well i have given up on living in vietnam and have moved back home. the cycling trip was my farewell tour and i got home on wednesday afternoon. i am staying at my parents house at ames lake. next week i will start looking for work.

wow cambodia was wonderful. here are a few shots of angkor. its kind of hard to pick my favorites out of almost 500 photos.

its all fun and games till someone loses. thanks to phong pham for the top two pictures, i think.

ok, so the cycling trip is finally over. we can put our bikes away, shave our faces, and sleep in. it feels amazing to have completed the 1300 mile journey. it was the hardest thing i have ever accomplished. the last week i think was the most difficult. life on the road was beginning to takes its toll on the groups moral, and starting to chip away at my sanity. waking early everyday and packing the vans, finding something decent to eat, and finding a hotel in every new town, were the most taxing aspects of the trip. by the end the cycling was the easy part, it took no mental energy, just pedal, pedal, pedal. i can do that. opon ariving in saigon our group was welcomed by friends with junk food and cold beer at the palace gates. we spent the next two days partying and eating delicious food. im glad the trip is over. im glad i took part in this ride. im glad i got to meet all the great people involved and see parts of the country that were well off the tourist track. and of course im glad that with the help of my friends and family H2H was able to raise $35,000 for charities im vietnam. thank you everyone who helped make this possible.

dont forget to never remember

after a couple of short days, 65k and 48k, we have a long one tomorrow. 110k but it shouldn't be too bad terrain wise. after that we have an 80k day and then we have a rest day. the ride is nearing completion we will be back in saigon in a week. this ride has been great but it will be nice when i dont have to get up early every morning and move from town to town. i of course will still be riding my bike everyday, thats not going to change anytime soon, but im not really suited for life on the road.
to read other people's feelings about the ride thus far read Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City.

wow today was wicked hard. 110k with huge mountain climbs through the jungle. one climb was 18k 10% grade. it was beautiful though.

its my first opertunity to sleep in in over a week and im up at seven in the morning. the ride has been great so far. we are having our first rest day in the ancient walled city of hue. i feel safe from any invading hordes but not from the cyclo drivers.

just a few photos from the road.

wow im six days into the cycling trip. its been a great time so far. we have been staying in little villages so i haven't had much internet access. before we left hanoi we went to the school that we are donating to this year. it was a two hour bus ride south of the city to cat tang village. we met the principal of the school and hung out with the students and had a really good time. it was nice to see were all the money we have raised is going. as for funds we have met our goal of $35,000. thank you to everyone who has donated, and to those who haven't its not to late.

wow sapa was amazing but for some reason bloger wont let me post any oft he increadible pictures i took. they are all on facebook if you want to lok there. i did a three day tour with three australians. we spent one night in a hotel and one night in a homestay in a little village outside of sapa. we took the overnight train to lo cai a town on the chinese border and then caught a bus the last two hours up the mountain to sapa. we arived at our hotel that had promised the best veiw in town but it was too foggy to see anything. that day we went on a smal hike to the nearby village of cat cat and saw the waterfall there. the next day was a more serious hike. we woke early and had breakfast at the hotel; it was still to foggy to see more than a hundred feet. our guide met us and we began walking out of town on the road. after a couple of miles we stopped at a small rest area were little girl were selling bamboo hiking sticks. i scoffed at them, "i dont need a stick." but after looking over the edge at the trail head i took that back. i bought a stick for 5000vnd and began the long slippery hike down the muddy trail. with the help of a 53 year old hmoung woman i was able to keep my feet under me and my ass of the mud which is more than i can say for most of the westerners out hikeing that day. once we reached the valley floor i found a shop i a little village selling rubber galloshes, the prefered footwear of the locals, and that made the rest of the hiking much easier. we stayed the night in the home of a local tribal family and in the morning the fog had lifted enough for us to look up at tghe giant mountain we had desended the previous day. that day we hiked up to a water fall and through the terraced feilds on trails so muddy and slick and narrow i couldn't help but wonder if anyone had ever fallen of the side and died. but it was all worth it for the increadible scenery.
that night we took the overnight train back to hanoi. i spent the next few days walking around that beautiful city until the rest of the H2H riders arived on sunday night. we have been on the road for three days now and i am really enjoying the ride.

some shots from sapa

well i am at the airport in saigon leaving for hanoi. i will then travel to sapa for a few days of relaxation before the bicycle trip begins on the 3rd of november. these are two of the three preschool classes i teach, the youngest ones i couldnt do group photos with cause i would have taken forever to get twenty three year olds to stand still. i will miss these kids. its nice to get hugs every day.

went ice skating on sunday and rollerskating today. well it wasn't really ice skating, it was plastic skating. it was a bazaar experience. my friend thi called me on sunday while i was in between classes to see if i wanted to go "rollerskating" that afternoon. apparently a new place had just opened in district 3 and she had never tried it before. she knew that we have "rollerskating" in the US and she wanted me to teach her how to do it. well i told her it sounded like fun and that i used to do quite a bit of skating back home,but i had an evening class to teach and so i would give her a ring after i got off work. i was surprised that she had never been rollerskating cause i knew there was a rink next to the zoo that has been there forever, and in fact i was planning to go to that one on wednesday with another friend. when i got of work i met up with thi and we headed to the place. it was on the top floor of the youth cultural center and as we walked up the three flights of stairs i noticed the mannequins lining the walls were dressed in winter clothes, some were wearing skis and parkas and some were in hockey gear. we weren't going roller skating this was ice skating. i was thinking ice in vietnam, this makes no sense. but after getting our skates on it became even stranger. it wasn't ice at all it was a hard white plastic on the floor that was sprayed with wax to allow you to slide. the room was long and narrow more like a wide hallway than a rink so instead of skating in a continuous circle, you skated down the hall, turned around and came back. watching vienamese try to ice skate was hilarious but of course i forgot my camera.

today i went rollerskating with my buddy joel who volunteers at a youth shelter for boys. every wednesday they do some sort of field trip activity, last week they went to a water park and this week they went rollerskating. the rink was really cool cause although it was rather small, around the outside was a track of ramps with banked turns.