Re-entry a day away

  After my morning coffee at the corner cafe with Peter, Dan and Faye, I headed off on Hai’s racing machine hoping to ride to the Anthology museum. With my iPhone badly malfunctioning after an involuntary upgrade by Apple, a bike ill suited for anything but racing and a sore right foot, I turned
back and took a Grab taxi instead.  I had to get other people to order me the taxi both coming and going.  My iPhone is just a screwed up mess.....thank you Apple.
     The museum was a display of all the ethnic groups through out Vietnam, their customs, traditional dress and life styles. It was quite interesting to see how diverse Vietnam is. Without a properly functioning iPhone, it was a challenge getting home. After lunch at a neighborhood open restaurant, Dan and I bicycled over to the French Quarter using the hotel loaners. Stopped for lemonade once in the quarter and returned home in the rush hour traffic. The humidity left me a sopping sweaty mess.
      At 6:30, Peter who lives permanently a few buildings down from the cafe invited six of us for dinner.  Great Mexican food (Peter being half Mexican having grown up in California), wine, sangria and Pepperidge farm cookies for dessert. Exactly my age, Peter had a line up of 60’s through 80’s music. It was a lot of fun, verging on being raucous at times.
    Tomorrow I pack my gear for my departure on the 16th.

Hobbling around on an injured foot

    Thank the lord I wasn’t injured while on the road to Saigon.  Dan, Faye and I hung out at the neighborhood coffee cafe and later drifted down the road to find a shop where I could buy something classically Vietnamese.  Walking was a struggle but doable.  Not much to do other than relax.  After an afternoon nap, Hai and I rendezvoused for dinner at one of his favorite out door restaurants. From the hotel and I carefully pedaled his bike as he ran in front of me.  This guy is slight in size but in incredible shape with steel bands for arms and legs. I have never seen a sixty year old as in good shape as this man.  Four other cycling buddies joined us.  Out came the pitchers of beer (which is impossible to get drunk on) and plate upon plate of food.  One dish was beef leg tendon, rubbery but good. We toasted at least twenty times over the cacophony of noise from other Friday night diners.  Low tables and chairs and no westerners to be seen.  We talked about cycling, particularly, the Hanoi to Saigon trip that Hai and two others with take starting early tomorrow morning.  No touring bikes, just their racing machines with an absolute minimum amount of gear stored in a pannier extending out from the seat post.  These guys are tough.
   Hai and I seriously discussed riding from Hanoi to London, perhaps via Singapore. Sounds crazy but I have read about cyclists making this trip.  Check out the site ‘Long Distance Cyclists’.  I am just scratching the surface compared to some of these guys who ride around the world.  This trip would be like no other.  I will be picking up some maps and reading more about how others have done it. The trick is to navigate around the Muslim countries which are in conflict.
       For tomorrow I will see if I can gingerly ride the bike Hai loaned me.

Hanging out in Hanoi

     Rather than reassemble my bike, I unpacked it from the cardboard container (packed for the flight from Saigon to Hanoi) and repacked it into my bicycle traveling case.  With my bike to ride, I used one of the loaners at the hotel.  After coffee with Dan, Faye and David at the local open cafe a stone’s through from the hotel, David Radford (a seaplane Pilot and sailor living in Subic Bay, Phillipines) and I  had lunch at a funky buffet a mile down the road.  He rides a one gear bike with no brakes. Back pressure on the pedals slows the bike down.  Not my first choice for a bike.
      Hai showed up in the afternoon and saw that I could use a better bike to get around the Island on.  We walked over to his place where he brought out one of his racing machines.  On our way back to the hotel as I was pushing the bike, a woman on a motorbike grazed the bike and pushed it into me. The bike’s pedal dug into the top of my right foot.  Within thirty seconds my sandal was full of blood.  Hai found a store around the corner where he bought some gauze, antiseptic and medical tape.  He cleaned my foot up and taped on a gauze bandage.  After having two beers outside of my micro hotel sitting in a sidewalk cafe chair, I rallied Peter upstairs and we had dinner our at a local place nearby.  Peter is from South Africa and teaches English to grammar school Vietnamese kids.  He is gay, funny and fun to hang out with. As the evening progressed my foot has become progressively sorer.  I limped back to my hotel across the street from original digs when I first stayed before my journey.  Given the injury, I am not optimistic about being able to ride around tomorrow.  Two minor accidents caused by two woman motorbikers.  Hai lamented how woman on motorbikes are dangerous.

3:30 is way to early to wake up

  3:30 is a really ugly hour to get up considering I went to bed just before midnight. I dressed in ten minutes and Victor call a Grab car for my ride to the airport.  The flight was two hours and everything arrived in good condition.  A taxi brought to my Hanoi digs. A two hour nap helped revive  me enough to dine out with Dan for dinner at a local vegetarian restaurant. Tomorrow I will assemble
my bike so I can get in a few days of riding around Hanoi.

Surviving Saigon traffic is an art form

   The ride is essentially complete  but I do want to see something of HCM/Saigon.  Compliments of Goggle, I rode several miles in the wrong direction looking for the war museum.  Eventually I arrived at the site and spent a good two hours absorbing the horrors of the Vietnamese-American war.  It was very sobering. I thought about posting some pictures and quotes but passed on it, knowing that it was a subject that has two volatile sides.  Thank you Robert McNamara.  Anyways, the museum was worth seeing despite its grimness.  Related to the war, Peter Doan’s wife’s father was a colonel in the North Vietnamese army.  His job was to plan out an implement the missile defense system protecting Hanoi.  I find it utterly astonishing that Vietnamese seem to have moved on and do not dwell on the subject.  Of course, my generation was essential elinminated.  The   US lost 55,000 troops, the Vietnamese lost 3,000,000 (2,000,000 civilians).  We had 30,000 missing in action, Vietnam had  300,000 missing in action.  If Robert McNamera had leveled with Lyndon Johnson, chances are thousands of lives could have been saved.
        After the museum, I found the huge central post office, mobbed by tourist, and mailed off some postcards.  Back at the bike shop, at Victor’s recommendation, I found a nice upscale cafe a few blocks away and had a smoothie and some lunch.  At the end of the working day, one of Victor’s employees helped me disassemble and crate my bike. He had saved a crate that a new bike had been shipped in.  Topping off the day, Victor’s eighty-one year old mother cooked us another delicious meal. I was given some tips on using chopsticks.  Holding the small rice bowl right up to my lips is legitimate.
        I am packed and ready for my flight to Hanoi. I almost royally screwed up what day I was leaving on.  Thinking my flight was the day after tomorrow, somehow I realized  it was tomorrow instead. Talk about a fire drill when I was just settling in for the evening. Victor kicked into gear and helped me get all the bags packed and weighed.  With the high humidity, my bed time T shirt was drenched. Rise and shine at 3:30 for my 6:30 flight.  A Grab car is getting me to the airport.  Why go to bed.

Twenty-two miles of insane motorbike traffic

   Binh and his family made a fabulous Vietnamese breakfast for me of noodles, spinach and pork soup, ginger tea and mango.  After pictures, hugs, and my many thank yous, Binh lead me out to the main road. For the next twenty-one miles, the motorbike traffic was intense to the point there were thousands of them in front of me and thousands of them behind me with only a few feet between each bike.  The closer I got to Saigon, the more intense it became.  Bikes ride up sidewalks, trucks and cars trying to merge in.  It kept me on my toes.  Finally, off in the distance the city high rises appeared, enshrouded in a yellow haze of smog.  Other than a few wrong turns in the city proper, I arrived at my Warmshowers.org host. Victor came out of his open front bicycle shop and spotted me first.  He set me up on the third floor followed by his eight-one year old mother making a superb lunch for us.
      After hanging out at the shop for the afternoon, due to the heat, I took a Grab ride (same as Uber and Lyft) over to meet Peter, his wife and son for dinner.  The restaurant clientele was loaded with westerners, the most I had seen since being in Vietnam.  Peter’s nine year old son was amazingly good in English. Afterwards we strolled the city center mall where there were no motor vehicles.  The buildings were lit up with colorful lighting designs and fountains sprayed up from the sidewalks.  Apparently, after the subway is complete, motorbikes will be banned from the city.  Good luck with that.  After an-after-dinner smoothie  at a second floor cafe. I took a Grab ride back to Victor’s place.
    With a flight planned for early Friday morning back to Hanoi, I will spend tomorrow and the next checking out the city.

Vietnamese hospitality at is best

    From breakfast into the night, Binh and his family rolled the proverbial red carpet. For all three meals, the family laid the most delicious dishes of food. Since yesterday I have tried four new fruits I have never seen or tasted before.  Jackfruit and Durian are two fruits I can remember the names of.  Binh’s older sister, Thanh, took me by bus up town where we went to a war museum and then to market stretching down a narrow city street.  She pointed out the various Vietnamese delicacies that I would not have had a clue about otherwise.  Of the one I tried, they referred to it as the Vietnamese hamburger.  Two glutenous opaque rice paddies with a pork pate half inch  slice sandwiched in between.  With paper wrapped around it. I was shown how to press the rice sticky substance flat to cover the pork. They joked how it was very filling, which it was as well as being delicious.  After returning  home for a shower, family lunch and  a short nap, Binh drove me on his motorbike over to his school where he worked, Dung Nai Technical University.  There his assistants took me around to the English classes and where I made brief appearances.  Either shyness and/or bad teaching, only a few students could speak English, sort of.  Hot and humid, my shirt was drenched but I continued on meeting and talking with students and administrators for at least two hours.  At the Cantina, I was treated to orange juice and spoke with more students sitting around at the tables.  Binh and I made our way through the barrage of motorbikes and  narrow alley streets back to his house. Another nap followed, whereupon I had another feast.   The brother, Cong, opened up about the problems of Vietnam.  Pollution, resulting cancer, poor educational standards and a government which was more inner focused and less concerned with the people.  His older brother, wife and two children moved to Australia for a better life.  The sister, Thanh, gave me a mask for riding, surprised I wasn’t wearing one for my trip.  Because of the pollution, everyone on motorbikes, particularly the woman, where decorative cloth masks.
   After dinner, Binh, his two sisters and I strolled the neighborhood streets, checking out the church reinactment practice of Christ’s crusification walk to Calvary hill.  We stopped off at a friend’s house for cold yellowing tea which everyone serves.  Their friend is a taylor and his fifteen year old daughter could speak English almost fluently.  She stressed how the school system did a very poor job of teaching English and she had gone online to teach herself.  She wants to study in England someday. On our way back to the house, we stopped off for another fruit delight.  By now my stomach was feeling the effects of too much indulgence.
      Tomorrow I leave these wonderful people and head for Saigon twenty miles away. Thanh, who commutes to a bank in the big city as an I.T. administrator, will meet me in the afternoon for a late lunch.  She gave me a whole list of places to see.