Day ONE Done

Wow, what a ride. We left the Rising Dragon Palace hotel in the old quarters of Hanoi and rode out to the little red bridge, an iconic location in Hanoi, where we burned our little prayer paper to bless us on our trip. To add more blessings to our ride I even wrapped the blessed Tibetan scarf around my neck for the ceremony!

With the Garmin GPS supplied by future team more Andrew from PNG we headed South towards Nimh Binh, 95kms south. When we overshot a turn and thought we'd be smart we took a long detour through tiny village roads to end up where we were when we deviated. That was the only hiccup.

Finding the hotel was reasonably easy. We couldn't just put the address into the GPS because of the scant Vietnamese map and the lack of a Vietnamese keyboard, but Alastair found it on his Android phone!

At the hotel we found Eleanor and Nam the driver. We were covered in dirt after riding from 930-430pm and covering 101kms. Mark did incredibly well on his vintage Apollo III bicycle, and our Zoco Electric Bike batteries lasted the entire distance, averaging just over 20km/hr.

Jim's bike needs some adjusting as he had not 'aligned the yellow marks' when he did some work on the bike and thus did not have top gear. We will fix that later....

Now it's time for some serious relaxing!