Una bicicleta para Gò Nổi
The book of the journey
The book is launched in Vietnam in January 2027. Purchase links will be published here.
The synopsis
On 7 February 2025, Marino Izquierdo Juan left Massamagrell, Valencia, by bicycle. Destination: Vietnam. Twenty-two thousand kilometres ahead of him. In the panniers: donations for Vietnamese hospitals and orphanages, a photograph of his family, his granddaughter’s first dummy and a letter from his father - dead of leukaemia, who had dreamt of that same journey and never made it.
Three months earlier, the DANA flood had destroyed Valencia: two hundred and twenty-nine lives, the Albufera buried under thirty years of sediment in a single day. Marino helped his own people and pedalled north. He was carrying drops of water towards a country that was flooding.
What he learnt on the road is that money helps, but the time you give to people is worth more. Every stop that was on no itinerary, every unhurried while given to someone who did not expect anyone to give it - that is what remains. What does not fit in the panniers.
He reached Gò Nổi on 25 December 2025. Gò Nổi means floating land. It is a peninsula in central Vietnam ringed by the Thu Bồn river, which floods for several months a year and which, to a farmer raised twelve kilometres from the Albufera, looks too much like home to be a coincidence. The colours, the smells, the way people work and the way they receive you: identical.
Una bicicleta para Gò Nổi is the story of a son who pedalled in memory of his father and found that he had been there before - in the landscape, in the character of the people, in the way the water and the land live together.
In Vietnamese, the word nước means water.
It also means homeland.
They are the same word.
Marino Izquierdo Juan
Marino Izquierdo Juan is a farmer from Massamagrell, twelve kilometres from the Albufera. He quit cycling as a teenager and got back on a bicycle forty years later, at 54. He left on 7 February 2025 and reached Gò Nổi on Christmas Day, alone and unsupported.