I have to admit that Simon and I had consumed at least two bottles of wine and while the malt whiskey was slipping down, I said something like 'why don't we go away cycling for a bit'.
Simon fetched a map of the world and after a few minutes, one of us pointed to somewhere north and east of Thailand. Vietnam might seem like a strange choice and indeed it did to us as well, but having almost randomly pointed drunkenly at Hanoi as a probable starting place and Ho Chi Min or Saigon as a finishing position and made something of an agreement about it, there could be no going back.
And that was pretty much all that was said about it for several weeks. I had seperately decided to go off to Thailand backpacking from the beginning of November and in about the middle of that month, I emailed Simon to make sure he was still coming. Of course he was! The journey however starts not in Hanoi, but in the opposite direction, in Singapore. That left me with something of a dileamour. For a start, I didn't have a bike. Not only did I not have a bike in Asia, but I didn't own one at all. In fact, I hadn't done any distance cycling for over twenty years. Mountain biking yes, but road biking, a total of about 50 miles! I decided that the most likely place to buy a decent touring bike in SE Asia, would be Singapore, so with four whole days to spare until my flight to Hanoi and after a relaxing new year in the andamans and Penang, I took the overnight train on my mission to get a bike.
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