Tour de Indochine

It’s going to be an exciting next two weeks for me and a few of my closest friends.  Unfortunately you’ll be stuck in the office, but I’ll do my best to make you feel like you’re part of our journey. Ten of us are going to Vietnam on a man-vacation for the next 16 days.   Just us, the bikes, beaches, pho, and cheap massages.  Don’t even mention Broken Back Mountain after yesterday’s post.  It’s not going to be like that.

We’re landing in the middle of Vietnam and riding down Hwy 1 to Ho Chi Mihn City.  Kind of like they did in Top Gear but the reverse direction (we’re going with the prevailing winds).  We’ll have domestiques in rickshaws running behind us so we can look as PRO as possible and not have to reduce ourselves to panniers and maps.

I was going to build up my Cyclocross bike with a new groupset to ride but Cycling Edge have been generous to build me up a Parlee Z3 to ride whilst we’re there.  This bike as become affectionately known as the “Bitsa Bike”.  Bitsa this, bitsa that….it’s basically a mutt that’s been thrown together from parts laying around the shop.  I took it for a ride this morning and it’s going to do the job superbly.

To immerse the Bitsa fully into this trip I’ll be on the look out for little souvenirs from every possible place we visit and fixing it to the bike.  The more wacky, the better.  It should be interesting to see how this ends up.   The idea is that we’ll pass the bike off to the next person who goes on a cycling adventure and they can do the same thing.

I’ll be off-line over the next few days while we’re traveling but I’ll be back with 2 weeks of posts from our bikes in beautiful Vietnam.    I may not post every day – it’ll depend what internet access is like.  Also, I’m sorry but I won’t be able to respond to emails over this time.

If any of you have been to this area of Vietnam before I’d love to hear about things we should see and do.

See you in a few days! 

Tim building up the Parlee Bitsa Bike.  It’s actually a pretty damn good.  Nice carbon frame, Ultegra groupset, Aksium wheels.  It’s gonna be bulletproof!