Bicycle South East Asia

Thanks for visiting my blog. I will be uploading photos and route information for friends and family to keep up to date with my progress on a bicycle adventure through South East Asia from Macau, China to Kathmandu, Nepal. I hope some of the information posted will be useful fellow touring cyclists looking to follow similar routes.

My route from Macau to Kathmandu will be meandering and inefficient in terms of Westerly progress, but luckily the destination is not my target. The purpose of this trip (if you can call it a purpose) is to explore as much of South East Asia as possible within the four or five months I have away from my job as a structural engineer.

I (Tom) will be joined by my good friend Mark who has just finished cycling from Bangkok to Singapore. Between us we have a considerable amount of bike touring experience but this will be the most ambitious ride for either of us by quite a significant margin. Besides obtaining visas and preparing gear, my planning so far has been fairly minimal. Every attempt to research specifics about the route finds me sidelined on to mostly unrelated cycle touring blogs (see Links for a list of my favourites), that really amount to hours spent day dreaming as opposed to useful planning and preparation.

The route shown below is our initial plan. Thanks to the freedom of travelling by bicycle this will almost certainly change and you can see my current location here, but there are a few destinations that will define our route. Upon leaving Macau, our first stop will be Yangshou in China that is famous for its dramatic Karst mountains. From there, the next ‘destination’ is Halong bay in Vietnam. After Halong Bay, we will be heading towards Angkor Watt in Cambodia followed by a short ride West to Bangkok where we need to collect our Burma and India visas. From Bangkok we will head North towards Burma where the only border crossing open to tourists is in a place called Myawaddy. Travelling north through Burma, we will pass through Yangon and Mandalay. North of Mandalay, we will be aiming to cross into India via a very rural border at a place called Moreh in northern Burma. After leaving Burma we will be climbing the foothills of the Himalayas through India and into Nepal. We have been preceded in this route through Burma by just a handful of cyclists who have taken advantage of the newly opened border crossing to India and luckily wrote some very informative blog posts about the details.

Wish us luck and I hope you enjoy following our progress!

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.”
Ernest Hemingway