s a lot of grit on the roads that you pick up but there’s always someone eager to give you a good bike wash for a couple hundred Dong.

Cafe Sua Da – Vietnamese iced coffee.  I’m absolutely addicted to this stuff!

GPS files of where we’ve been:

Day 2:  Da Nang to Hoi An  http://connect.garmin.com/activity/25728446

Day 3: Hoi An to My Khe http://connect.garmin.com/activity/25728490

Hue to Danang with mountain climb Hai Van Pass.   GPS file here

After a long journey we’re finally on our bikes here in Vietnam. We rode today from a small city in the center of the country called Hue to a nice little beach town outside of Danang.  From the second we got here I could tell this is going to be one of the best vacations I’ve ever taken.

For the next couple of weeks I’m going to keep this very light on words. I’m sure you don’t mind…

TIP: We got our flights for a ridiculously cheap $360 (return) from Melbourne to Vietnam with Air Asia.  It was a pretty good flight overall.  The catch was that you’re only allowed 15kg of baggage to check-in and 7kg for carry-on. Anything more will cost you an arm and a leg.  All we did was take half our stuff out of our bags, get it weighed and checked-in, put all the stuff back in, and then carry it over to the oversized baggage drop-off area.  Worked like a charm.  With the carry-on bags we simply hid any extra bags out of the check-in agent’s site and brought it on the plane after we got our tickets.

Neil wasn’t a happy camper after he had to pay a couple hundred dollars in excess baggage fees with his 30kg hardshell case.   Cardboard bike boxes and softshell cases work the best for a couple reasons.  First, they weigh next to nothing, and second, they can be broken down into something more manageable when you arrive at your destination.  Two of us are using the Pika Packworks cases which have been awesome.

What a welcoming crew!

This was the best way to pack a bike by a long shot.  I had to get a picture just so we’d remember how to pack it back up on our way home.  Keeping the parts padded and packed tightly together and keeping the back wheel on is the key to this working so well.   The only problem I’ve ever had with using cardboard boxes is that I had one get left out on the tarmac in the rain once.  It completely disintegrated on me.

The crew ready to roll

It took a few minutes to get used to the chaos, but once we understood that it’s a controlled chaos it was an absolute blast riding it.   The only thing you gotta remember is hold your line.  You gotta flow with the traffic and commit to your line.  It was quite civil once you got used to it.

After we got the hang of it we’d hop from scooter to scooter getting a motorpace through the cities.  It was like a massive Derny race in a peloton of scooters.  So much fun!

Some seriously big climbs here and amazing views.

We were motorpaced at 47km/hr for 35kms today by some scooter driver who thought it was just as much fun as we did!  BTW, the roads here are as smooth as glass.

If you can find a street vendor that you can trust it’s the best food you can eat.  We were in heaven last night with all Bun Bo Hue you could eat…for a buck!

It’s going to be an exciting next two weeks for me and a few of my closest friends.  Unfortunately you’ll be stuck in the office, but I’ll do my best to make you feel like you’re part of our journey. Ten of us are going to Vietnam on a man-vacation for the next 16 days.   Just us, the bikes, beaches, pho, and cheap massages.  Don’t even mention Broken Back Mountain after yesterday’s post.  It’s not going to be like that.

We’re landing in the middle of Vietnam and riding down Hwy 1 to Ho Chi Mihn City.  Kind of like they did in Top Gear but the reverse direction (we’re going with the prevailing winds).  We’ll have domestiques in rickshaws running behind us so we can look as PRO as possible and not have to reduce ourselves to panniers and maps.

I was going to build up my Cyclocross bike with a new groupset to ride but Cycling Edge have been generous to build me up a Parlee Z3 to ride whilst we’re there.  This bike as become affectionately known as the “Bitsa Bike”.  Bitsa this, bitsa that….it’s basically a mutt that’s been thrown together from parts laying around the shop.  I took it for a ride this morning and it’s going to do the job superbly.

To immerse the Bitsa fully into this trip I’ll be on the look out for little souvenirs from every possible place we visit and fixing it to the bike.  The more wacky, the better.  It should be interesting to see how this ends up.   The idea is that we’ll pass the bike off to the next person who goes on a cycling adventure and they can do the same thing.

I’ll be off-line over the next few days while we’re traveling but I’ll be back with 2 weeks of posts from our bikes in beautiful Vietnam.    I may not post every day – it’ll depend what internet access is like.  Also, I’m sorry but I won’t be able to respond to emails over this time.

If any of you have been to this area of Vietnam before I’d love to hear about things we should see and do.

See you in a few days! 

Tim building up the Parlee Bitsa Bike.  It’s actually a pretty damn good.  Nice carbon frame, Ultegra groupset, Aksium wheels.  It’s gonna be bulletproof!

For the umpteenth time this past weekend I had some bogan driver in a ute yell at me “Fag!“.  Over my years of cycling I’ve gotten used to this and I don’t think much of it anymore.   I’ve played my fair share of “tough guy” sports in my life and I can tell you that cycling has to be one of the toughest sports of them all.   The fact that we all wear lycra, shave our legs, wear rainbow colors, etc doesn’t exactly line-up with a hardman image.  Therefore I can cut a little slack on the ignorance when I’m mocked early in the morning by a bunch of drunks driving home from a big night on the piss.  I can even see the humor in it.

Last night I was reading on cyclingnews about a suggestion that the winner of the Giro d’Italia prologue in Amsterdam this year should be greeted by podium GUYS.

The thought of this might scare us at first, but I think it’s going to take a lot more than three guys in lycra kissing each other to detract from the public image we’ve created for ourselves.

For example, to us Tom Boonen is considered to be one of the hardman representatives of cycling.  Three time winner of Paris Roubaix,  Tour of Flanders, World Champion, TdF Green Jersey…the list goes on.  They don’t come any tougher.  To us, he can pretty much get away with anything and still uphold his brawny image.  I’m sure if Tornado Tom somehow won the prologue in the Giro this year and had a couple bearded men kissing him on the podium it would only add to his masculinity.  Anyone can kiss two beautiful women – but you gotta be tough as nails to kiss a bloke.  Boonen could surely pull this off.

However, I can see how people who outside the cycling fraternity would be, say…confused with our sport, which might lead to various obscenities shouted out at us.  Boonan and friends, you are certainly not helping our image. The only thing missing here are the podium blokes!

I’m starting to find the need for a way to communicate random items that people send to me that fall outside of the format of this blog.  This will be the start of a randomly timed “Random Ramblings” post.  If you have something you want me to post feel free to send it over to me at at this address and subject heading .  I can’t promise I’ll include it, but if I think readers will get some value out of seeing it I’ll gladly put it up. Let’s please keep it to road cycling and a non-commercial nature. Hint: make it as easy for me as possible!

fyxomatosis Events

Double Happiness: If you think the Melbourne to Warrnambool is tough, take a ride with TC from fyxomatosis and do the DOUBLE!  Details here (at bottom of page).  Think of it as only 6 Hell Rides in a row in 2 days.  Easy, right?

The Melburn-Roobaix is fast approaching. It’s gonna be better than ever this year.  See here for details and register your interest.   You don’t want to miss it.  See my video and post from last year to see what it’s all about.

Brunswick Cycling Club Roller Derby

Beyond The Yellow Jersey

Beyond the Yellow Jersey is a coffee table book designed to support the Amy Gillet Foundation. They are trying to get 300 photos of people buying a in the page in the book with either themselves or team in it, raising funds for the Amy Gillett foundation. They only have 40 photos or registrations to date, and they need to keep the ball rolling to get momentum to get to the 300 pages so they can publish it.

Shane Perkins & Anna Meares Sprint Clinic Competition

I have to admit I’ve done a horrible job at following up this competition. Back in December we had a competition with Musashi for 10 cyclists to win a skills clinic with track champions Anna Meares and Shane Perkins. The event was a huge success and I couldn’t believe how well it was run. Thank you to everyone who took part. I’ve finally made my way through hundreds of photos and posted them here. Also, see the photos that fyxomatosis took here.

Going to the TdF?

Check out fellow reader and commenter Tim Marsh’s ebook if you’re planning a trip to the TdF.  It has all sorts of tips that’ll help you plan your trip over to France for 2010 and beyond.  It talks about his experiences from going last year and his recommendations.  Click here for more information.