Tanh Hoa – 100km on

Well here we are! A hairy ride through HCMC, a few wrong turns, 5 road side wees, 2 huge bowls of Pho and many smiles and waves later we have completed our first day on our tandem.

We made it, even if the German chocolate biscuits that Gina (our warm showers host) gave us for the journey didn’t…

We think we did a 100km in total and we’ve stopped overnight at a sleepy town called Tanh Hoa. Our position
10.658degN,106.181W

It seems we are the only foreigners here – one of the joys of arriving by bike – but we are acutely aware we need to improve our basic Vietnamese quickly.

My bum (Annie) is more than feeling the 7 hours in the saddle although Ben’s bikers balm is working it’s magic.

Our hotel is basic but clean. We feel the bed spread pretty much sums it up…

Paddy is physically in pretty good shape although mentally exhausted from navigating through the road traffic. Dad will be pleased to know that his suggestion to fit a handlebar mirror was a good one and we would encourage other cycle tourers to think about getting one too. The Mekong Delta is heavily populated resulting in quite a lot of traffic and it’s really useful to know if there are large vehicles coming up behind us. The Vietnamese are not aggressive drivers but they do like to overtake wherever possible, we can use the mirror to slow down/speed up so we’re never  near 2 trucks passing each other. We also wished we had bought pollution masks as the roads in HCMC and other towns can be truly nasty.

The bike performed well – we have a slightly warped disk break (a result from the flight) which we have fixed but need to keep an eye on.