Back in 2001 Choc and his wife Rachael had an epic adventure riding a Cyclo the length of Vietnam from Hanoi in the north to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in the south: a distance of 1728 km!
On his return to the UK Choc wrote the story of this journey but then never published it. That story is now here in its entirety.
Warm Beer and Cold Women
The rain had been coming down in sheets for hours and by the look of it there was to be no respite from it; not in the near future anyhow. Was it the third or fourth day in a row of torrential rain? I don't know? It had been raining on and off for so long it was getting hard to remember a day when it wasn’t raining. Layer upon layer of the long sharp stinging water droplets were hitting our faces and bodies. We were both soaked through to the skin and thoroughly miserable. Our attempts at conversation with each other had long since been abandoned. We both just sat there deep in our own thoughts wishing that we were somewhere else, anywhere else in the world but here! When it rains in South East Asia it really rains.
Even under the wide brim of my hat visibility was poor. For what I could see out of my eyes they may as well have been closed. I kept trying to peer through a half open, half closed squint in a vain hope that I could spot any obstacles in our path. From time to time I had even been taking it in turns, to try to keep one eye open and one eye closed to give one eye a rest, but this just gave me headaches, making a bad situation even worse.
On and on we slowly went. The steady repetitive turning motion of my legs on the pedals pushing us onwards to our evening lodgings sent me in to some kind of semi trance. I was not really concentrating on where we were going; or even thinking about my very sore legs and bum. Instead I was contemplating the big question that I have been asking myself for the last few days now: How and why on Earth did I get myself in to this? It was all down to me; nobody else. I wasn’t pushed our coerced in to this. Nobody held a loaded gun to my head to make me finish this. It was all my idea for God’s sake, nobody else’s just mine. I must have been totally crazy to think that one man could pedal a Cyclo from Hanoi to Saigon.
What had made me talk my poor suffering wife into trying this way of travelling? Well that’s a long story and in a way, she is a little bit to blame for us being out here in the middle of Vietnam. After all she did agree to let me attempt this trip.
I have had a fascination with Vietnam and its people since I was a young boy when I used to watch the news reports about the American / Vietnam War on the early evening news. This in turn led me to collecting and reading as many non-fiction books about the conflict as I could lay my hands on. The place names sounded so magical and mysterious to me then, and still do to this day: Saigon, Da Nang, Nha Trang and the Mekong Delta to name but a few.
I have always known that one day I would go and see these places for myself. So when my wife of only a couple of weeks (Rachael) and I were deciding where to buy a house and settle down. She turned to me and said “let’s just sell up what we have, quit our jobs and travel around Australia for a year”. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t have said no to her request. I had travelled for quite a few years previously when I was younger but Rachael had never travelled for one reason or another. So being a firm believer that everyone should travel at least once in his or her life, the only answer for me to give was a resounding yes. Not to mention what a great way it would be to begin our married life together, it would be great for us to have such a big adventure together. If we could survive a year living out of each other’s pockets we could survive anything.
I only had a couple of stipulations for the trip:
1. If we are going to go all the way to Australia we may as well visit Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam on the way.
2. If we are going to go to Vietnam I would like to try to cycle from Hanoi in the north to Saigon in the south on a Cyclo.
“What on earth is a Cyclo?” Rachael asked with a frightened look upon her face. I told her that a Cyclo is the Vietnamese version of a rickshaw where the passenger sits on a bench seat in front of the driver and that they are mainly used as taxis for short journeys around towns and cities. “Now I know you’re mad” she replied.
It was not an original idea of mine to cycle Vietnam on a Cyclo. A few years before I had been watching a Lonely Planet travel program about Vietnam when the presenter stopped to chat to a couple of French guys trying to cycle the opposite way from Saigon to Hanoi on a Cyclo. “What a wonderful way to see the country” I thought to myself and made a promise that if I ever got the chance I would try to do the same. I don’t know whether they made it or not? I tried to find out on the internet without any luck. But there were two of them taking it in turns. While one pedalled the other one was resting. I on the other hand had only myself to do all the hard work. Rachael had told me straight after I had explained to her what a Cyclo was. If I was mad enough to even try to cycle Vietnam on a Cyclo there was no way that she would turn a pedal to help, “it’s madness!” she said. However I secretly thought that she would change her mind once we got out into the countryside and started to get in to the journey.
I am a keen mountain biker and I was fairly fit so I didn’t think it would be too hard for me to ride a Cyclo but who knows? I had only ever seen photos of them before. I had never seen one up close. My plan was to start from Hanoi in the north and head south to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) a distance of some 1,700km. Our Vietnam trip was to be the second leg of our journey. First we were going to spend two weeks in Thailand relaxing and getting acclimatized to the heat.
