By telling us your country of residence we are able to provide you with the most relevant travel insurance information.
Please note that not all content is translated or available to residents of all countries. Contact us for full details.
Shares
As our buff guide unpacks the bikes, Lisa and I take in the view. We can see forever across blue-grey valleys and mountainsides crowded with foliage. There are no hints of the bitumen road snaking through endless rainforest. Am I really going to do this? A handful of goats regard us indifferently. Some roughly assembled bamboo poles suggest that they should not come onto the road. There is a roadside café implied by one bamboo wall and roof slats. Inside, our driver is ordering. A young woman in a floral shirt sits patiently on a stool plaiting leather straps. “This is where begin,” our guide waves a happy arm at the road vanishing into the mountain. I am smiling but I feel tight across my chest. It’s humid. My clothes feel sticky. I’m forty-nine. I’ve never ridden more than 40 k’s in a day. Will my knees survive? Oh dear lord, what am I doing? A cycling trek had been a bucket-list thing. When a travel agent priced a 10-day trip to Vietnam at $6000, we decided to see what we’d save booking everything ourselves. Were we savvy enough to build our own adventure? We dreamed a trip of a lifetime. Standing here, 100 kilometres west of Hanoi at the edge of Ba Vi, I was starting to doubt my own bucket. “Okay, your helmet. We ride for a couple hour maybe, then our driver he meet us with some morning tea. Then maybe two hour before we stop some lunch.” “How far do you think we’ll ride today,” I try to ask lightly. “Oh, 80 kilometre today. We take it easy.” This would be a good time to announce that I am a fraud. But like the time I agreed to bungee jump, I can see no feasible way to back out of this now. And that is it. Literally the last moment that I feel anything other than exhilaration. As we pedal, the air cools my skin. There is so much to take in, we travel many kilometres before I notice my heart thumping. This mountain air pours through me. On our left, wet walls of rock streaked with yellow plunge skyward. To our right, peak after peak after peak dissolve into mist like a Japanese water-colour. Only when we stop do I become aware of my legs, my knees. I can feel it in my quads. And my butt is definitely tender. But Lisa and I can’t stop smiling; dancing around each other, all wet tops and bedraggled hair sharing our child-like glee. That night, a home-stay inside the rainforest. On stilts, a large bamboo room boasted luxurious bed-mats and we slept like anvils. Over the following days I learnt that Duc, our guide, had been an Olympic cyclist. By sheer luck, Lisa and I were the only two people booked on this tour. So we soaked up Duc’s thoughtful attention. He would swing around from the lead regularly and sidle up to ask, “Okay?” Or offer tips on how to push through our ankles for power when pedalling uphill. We visited Cuc Phuong primate rescue centre and a mountain cave where Neolithic dwellers left their tools. We stood in awe inside rock-carved temples. We stopped for a water-buffalo, a parade of ducks and a funeral. We lunched on spicy soups and sweet purple-and-white dragon fruit. Our guide swapped our bikes for row-boats and we drifted through limestone caves dodging stalactites. Rough brown-dirt laneways through villages produced children running from their houses to chase us and high five as we passed; vast green rice-fields unzipped for our passage past grinning leaf-hat women. In towns, we grew so accustomed to manoeuvring the five-way traffic that I took to shooting with my SLR slung around my neck while riding. The great joy of 64 gig SD cards is that even a monkey can press the trigger four-hundred times and you are still going to get that one National Geographic shot. Over four days, I managed several. Blown up and framed on my bedroom wall, I cannot look at them today without smiling. My knees survived. I’m planning to cycle Morocco.