Trial by fire

  Dealing with jet lag in a strange country makes the acclimation difficult.  Fortunately, Dan Potter has given me a running head start in learning the ropes. Starting off around nine we rode into the center of old Hanoi.  The motor bikes clogged the street by the thousands and the rules of the road are basic: hold on and use every bit of your wits.  The locals seem totally oblivious to the constant danger of everyone passing each other in all directions.  Hold your ground and don’t do anything sudden.  You see an opening, take it and pray everyone is on the ball.  Dan goes at a leisurely pace, laid back, cutting across traffic with only the slightest opening; no rear view mirror just his zen of willing the others to yield. I am alive to talk about it.
     Our first destination was to the corner open cafe where we had some expresso and watched the street fill with people carrying shallow baskets of fruit or whatever balanced on a horizontal wooden pole over their shoulders.  The cone shaped cane hats you have seen so often in Chinese movie scenes.  Motorbikes over ladened with five times what one would consider a reasonable load. Narrow buildings packed together of French, Chinese, and Vietnamese architecture line the narrow streets. The wiring overhead is a tangle of hundreds of wire going in every direction. Dan related to me what is done to fix a wiring problem, “just add another wire”. After coffee we had for hole in a wall restaurant where we sat on the on small plastic sidewalk stools and feasted on a delicious soup of noodles, spinach of some variety and thin slices of beef in a yellow broth. As we ate, only feet away, motorbikes, bicyclists and pedestrians clogged the narrow street.  Next stop was to over sooks(sp) where whole blocks comprised hardware goods or whatever.  I needed a wrench for my bike taken by the Chinese airport TSA security. Last stop was at a monstrous Russian built marble building repurposed for the arts, elderly, wherever.  A friend of Dan’s, Zooie, played the guitar with another person a keyboard for a fifties and sixties women singing group, dressed in traditional dresses. Quite the event with everyone packed in a small classroom with excessively loud amplification.
      Upon our return, I set to work assembling my bike with the help of a bicycle fanatic friend of Dan and Tuyet, the hotel owner.  With Hai’s English poor at best and my Vietnamese none existent, we hit it off, seemingly unaware of our language barrier. The upstairs gay South African white guy, Peter, kept us entertained with his comments about how my curtains were much better in my room that in his room.  Finally with the bike assembled, Hai and I worked out a route for me to take west to the coast then south.  Apparently, route 1 is too congested with trucks and not a fun ride at all, dangerous in fact. Tomorrow we have a breakdown cruise around the outskirts of Hanoi starting at 7:00 follow by a 6:00 start the next day when I shove off for Ho Chi Ming/Saigon.  The traffic is very light at this time of morning. Finally, a good nap helped ease the
jet lag.  Ending the day, Dan and I walked a block to an Indian restaurant for diner.  We ate like Gods for only $15. 225,000 dong equals about $10!  Enough for tonight, up early tomorrow.