09 July – shock and horror, just 98 days to go to Vietnam.
It has been a month since my last blog, ground rush has commenced, and we’ve been crazy busy, mostly with Jenny’s Vietnam Visa application.
Back in the olden days, before Covid, visas were easy. You popped down to the embassy, spoke to the person through the hole in the window, they gave you a form, you gave them money and a cringeworthy passport photo, and it was job done. The hardest thing was trying to cram your handwriting into the stupidly tiny little boxes on the form.
But fast forward to after Covid, and every single embassy in the world has shut down their visa department, and you have to now apply online. But no problem, that is why you had children. But one of your children is away on safari for six weeks, and the other one is too frazzled with four children, leaving you to fend for yourself on-line.
But no problem, you watch a video of a man applying for his Vietnam visa in under three minutes on YouTube, and without swearing. So, with Jenny standing by to provide vital information like her birthdate, you jump on to the Vietnam e-Visa portal. You jump on using Jenny’s iPad, because that’s where she gets her e-mails.
The first three questions are easy, name, address and birthdate, but then you come unstuck on question number four, Jenny’s phone number. Crap. The portal’s alphabetical pull down for international dial codes stops abruptly at Yemen, rendering every Zambian and every Zimbabwean buggered. Two entire countries have gone missing, and you have no idea what to do. You lapse into foul language.
Jenny tells you to look harder, Zambia and Zimbabwe can’t just go missing, they have to be there somewhere. You look for them again, and still the Vietnamese alphabet stops at Yemen. And all the while you are reminded by yourself that you travel on a Dutch passport, and you don’t need to be doing this shit, and you lapse back into foul language again. Which sets Jenny off also lapsing.
Eventually both of you calm down, thankfully before the parrot picks up on the lapsing. What to do? What to do? Think, think, think.
There is a support e-mail address hidden in the small print at the very bottom of the portal. You reach out to the support guy, and he responds promptly, even though it is after midnight in Vietnam. His name is Ched, and how can he help? You worry that Ched might be a robot, but he sounds nice anyway. You tell him your alphabet problem. Ched thinks for a nanosecond, and then he tells you to use the international dial code for the country nearest us instead. Jenny is hugely relieved. You are less hugely relieved, because you can’t see how some poor bugger in South Africa with the same cell phone number as Jenny is expected to successfully handle Ched’s queries as and when.
But you decide to fall off that bridge when you get to it, and you move on to the next section. You have to upload Jenny’s selfie and her passport page. You know how to do that because you watched the guy from Australia. But you don’t know where to find Jenny’s photos and her documents on her iPad. And neither does Jenny. All she knows how to find is Pintrest and cooking recipes.
Eventually you calm down yet again, and you move the whole process to Jenny’s laptop. Which doesn’t work, because Jenny hasn’t renewed her Outlook subscription since 2023. You lose it again, this time with Bill Gates.
Out of desperation, you try another visa agent. And good news, this guy is definitely a human being and gets pissed off when you ask if he’s a robot. Sure, he can help, he says, for a fee, he just needs your dates, and a copy of Jenny’s passport. You send him a copy, and he replies, and I quote, “After reviewing her profile, I found that she is from a nationality with a high visa refusal risk for Vietnam. Therefore, I am unable to accept and process her visa application, as there is a significant risk of refusal.”
Shit. Vietnam is a communist country. Zimbabwe was also a communist country, before the Tagwireyi wedding, and we even have a red star on the flag to prove it. Communists are supposed to call each other comrade. So, it really sucks when a comrade declares a former comrade high risk, without knowing the first thing about her, just because of the colour of her passport.
But you’re more saddened, than angered, because it is symptomatic of the crappy narcissistic world we live in, where mobs in South Africa know how to spell xenophobia, but don’t know how to spell empathy and ubuntu. Cry the beloved country, Mandela will be turning in his grave.
But visas aside, and apart from my training which is currently being disrupted by three weeks of the Tour de France on television, Tour preparations are going swimmingly well.
Bar some missing logos, our Vietnam to Vic Falls ride jersey is good to go and a thing of beauty. If you would like one hanging in your wardrobe with your company logo on it, please reach out to me. NB all pledges will go directly to the charities.
My bicycle is also good to go with brand-new tyres front and back. Amazingly it only took me, Jenny and the guy on YouTube two hours to get the back wheel back on the bike, so I am getting the hang of this DIY stuff. Because we will be sharing the roads less travelled in Vietnam with 45 million motorbikes, my bike now boasts two rearview mirrors, which I installed myself, and will be lit up with more red lights than an Amsterdam brothel, although I do worry that the two rearview mirrors might serve to double my motorbike angst.
And on the subject of doubling, don’t you just love how this blog flows, we’ve taken delivery of our Vietnam Izzy Doll new gang members, knitted with much love in Mutare by Helen Valentine, Helen Bains, Jane Fern and Rienie Heynes. (Jane and Rienie are 86 and 93 years young respectively.) And a big shout out to the Yarn Barn and all the other knitters out there. ❤️
For those who don’t know, Izzy dolls have a very cool backstory. Inspired by Canadian soldier and peacekeeper Mark “Izzy” Isfeld who saw a child’s doll lying on a pile of rubble from a bombed house and asked his mom back home to knit him some dolls so he could give them to traumatised children. Mark was later killed in the war, but his mom Carol carried on with his mission, and she has distributed millions of Izzy dolls around the world in the last 30 years as symbols of kindness and compassion. Both commodities are currently in short supply, so we are taking an Izzy Doll gang with us to Vietnam to share the love.
Our Vietnam Gang is now almost 200 strong and growing. I have given my grandchildren Colton and Teagan the challenge of naming the dolls before we fly to Hanoi early October.
The Old Legs Tour 2026 starts on October 15 in the village of Ha Giang on the China border and finishes in Victoria Falls on November 29, unless we get lost. To celebrate two continents, we are riding in support of two very splendid charities, ZANE Australia and the Friendship Bench. I look forward to introducing you to the charities and my equally splendid teammates over the next ten weeks, modestly starting with me and my bike, Pole Pole.
But before I introduce myself, a quick update on Lynn, the pensioner whose prefab cottage we bashed down in Tynwald, so that we could rebuild it in Goromonzi. Alas, turns out my construction project management skills are up there with my bike DIY skills, and I was overzealous in the demolishment phase of the project, and reduced Lynn’s prefab to rubble. But with help from Round Table One, a Pint for a Pensioner in the UK and Karel Hooijman in the Netherlands, we are rebuilding the cottage with bricks and mortar and have now reached roof height.
Thank you and God bless to all who helped, and especially to the Friends Animal Foundation for offering Lynn a forever home, and for all the good work they do with the animals. The Friends Animal Foundation are the largest ‘No Kill’ animal shelter in Zimbabwe and are home to 450 dogs, 190 cats, 32 goats, 2 cows and a donkey. Please support them if you can.
And in breaking good news, Vietnam have just granted Jenny’s visa! Yippee, Hanoi, here we come!
Until my next blog, Have Fun, Do Good, and Do Epic if you can – Eric Chicken Legs de Jong
* Names and images may have been changed for privacy reasons
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