March 5 - Big Bike Troubles in Little Hanoi
OK, Hanoi is not little at all, its population is estimated to be well over 7 million people. On the way from the airport to town, I was met with the flat, boring landscape that I had spotted from above and it was rather warm, but sort of an unpleasant warmth, let's call it hazy. I was far from being impressed and cursed myself silently for having chosen Vietnam - but at the same time, I told myself not to be judgmental right at the beginning and to give it some time. The first images of Hanoi were also not favorable, but then most cities have rather ugly outskirts. The 'superior room' of hotel I booked was in the Old Quarter (called Serenity 2), and for a 3-star hotel, the $22 price was quite OK. When I reached it, I wasn't too impressed and the superior room turned out to be a windowless hole. I was told that for $10 more, I could upgrade to a 'deluxe room', with a balcony and plenty of space for my bike - I opted in.
After cleaning up a bit, I went for a walk, not so much for sight-seeing, but to find someone that would re-assemble my bike. Soon my swearing at myself for choosing Vietnam was over, I started enjoying the scenery. In colorful, crowded street full of motor-bikes, people, shops, cafes, food stalls, more food stalls, even more food stalls, I was walking in the warm weather, curious as to what I would find. In the six weeks, I became real good friends with Google Maps and the offline map functionality- but not just yet, here I was wandering around with the goal of finding a bike shop. It did not take long to spot the first motorbike shop: you see, according to some estimates, there are more motorbikes in the cities than people living there and these range from the expensive Kawasakis all the way to probably WWII-era rotting motorbikes - all of which need to be serviced. So the motorbike repair is a huge business across entire Vietnam, next to food stalls, this was the second most frequent type of business I saw. I asked, or tried asking, if they could assemble a bike, and experienced first-hand the lack of foreign-language skills of the locals. Yes, this is something that would then haunt me for the rest of the six weeks - it was very hard, close to impossible - to find anyone who understood English. In a side-street, I spotted a motorbike shop that had a bicycle in front and oh wonder, the guy spoke some English. We agreed that he would charge $5 to put my bike together, so I went back to the hotel to fetch the box.
View of the Old Quarter, opposite my hotel
He was pretty quick in assembling the parts and in a few minutes, I did a test run. Hmmm, for whatever reason, the front gear would not change. He tried and tried to adjust it, I would go for a trial round, trying to shift, when suddenly the entire cable broke loose, it would no longer shift. Sh*t! Suddenly, we spotted at the same time that the gear cable, coming out of the handlebar, was broken.
Now it was time to find a "real" bike shop. One aspect of Asian culture is not to say 'no' or 'do not know', but to say something, anything. So when I started asking around for a bike shop, people would point confidently at some distant destination, and not having any better information, I followed this. Once in a while, I would see a biker on a modern bicycle, I would go up to him (usually him, not her) and he would say, yes, about 2 kilometers away is a bike shop, but I cannot join you to show the place right now. So I set off for an unknown destination, without much hope - but I still liked the views of Hanoi as a city.
Not sure I would want to live here, but I still enjoyed the city - a lot
After being directed by a few folks in a certain direction, I decided to use the Wifi of a random hotel and do a Google search of bike shops. I could hardly believe my eyes when the first result said "Origin Bike Shop - 50 meters from you" and yes! there was a beautifully equipped, modern bike shop. I explained the owner, who spoke quite good English, the issue, soon two of his mechanics started working right there and then, and after an hour or two, the cable was done! I was back in business, ready for the trip. The shifter worked perfectly, though at the back of my head I had the feeling that it was a bit hard to actually shift gears. This will be significant a couple of weeks later.
I was really happy, it was sometime in the afternoon, I was biking on a major street in Hanoi, towards a quarter full of restaurants. "Have some dinner, go to bed and then start the bike tour the next day fresh and early" - or so I thought.
Streets full of motorbikes
Suddenly, while riding, I was startled by a loud bang, as if someone had fired a gun, and the next moment I felt the bike riding very strange. Did someone shoot at me? No, this was the second in the row of my bike issues. Now we know it was due to the ripped tire, but I just thought it was a flat. I was about 2 kilometers from the bike shop (all my tools were at the hotel), and I was not looking forward to having to shoving my bike all the way back to the shop. I started asking yet again for a bike shop, when someone pointed me to an old man sitting at an intersection, him waiting for a two-wheeler to have a puncture or some other mechanical failure.
He started changing the tube, but took his time. Jet-lag had set in, he pointed me to a tiny plastic chair, I sat down on it, not having any energy left except to experience the organized chaos of Hanoi traffic. The hole in the tube was a large one, he used three of four patch tapes to mend it.
The tube getting fixed by the old man
Me half-asleep, he got it done (quite an impressive job, given the state of his instruments), handed the bike to me - I sat on it and the next moment another loud bang, we both knew what it meant. Back to square one, he again painstakingly removed the tube, fixed it and put it back. Second time is a charm, he worked with his aging patch kit for yet another hour - this one held, but I made a note of getting a permanent solution for this issue - it is not wise to set on a long journey with a badly-patched tube.
As most freshly-arrived tourists to Vietnam, I got confused with the money denomination. The exchange rate of the USD was around 22,700 Dongs, so it is easy to become a millionaire there. The old man, having spent roughly two hours repairing my tires, asked for 50,000 Dongs, which is about 2 dollars. With me being tired, I mistakenly thought he was asking for fifty dollars, so I started arguing, and wanted to pay just 5000 dongs (which is roughly 20 cents - not what I had meant). We got into a smaller argument, with some people around joining in, at the end of which he told me to just leave without paying. I then realized my mistake, apologized profoundly and paid the amount and then some more.
I rolled on to a restaurant somewhere near a big lake - this was not the best introduction to Vietnamese food, it was some beef dish that looked good on the menu (at least its picture), but was extremely spicy and rather hard to chew - it was a bit of an unfortunate decision as it would seem, and it was even quite pricey. To compensate myself, I had a Vietnamese beef sandwich with lots of salad at a small stall near my hotel, then fell into bed.