Stuck in Hanoi with the Luang Prabeng Blues Again

After a few days of rest in Hue and some antibiotics (thanks Jennifer and Scott!!!) Mo was back in full force and we jumped on an overnight "sleeper" bus North to Hanoi. The seats were not normal seats, but rather some space-age pods that fully reclined while allowing your legs to extend to some degree. We managed to get a bit of sleep, more so than a regular bus but definitely less than your average room in a guest house. At 5:30 AM we awoke to being dropped off in the rain, in the middle of nowhere, outside the city center of Hanoi. Conveniently, there was a queue of taxis awaiting the bus, friends with the bus driver, who were waiting to take the passengers to a wonderful guest house nearby, for a hefty fee. Argh. Of course we couldn't load our bikes in the small cabs, and we weren't planning on staying in Hanoi anyway. We pulled a janky photocopied partial map of Hanoi and set to it, navigating the streets of the huge metropolitan city, on our bikes, in the rain.

At this point we realized why The Amazing Race didn't select us for their show - we would have demolished all other teams involved. Somehow we found our way to a hotel for breakfast, found the central part of town, and then got directions to the bus station that would take us to the start of our next cycling leg: a journey west from Hanoi, over the mountains, and back into Laos.

Riding around in the rainy madness we realized what the one piece of gear we wished we had most was: fenders! Somehow we neglected to bring these from the states, and had to improvise some for our bikes out of duct tape and plastic water bottles. They worked decently well, however the Vietnamese have a remarkable ability to stay completely free of dirt and mud while riding their bikes and motos through the street. It seems that in the culture it is very important to keep your clothes clean, even with our plastic fenders after a few minutes of riding we looked like we had just finished Paris-Roubaix. We literally became the laughing stock of every corner we stopped at, with people pointing at us and making disgusted faces at how dirty we had allowed ourselves to become.

We headed out of Hanoi towards our bus station and began to get a hang of riding in all the traffic. Hanoi has a unique per-capita income that allows nearly ever inhabitant to be able to afford a motorcycle, but not a car. So the streets are literally filled with thousands of motorcycles, zipping back and forth like some futuristic arcade game. Our pace was somewhere in between the slow motos and the fast local cyclists, which resulted in quite a lot of passing and getting passed. We finally figured out one of the main traffic rules which helped things go a bit more smoothly - as a driver, you are responsible for all traffic in front of you, but none behind you. So motos, bikes, and vehicles routinely merge from the right hand lane without giving as much as a glance over their shoulder - as long as they are a fraction of an inch in front of you, they have right of way. Riding actually became easier once we discovered this rule, as we knew when to hit the breaks and let people in.

Mat had the great idea of riding right bast the bus stop 12km out of town and riding to our starting point, 70 km away. He was not operating super clearly due to lack of sleep and mud in his brain, but this is what we did. Accordingly, he had a breakdown about 30km into it when the hundredth person pointed and laughed at our mud covered bikes and butts. We got some Pho and managed to salvage enough motivation to but on, and about 40 km out of Hanoi the traffic lightened up a bit and the scenery became gorgeous. If only the rain would stop.

Unfortunately, it didn't. We spent a night at a terrible value guest house in Hoa Binh after after an interesting meal full of all sorts of things we couldn't identify. We even gleefully accepted a bottle of what we thought to be water but turned out to be incredibly strong moonshine to drink. The bottle itself would have killed a man, but we had a few shots at the risk of offending the local spirits and called it a night. At least we were out of Hanoi and on the road back to Laos.