I’m starting a new tour company, tours all over Asia, NZ and Oz.

More info coming soon, very excited about this new project!

If you’re keen to ride those ol’ roads less traveled – and do see below, I definitely found them in Vietnam – with good and experienced riders, tight guides, and to eat great food and basically love to live your very best BikeLife, then this is for you!

This October / November will be our first tour, and it’ll be this one, 7 days in northern Vietnam…

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I was introduced to Minh Ha by Brendon Morrison, the co-founded of the amazing gravel event, SEVEN, out in Western Australia (heading there next week for the May 11th race).

I messaged Minh, who lives just south of Hanoi and has been hosting cycling tours for 25 years. I told him I was looking for a route upon which to hold a tour, and he mentioned one he and Brendon had scouted last year, so i called him:

Me: When is the best time to come ride the route?

Minh: Now.

Me: … OK let me go book a flight.

With Minh Ha, just before the start of the 7 day tour recce.

In a week I was there, giddy as a Lab in a fire hydrant shop.

Banh Mi, that’s some damn fine eatin’…

Ming picked me up in Hanoi on the 18th and off we drove to the northern city of Thai Nguyen, 72km from Hanoi. A coffee and a bite to eat later and I was lycra’d up and pedalling my way to Lang Son, 160km away to the east towards the border with China, with Minh showing the way up ahead in his van.

Straight away I was on quiet provincial roads with little traffic, surrounded by rice fields on a beautiful and not overly humid day. A couple of weeks riding over 330km in Taiwan beforehand meant my legs felt good too, and I was humming along at a nice clip.

Then these jagged little ‘shark’s teeth’ hills started popping up in the distance, locally known as karst hills, which are made of limestone. They’re quite beguiling and very picturesque.

The first shark tooth of many to come.

After some 30km we took a turn off the main road and descended down into a valley, a descent that had a lovely view of where I was heading.

It was just gorgeous, I was already quite blown away by the beauty of the land, and then, just after I’d taken this shot, we turned left and I was on gravel. One of my favorite sounds in the world is that you hear when your tires cross from tarmac to gravel, that crunchy little ‘fizz’ you hear – it sounds a bit like rock candy popping in your mouth.

The road headed down then levelled out and I was getting up to a good tempo, pushing it probably more than I should have, with such a big week ahead, but hey, what’s a man to do?

I was flying past motorbikes as we passed small villages and little towns, crunching along over the grit.

Then, POP… front tire blow out. Bad news was that we’d forgotten the floor pump, so had to rely on my old, taped up Lezyne hand pump, but we only got the pressure to about 30 psi, so decided to head on and stop at a motorcycle repair shop to see if we could get some air there.

When we arrived, Minh remembered his compressor for his car tires, and he and the mechanic at the shop set about connecting my pump tube to the compressor.

And yes, it does look like a bong but, it’s for tobacco..!

The guy brought his kids out from his house to meet us, which was the start of lot of random encounters with local people, who were so nice to us, from the kids that ran from their houses to high five me or the old ladies selling fruits by the side of the road.

More on the people later…

These recces for future hosted tours are invaluable for getting to know the proposed routes and seeking out little cafes and good food spots, but they are also important because you get to meet people like these, good folk whom you can get in touch with next time you’re passing through. They may know of a local festival that’s on that you can take people to or a local waterfall, and they will very likely help you out if you are in a pinch, as were were here.

By now though we were quite behind schedule, as we had started late (too many of those amazing coffees), and with this flat, and then another just after I took this photo below, I had to jump in the car at 120km as the night descended. We arrived in sleepy Lang Son at about 7pm, found a hotel, got some food in us and headed to a bike shop – the only local one – to see if we could get some new rim tape and a 32mm gravel tire…

And to my astonishment, that is what we did.

We met owner Tran Quoc Kien, who had two Hutchinson cyclo cross tires and a bag full of rim tape. His store is on the first floor of his house, next to his wife’s teaching room. She had a class of ten young teens sat learning maths who gave a big shout when they saw me, and I chatted with them for a couple of minutes before Quoc’s wife shooed me out so that they could get back to studying.

All in all this was a great start to the trip, and oddly, we hadn’t seen a single foreign tourist or cyclist since we left Hanoi.

Job done.

Day 2 report coming tomorrow, as the cycling gets even better!

Oh and I almost forgot the buffalo, see video…