Tag Archives: Vietnam

Bicycle Touring

Day 66: Road 14

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Distance: 104,59 km Time: 5:48 Total distance: 3254 km

Again just a normal day,  expect the clouds went away and I could take off my long shirt 😀

If you take out the camera here girls get wild and want you to take a picture of them😂

As lunch time approaches I keep looking out for these signs with “COM” written on it. Com means rice. Which I am eating really often here because I don’t really like the soups here. This sign is a really really big sign, sometimes I really have to search for it, but there is always one at least every 5 km😀

I intended to only ride till Nhơn Hòa, but as I felt really great cycling in the afternoon, not like in the morning,  I decided to continue 20 km to Chư Sê where I am now. Nice little town again. The room is a normal room,  not like the hole from yesterday. And there are people on the other side of the street playing karaoke 🎤 (not a karaoke bar,  a private group,  but they are so loud 😂)

Before I will crush the karaoke party (I don’t know if I really want do that 😂) I found a bakery where I bought some desert. The one on the right side (with something red on it) is called Bánh Pía,  it has a salted egg inside and is normally eaten in mid autumn. The other one remains unknown, but its good,  I think something with coconut (I am bad at guessing whats inside).

Tomorrow my destination is Kon Tum,  where I will stay for one whole day,  to visit and not cycle for one day😀 for the past 12 days, I was on the bicycle every day😯

I ran a little bit out of titles so today I made a little reference to a road in America as it is the 66th day WINK 😂 And I am always on highway/road 14☺️

Bicycle Touring

Day 65: The other way around

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Distance: 99,76 km Time: 5:45 Total distance: 3149 km

In the morning it was so cold because of the wind and the clouds blocking the sun that I had T-shirt and long-shirt both on. After 2 hours of cycling,  the sun came out and it was hot immediately 😂 The wind stayed though. It was so strong sometimes that I had to slow down while going down as it was hard to control my bike with the speed and the wind pushing me in the middle of the road…










The last few days were always going up first and then going down. Today it was the other way around. First I was going down, to climb again in the afternoon.

Arrived in Buôn Hồ I searched for a hotel. The first one was open but nobody at the reception for 5 minutes,  eventually somebody came shouted a name,  nobody answered and went away again. So I decided to go too. I found a second one, but as they saw me,  they waved with their hands to say noo. They showed me that down the street would be another one. Which I then took. After taking a shower I realized why there was so much dirt on the floor. The whole bathroom was under water. I got to the reception and they gave me new room,  which is freshly painted,  so it still smells in there…

Also I have the impression that people in this town are a little bit strange,  some of them hide and laugh. At least is that my impression of them.

Tomorrow I will just continue following the highway☺️

Bicycle Touring

Day 64: close to raining

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Distance: 70,43 km Time: 4:21 Total distance: 3049 km

Today was a shorter route. I decided not to do the trip to Đă Lat,  as I was told Hue would be better to visit. Todays route was not only shorter but also cloudy, windy and therefore colder. I even changed my T-shirt to a long shirt as it was too cold. I always thought it would start to rain,  but it never did. For the rest I was just climbing to 900 meters to get down again to 700 meters. But it’s never a constant climb,  always up and down and up and down.







When the road gets steeper and there is a fully loaded truck,  then they sometimes roll slower than me 😀


I arrived early in Đăk Mil. I got a room,  packed my luggage out and then was told that I had to leave as the hotel was already full… But they showed me another hotel at the end of the town, not in front of the lake, but the same price.

I walked up and down the main street,  ate an ice cream and waved back to people who waved to me. I found a place where they had fried noodles. Eventually some people from another table joined me to improve a little bit their english. When they left, the girl from the restaurant joined me and invited me on a milk tea😀 We made some funny pictures together☺️


Tomorrow I will continue again on the highway. The highway splits into two roads. One of them passes the Cambodian border really close, that close that it is marked on the other side. I checked in the Internet  and found out in forum posts from 2015 that foreigners are not allowed on that road and send back from military. So I will take the other road.

So here is again some little bit of my equipment. Today I will present the stuff around my head:

  1. Of course my helmet,  I always wear it on my bicycle.
  2. This little funny thing on the upper left side of my face is a mirror attached to my helmet to look behind me. I am so used to it,  that when I am walking in the street,  where I don’t wear the helmet, I sometimes want to look behind me with the mirror, which isn’t there😂
  3. My glasses. Either the normal once or my sunglasses 😎
  4. On can not see them, but they are always there while riding,  my earplugs. For those underneath you who want to shout up and say it’s too dangerous: Shut up,  I hear everything around me,  I even hear people saying “hi” to me😂 So everything is save.
  5. Today because it was so cold,  I started to wear my Buff again around my throat.

Bicycle Touring

Day 63: going up even more

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Distance: 94,59 km Time: 6:12 Total distance: 2979 km

Today nothing really special happened,  expect that I forgot to change the batteries of my GPS so it ran out of juice in the morning. It was no problem as I just followed the highway and my road computer told me how far I went.

Fir the rest it was lots of climbing to somewhere above 800 meters and going down a little bit to the town called Gia Nghĩa. The landscape while going up was amazing☺️

Just notice the smoke next to the truck  😂








When the highway hits a town then the road is transformed into an allay with some green stuff in the middle.


And these are just a few spots. Often there are electricity cables,  houses,  trees or something else in the way to take a picture of it but just by passing by,  the view is great. For example here are cables in the view


For breakfast: rice

For lunch: rice

For dinner: pizza…  wait what? Yeah I found a place where they sold pizzas and some kind of bubble tea😀 Luckily there was a girl who spoke english and so helped the waitress and me to make the order😀

This evening I will check if I should take the train to visit a city a little bit off the highway and get back or just continue on the highway and therefore visit some other places.

Bicycle Touring

Day 62: a little climb

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Distance: 96,15 km Time: 5:04 Total distance: 2884 km

I got up later. For breakfast I got invited by the owners of the hotel. Really nice to talk to them☺️

On the road I just followed the Ho Chi Minh highway,  which I will follow the next few days,  probably. I don’t know if I will change my route. It started to climb a little bit,  so that I arrived at 270 meters of altitude in a town called Nghĩa Thành and I started at 11 meters☺️ But it was all the time up and down. I enjoyed cycling today,  landscape was beautiful,  it went up a little bit,  but I didn’t took a lot of pictures.

At the end it started  to rain a little bit. I just placed the rain cover over my handlebarbag and placed my Ipod in a plastic bag and continued cycling without raincoat,  as it is still warm and it just rained for one minute,  then stopped for 5 to 10 minutes and then it rained again shortly… But that was just the last 20 km.

I arrived in a village where I found a motel and a place to eat and nothing more😂

Today I had the same for breakfast, lunch and dinner… Plain rice with meat.


And tomorrow,  who would have expected it, I will continue on the highway☺️

Bicycle Touring

Day 61: Củ Chi Tunnels

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Distance: 78,58 km Time: 3:48 Total distance: 2788 km

So yesterday evening having dinner with my friends from the border. They are all from Mozambique and one from Belgium😀 Eventually I packed out my juggling balls and made a little show☺️ To finish the evening with guessing who was the artist of songs of the 80s. Yes I was a little bit lost, but it was fun😀



In the morning we cleaned everything up,  or more the other were cleaning up and I was packing up my stuff. After that we had breakfast and there were cereals 😍

I wanted to start at 9, postponed it to 10 to finally leave at 11 to get back on the road again. A big thanks to Ines an Stuward for hosting me. And Candy, Fraser, Alexa, Lea, Jhonas and Teo (hopefully I got the names correctly) for having that great evening 😀 And not to forget the dog called Cookie😀

On today’s plan wer the tunnels which were used in the Vietnam war to fight the americans. There is a special place,  where they show such tunnels and explain it a little bit (if you have a guide).

I had to cycle 50 km till there. Arrived there i parked my bike and wanted to store my luggage at the ticket office but they were like: “here no storage”. And the answer to my question: “why?”  was: “we don’t know”. So I had to place them with my bike as the bikes are guarded by security persons and these looked like they would move away that quickly,  so they won’t leave my luggage alone.

After carrying my luggage a little bit around and leaving it with my bike, I went back to the ticket office and asked whether there are guided tours,  they told me: “Inside,  just go inside”. I got  inside,  there was no guide… There were just some guided groups,  so I just joined a big one😂 Because I was all sweaty from cycling the guide always asked me if I was alright, I didn’t want to tell him that I was on a bicycle as the group was a bus group😂 The guide showed us around and gave lots of explanations. They were really inventive in building traps and hiding everything,  so that the americans couldn’t find the tunnels and when they would find it,  they would die or get hurt in a trap.




Yes I went into one, for tourists made bigger,  tunnel of 100 meters with exits every 20 meters. I took the first exit as walking in these tunnels weren’t really good for my knees and legs,  they are really tiny.

When we got to a show case with weapons, I was a little bit shocked that I could recognise some of them of the game called “Battlefield Vietnam”, which I used to play when I was a kid😂

As  there was no place to sleep around there, I decided to continue into the direction of the Ho Chi Minh Highway,  which one I want to take to get up in the north of Vietnam.

To get over the river I took a ferry which was only for motorbikes,  bicycles and pedestrians. Arrived there,  people were constantly laughing at and with me. I shared some cookies with the kids,  we did a photo shoot on the ferry and they took me over for free😀



Arrived on the other side I still had 20 km to go to the place with hotels. And the sun was going down.

I don’t know how I always end up cycling in the night…

Arrived in the town called Bến Cát I found a nice hotel. It’s owned by a Malaysian guy with its vietnamese wife and I was talking to them for quite a while after dinner.

Tomorrow I will probably just cycle as far as I can.

Bicycle Touring

Day 60: Saigon

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Distance: 75,11 km Time: 3:37 Total distance: 2709 km

The roads to get to Saigon were really boring,  just straight,  lots of motorbikes, trucks and buses. And the bigger the vehicle, the louder the horn… This image shows a really really quite moment, there was probably a big wall of vehicles coming up to me at that moment. That happens because of some traffic lights on the road.

I got really angry at cars, busses and trucks,  which sometimes entered the traffic from the side of the road and then stopped in the middle of the side lane, where I was driving with lots of motorbikes,  to look for a whole to get into the traffic. When they found a big hole,  they start to move in slow motion speed so I had to break. Then I started to shout at them in all kinds of languages that I know (expect french) 😂

Arrived in Saigon it got really full of motorbikes.

I had to cross through Saigon to get to my friend’s home😀


Now I am relaxing with them and we will all have dinner tonight together for new years eve☺️

EDIT: HAPPY NEW YEAR to everybody

Bicycle Touring

Day 59: the road of the nail

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Distance: 128,19 km Time: 6:03 Total distance: 2634 km

I met up a last time with the girl from the day before and we had breakfast together and then I went on the road.

First I had to cross the river with a ferry outside of the city. Because I only had big bills left, the woman in the ticket box just waved me through. Sweet,  ferry for free😀

A new bridge is being build, which will probably replace the multiple ferries running simultaneously.

On the other side I had to stop for this sign,  I don’t know why it was there in front of a bridge😂

I continued my cycling until it happened. What I wrote now is how I thought shortly after it happened,  my thoughts changed later that day: My bicycle started to whabel around, I look at my wheels and knew there was a flat, so I stopped immediately,  as cycling with a flat tire will destroy it and you can’t repair it anymore. I took of the luggage, and carried my bicycle 20 meters to the next café vong (a place where you can buy drinks and there are hammocks,  which are vongs in Vietnamese,  everywhere) . People started to look strange at me,  because I was carrying my luggage and my bicycle😂 When I showed them that I had a flat,  they pointed to the place next to the café vong. I went there to look what it was and left the bicycle back,  it was a place which repairs tires. When I came back,  there was already one guy carrying my bicycle to that place (I was just gone for 10 seconds) 😂 He found the reason quickly,  a 1 cm long old rusty nail… Removed the nail,  fixed the whole in the tube,  fixed the hole in the tire, placed everything back and pumped up the tube 😀 And everything for just 10000 VND😀 no stress for me. How lucky I was to get the flat in front of that store. I could have fixed it myself,  I have all the tools on me,  but I would have been more frustrated.

So these were my thoughts shortly after it happened when I stopped at another café vong to buy new water and rest. The guy in the picture was the one who “repaired”  the tube

I continued for the rest of the day,  just good road.

this kind of reminded me of another city

a big bridge with a sign of 120 km till Ho Chi Minh City😀

Until suddenly,  my bicycle started whabeling again. The back tire was flat again after 60 km. I took my pump out and filled the tire again,  it looked all right. After 5 km again flat. I went to a store with a compressor,  they filled up both of my tires. Which lasted another 10 km. I decided to check it. I was really pissed of. I stopped at a cafe vong (they are really everywhere here 😀) and tried to get my rear wheel out. Sadly it completely blocked and I freaked out a little bit more. The family of the cafe the helped me. Eventually we got it out,  a spring in the fixation of the wheel was blocking. I saw the patch of the repair action of the morning. The glue was eating up the patch… So the guy in the picture above was called an idiot by me. I just replaced the broken tube with a new one (my last one,  I have to buy new ones in Saigon) and pumped it up again. Luckily they had a stand pump and I didn’t have to pump it up with my little hand pump😀

Shortly after that it got dark and I decided to find a place to sleep. I just needed to cycle for 11 km in the dark and asked around as nobody knew about the placed marked on my map. In “My Tho” I then found a really cheap and good hotel 😀

Tomorrow I will enter Saigon, only 70 km left till there. There some people I met at the border invited me in for new years eve and to stay for one night 😀

Bicycle Touring

Day 58: cutting something off

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Distance: 75,42 km Time: 3:39 Total distance: 2506 km

This morning I finally wanted to continue and I had to leave the lovely family. After packing,  having breakfast and getting down the mosquito net, it was time to say goodbye. (The girl in the picture is the little sister of the girl I was talking/texting to)

Cycling was nice,  along the river,  around one hill and not too long.

I really like the traffic lights here, they all have these countdowns

I arrived early in Long Xuyên. The reason why I stopped in this city is because here lives a girl who hosts cyclists. I found her on a website called warm showers,  which is dedicated for hosting cyclists☺️ But she was unable to host me at the moment because of family visiting,  so I have to stay in a hotel next to her home. Why I still stop here? 1. it was planned to stop here to meet her 2. she helped me before I came to Vietnam and when I came to the last family when we had communication problems,  so I wanted to meet her in person to say thank you.

After a long shower and washing my cloth,  we met up and spend the rest of the day together. Eventually we talked about my beard as many people already told me,  that it is too long😂 So we went to a barber shop and cut it off. (yeah it was too long)

Before:

After:

For dinner I was invited in by her family☺️

Wow there was really less to tell today,  but it was a really nice day☺️

Tomorrow I will continue my journey towards Saigon where I will arrive one day later for new year’s eve.

Bicycle Touring

Day 57: Forest of silent guides

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Distance: 22,22 km (hihihi) Time: 1:16 Total distance: 2431 km

I found out that I am not sleeping at the girl’s home but the home of her grandparents. I spend the evening writing to her on Facebook as she can’t speak English but writing with the help of Google Translater sometimes. Also I was playing with the grandparents on their big arcade game table.

In the morning the girl had to go to school. I cycled to a forest near by (10 km)  which is called Tra Su. The forest is completely under water and for 130.000 VND (5,7 $) I got a fully packaged tour with motorboat, handboat and observation tower. Sadly the boat riders and the guy on top of the observation tower didn’t spoke a word of English, so no information for me about the forest. But it was still amazing and lots of birds.

My favorite picture of the forest

Down from the observation

The guide at the observation tower wanted to take a picture with me,  yes he has yellow glasses on😂

On the way back to the village

Back at the grandparent’s home, the girl was back from school. We all had lunch together.

After lunch we climbed up a tower next to the house. The tower has something to do with Buddhism as there were Buddhas on every floor.

in that house lives the family hosting me☺️


After some relaxation in a hammock, the girl and I went into the village for dinner.

The rest of the evening I spend with the family,  I showed them a little bit of my juggling and tried to teach them all a little bit.

I decided not to continue  cycling anymore today, as my legs hurt a little bit… So I am still in the same village. I will reach my friends town tomorrow. ☺️

On of the many guests in this house