Welcome back to our next best adventure, the Old Legs Friendship Bench Tour 2026, Vietnam to Vic Falls which reads as a bit of a mouthful, but then we will be pedalling nearly 3000 kilometres across SE Asia, and a chunk of Africa.
6 Months to Hanoi
We will be riding to raise money and awareness for Zimbabwe’s pensioners, and for the Friendship Bench, the mental health charity creating safe places for vulnerable people across Zimbabwe and the world, one Friendship Bench at a time.
Our peloton is taking shape. Despite spraining my thumb grievously falling up a hill two weeks ago, I was guaranteed second-place on the podium when a friend of mine called Pete told me he would rather barbecue his scrotum than ride the length of Vietnam with me and a million mosquitoes.
I was almost guaranteed first place when the other 50 percent of the peloton crashed his bike, clumsy bastard, puncturing his lung and busting his collar bone, but thankfully he is well on his way to recovery.
Although chances are he would’ve beaten me even with a punctured lung. Because of my sprained thumb, I can’t even hitchhike, let alone ride my bike, and I’ve spent the last three weeks practicing eating two-minute noodles in under two minutes. By the time we get to Vietnam, I expect I will hate noodles more than broccoli.
But in breaking good news, I have been bumped off the podium by Mark Jonno Johnson and Macca McKenny from Old Legs Australia who have just signed up to join me and Howard Thompson in Hanoi. Which leaves us with one rider spot left to fill, applications welcome, no previous experience required.
Having sorted out the finishing order, I have also attended to the nitty gritty stuff, like the route. I think the fact that I have plotted the route worried Pete more than the mosquitoes, for good reason, because if the truth be known, me and Komoot have struggled with finding our way across 2200 kilometres of Vietnam.
It didn’t help that our Day Three night stop is in a town called Nha Nghi Hoang Huong, but every time I asked Komoot to take me back to Nha Nghi to plot Day Four and onwards, Komoot offered up a million other start point options, all of them also called Nha Nghi. So much for artificial bloody intelligence, and then I found out that Nha Nghi is Vietnamese for guest house.
Supporting the riders in the back up van, is my cousin Hanny from Holland, not to be confused with my cousin Vinny, the movie, and Vicky Bowen from Guruve, plus Jenny, plus our Vietnamese driver, Phuc Binh, whose inscrutability will be tested to the limits.
Jenny, Vicky and Hanny will share responsibilities for foraging for food and accommodation, and also for telling Phuc Binh to slow down and to watch out for scooters, etcetera. Hanny will be in charge of photos, and Vicky for collecting cultural artefacts and souvenirs, and Shona translation, should we bump into any lost Zimbabwean tourists, other than ourselves.
Jenny, Hanny and Vicky will also handle the manufacture and distribution of the Izzy dolls.
Izzy dolls have a very cool backstory. They are inspired by Canadian soldier Mark “Izzy” Isfeld who was on peacekeeping duties in Croatia. He 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 thought we’d take a bunch of Izzy dolls with us to Vietnam and Vic Falls on Tour with us. Please be invited to also get busy knitting.
With Vietnam out the way, me and Komoot have now turned our attention to Part Two of the Tour, 500 kilometres from Bulawayo to Vic Falls, hopefully via Hwange National Park. Joining us on her first big ride is Nicole van Os from Holland, and CarolJoy Church from Germany and Ryan Moss from Mutare, both of whom are Old Legs stalwarts.
In closing and still on the subject of doing good, the Friend Animal Foundation are moving 460 dogs, 200 cats, 30 goats, two cows, one mule and one pensioner from Harare to their new shelter yet to be built in Goromonzi. Please reach out to me if you are able to help with donations or logistics, transport, building skills or materials.
Until my next blog, have fun, do good, do epic- Eric Chicken Legs de Jong
* Names and images may have been changed for privacy reasons
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