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A post gap year cycling update

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I have a rather  strange   difficult to explain hobby that combines my love of travel with the challenge of finding the most obscure routes to random destinations, acquiring air miles and paying the least amount of money to do so. I’m not the only one: there are web forums where similar minded  people like me swap routings and talk in acronyms all the time. We also know most of the airport three letter codes off by heart, so it is never Heathrow or San Francisco but LHR or SFO. . If you have a spare couple of weeks and a sense of humour, I’ll happily explain how it all works. So talking of SFO, my bizarre route of this little trip was London-Inverness-London-Helsinki-New York-Los Angeles-San Francisco. The fare rules stipulated that you needed a minimum 3 night stay in your destination, so using my love of cycling seemed like a perfect way of filling in the three nights. I say the word “my” as Sian can’t take holidays at this time of year, so I was on my tod. ...
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Vietnam, the best coffee shop in the world and the end of this adventure

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Well, as the saying goes, all good things have to come to an end and I am sitting here in Bangkok airport waiting for our flight back to blighty. A brief summary of what we have done now follows. We've been following the coast south from Route 9 - the old border between North and South Vietnam. Stayed a couple of nights in a place with it's own private waterfall. Another heroic route planning failure. It's not obvious from the photo, but that path is pretty steep and very rutted. So off the bikes and push - not easy in the heat! Sorry Sian..... The main coastal route in Vietnam is the Q1- and it has a bit of a reputation on the web as being the highway to hell! This in fact is it - whilst it is busy and you don't want to be on it all day, it is no worse than any of the other main roads we have been on. Generous hard shoulder and a lot of the time a central reservation ( thus stopping some of the crazy overtaking manoeuvres that you get otherwise)....
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Farewell Laos, and good morning Vietnam!!!

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Some 1000km finds us now on the Vietnamese coast, having left the 4000 islands region in Laos where my last blog finished. This has been 1000km of cycling, although I have to confess to us taking a taxi with bikes from Pakse to Savannhakhet in Laos- the excuse being that we had cycled this road in one direction and neither of us could face up to repeating it in the opposite direction! This is us leaving the island of Don Khon in south Laos, via the French bridge. So called because the French couldn't find any way of getting past the rapids in the Mekong River, and built a railway line and this bridge to circumvent said rapids. It was a terrific place to get some sunset views in the evening, along with most other tourists it has to be said. We cycled back north towards Pakse, but this time on the opposite side of the Mekong river, experiencing the worst of Laos roads - 30km of exceptionally bumpy red dirt track.  There is a certain leap of faith when you look ...
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