D31: Hà Nội

March 6, 2018

I was, somewhat unceremoniously, awoken and kicked off the bus just shy of half past three in the morning. Perhaps “kicked off” is too strong a term.It’s not as if I did anything wrong, I merely arrived at Hanoi or as close to Hanoi as the bus was coming. With nary a moment to properly blink the sleep out of my eyes or to point out to the person returning my phone that when I’d left it on charge there had been a cable and a charger too, I found myself standing at a gas station with my pannier and my handlebar bag while my bike was being handed down from the roof of the bus.

The niggling fear I’d had all bus trip that maybe, just maybe, I hadn’t secured the bottle bags well enough for the unexpected bus-on-roof scenario was proven unnecessary. Even my external speaker and water bottles had made it through the trip.

I quickly set to getting the bike into rideable condition. Bottle bags properly strapped to the manything cages on my front fork, pannier on the rear rack, pedals back on and so forth. At least in the earliest moments I was thinking “I’ll just get myself to the closest hotel” but by the time I’d finished getting everything suitably moveable that I could do that, I realized it wasn’t really going to work. Here I was in some random outskirted part of Hanoi at a quarter to 4 in the morning. Unless I was to get myself well into the downtown and try checking myself in to something expensive like a Marriott, any hotel that might be open enough to just happen to have front desk staff on duty was, without a doubt, not going to be the kind of hotel that expected you to rent a room for the whole night.

Apparently, if you go to the right parts of Hanoi, there are high rises

Plan B (or maybe it was C or F or some other letter), head towards the Hanoi Bicycle Collective and see if, by the time I got there, I could find somewhere nearby to sit. Maybe drink some coffee. The best case scenario would be that I pushed myself to stay awake at least until they came and opened the shop and, if I wasn’t too buzzed on caffeine by that point, to dump my bike and go to a nearby hotel. Or maybe just fall asleep on a sofa if they had one or the floor if they didn’t.

I started with the GPS calling out car directions but that only worked until it tried to get me to take an expressway. Then I set it to walking directions but it kept trying to get me to walk up the wrong sides of roads. Not knowing how bad the crack in my rim was but having had plenty of time to read up on all the myriad and unpleasant ways a wheel which had started to crack on the brake track could suddenly and without warning jam up and cause a crash, I rode slowly and cautiously avoiding speedbumps, potholes, and any reason to ever go fast enough that I might forget and decide to use my rear brake. My decision to go slowly was bolstered by my my never having anyplace to change into bike shorts, my still wearing flip flops, and my inability to decide if the rumbling in my gut was a) hunger, b) flatulence, or c) potential diarrhea.

Even so it was 2 minutes to 5 when I found the bike shop.

They open at 9.

I had four hours until opening time.

For the first two hours I sat on a bench on the other side of the road. I called Mike. I watched the sky lighten over the lake in front of me and turn from black night into morning fog. I watched the increasing number of yuppie exercisers out for morning runs or bike rides. I browsed reddit and binge read yet another Daniel Abraham book because, with ebooks, you can always download another one.

By 7am it was increasingly apparent I wasn’t going to manage to stay awake all the way to opening time just sitting there so I decided to go on what I thought would be a short bike ride around the lake. Only it turns out the lake in question is quite a lot bigger than it looks from a bench in the morning fog.

It really doesn't look like that big of a lake

Restaurantboats, most of which look like they haven't been open in a long time

Of course, they may look closed and abandoned because it's 7am not because they are actually abandoned

Five or six kilometers into my short ride I passed an already open but not especially great looking bike shop and thought, grasping at straws, that I’d see if they could fix my bike. Bear in mind that despite my having already contacted them online, I didn’t actually believe that the Hanoi Bicycle Collective was going to have 36 spoke 700c non-disk brake rims in stock until I saw the rims. My conversation with this other bike shop took place entirely by way of charades, body language, and exaggerated facial expressions. Maybe they could help, but maybe not, in any case the person who can maybe help isn’t here yet and I should come back at 10am.

Five or six kilometers after that I passed through an area with shop after shop after shop after shop selling shrimpcakes. One of the shops had a convenient power outlet next to a chair where I could charge my phone while I sat and ate. So I sat, and I ate, and I read, and I people watched and I drank some kind of sugar water juice. By now the sky was getting significantly lighter (if still gray and foggy) and it was getting easier to fool my brain into thinking I was supposed to be awake. I was dull and stupid from lack of sleep but no one was asking me to do math or make decisions or hold a conversation so it wasn’t really apparent.

Used by enough people daily that the street vendor is selling bike helmets

Another couple of kilometers, another dozen times where I was absolutely certain that I had finally reached a bit of road which I had ridden on already and that the bike shop was going to be just around that next bend when I came to another bike shop. VeloLam. A small narrow shop it had that vaguely undefinable ‘professional bike shop’ look about it which rather a lot of bright and shiny bike shops selling bright and shiny expensive toys don’t actually have. A peek at the maps (which I should have done before I went on my short ride around the lake) showed that I was actually close enough to the Hanoi Bicycle Collective that if I didn’t stop in here, it still wouldn’t be 9am by the time I got there and they still wouldn't be open.

Despite a sign claiming that they could speak English and German, the English speaker wasn’t in the shop. As a result conversation took place via a phone call to a third party (most probably the referenced English speaker on the sign).Even though this clearly was the kind of place that builds wheels and takes things apart for the joy of putting them back together again, there wasn’t a whole lot of confidence that they would have a 36 spoke hole 700c rim. Why would they? It’s not like 700c is a super common size in a place like Vietnam and the nicer bikes have been getting lower and lower spoke counts for decades.I was in the process of being let down gently when the guy who went upstairs to look through the detritus of one of the storage rooms came back down with a rim.

We passed the phone back and forth a few more times. I would speak English to the person on the other end. He would speak Vietnamese. Presumably everything important was getting translated but, as someone who is specifically in the translation industry, it sure felt like I did a lot more speaking in English and he did a lot more speaking in Vietnamese than the voice on the phone ever did in relaying the messages.

There wasn’t a price tag on the rim. They didn’t know how long they had had it up in storage.They weren’t even especially sure where it had come from. If it was secondhand, thirdhand, or fourth. Just that it was.So, as a favor to me as a touring cyclist, they were going to give it to me. I just needed to pay the labor cost to unlace my hub from the old rim and relace me a new wheel. Would 100,000 dong be an okay price?

100,000 dong.
That’s 5 dollars.
Would 5 dollars be an okay price?
Is this really a question that needs to be asked?

They also did a bunch of those minor but important maintenance tasks that you don’t really notice need doing while you are on the road because they’ve been getting worse so slowly you never realized a problem had begun.

Now,it was definitely time to find a place to go to sleep. Working on my usual three hotel rule I started with trying two places between where I was and the Hanoi Bicycle Collective. The first one looked perfectly alright but the front desk lady (who was more of a front sofa lady) waved me off with that sort of hand gesture that doesn’t so much indicate “we don’t want you here” as it does “you don’t want you here”. After I left I noticed the prominent rate sign with their special “2 hour price”. The second one was on aside street with perhaps a dozen small hotels and guesthouses. They also had a prominent rate sign also with an hourly listed but I picked them out of the line-up because they were the only one in the batch to have the overnight price listed first and in a bigger typeface. The desk clerk told me it would be 400,000. The sign outside said 190,000. I didn’t argue. I just left and headed towards the backpacker quarter.

Hotel number three on the very edge of touristland cost me 300,000 for an oddly shaped large room clearly meant to either sleep a family or to host an orgy. There were two big beds and I had a great deal of trouble choosing which one to sleep in. The larger bed had a sprung mattress while the smaller one was almost certainly memory foam.

Within minutes of my falling asleep at 3pm, someone who spoke no English started knocking on the door. Of course, since no one would be asleep at 3pm, now was the perfect time to do loud maintenance of the bathroom.

The room was L shaped with the bathroom and the only openable window being in the other branch of the L

Today's ride: 44 km (27 miles)
Total: 1,513 km (940 miles)

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