About

Hi, welcome to Bicyclating! It’s not a proper word but does sort of combine the idea of bicyles and one of those ‘action’ words – exciting! exhilirating! adventuring! That kinda thing.

We are Joe (37) and Rachel (30) from SE London (Lewisham and proud!) and this is our first bicyclating adventure. We’ve taken 4 months off work and plan to spend three of them (Jan – Mar 2015) cycling from Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand to Bangkok, via Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. We’re not sure of the distance we’ll cover on two wheels, but it could be around least 3,000km.

This is our first experience of cycle touring so we hope that our amateur approach and steep learning curve will prove useful (and maybe even entertaining) to anyone else thinking of doing something similar, or for anyone who’s ‘been there, done that’.

We’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has encouraged us to go for it, and to all who will provide a helping hand over the coming months… no doubt we’ll need it!

Update (April 2015)… we’re now back in London and…we did it! Just under 2,500km cycled, no accidents, not even a puncture! It was a fantastic experience overall, and the countries we visited were all brilliant and full of lovely people.

We’ve decided to keep the blog going and make it more about cycling in general, and more specifically in London, so you can look forward to occasional updates in the future, mostly from me (Joe).

We’ve also uploaded the SE Asia part of the blog as a “completed journey” on the Crazy Guy on a Bike website. This site was such a useful resource to us while we were away that we wanted to share our experiences on it too; hopefully they will be useful to other cyclists going the same way as we did, or to any first time cycle tourers wanting to learn from our mistakes!