Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter Six
Hanoi to Bangkok
T
HE streets of Hanoi are like gushing, white-water rapids—if you replaced the water with motor scooters.
The motorbike is Hanoi's preferred vehicle, as few people here can afford (or have a place to park) a car.
Endless torrents of scooters flow through the city's intersections and around its corners. The riders jostle
shoulder to shoulder in a high-speed scrum. There are rarely any stop signs or crosswalks, and making it to
the other side of a street can be a daunting proposition.
Your instinct is to wait for a small opening in the scooter traffic and then sprint across the street for all
you're worth. But this would be suicide. As explained on a partly helpful, partly terrifying instructional sheet
that's been posted in our hotel lobby—and is clearly an effort to preserve tourist lives—the proper tactic for
crossing a Hanoi street is to wade in slowly and let the motorbikes flow around you. You must free your
mind of fear and step gingerly off the curb into the chaos. Making no sudden movements, you steadily inch
your way across as the scooter drivers adjust to your presence. Please attempt not to notice the kilotons of
metal and fiberglass whizzing by on all sides.
We're on our way to the orientation dinner for our bike trip. When we arrive (miraculously intact, after
several near collisions with hurtling scooters), we take our places at a table filled with the other cyclists in
the group. While knocking back a few crisp Vietnamese beers, we introduce ourselves to the folks we'll be
casting our lot with for the next two weeks. There's a yuppie Canadian couple, a middle-aged Japanese man,
two retired Aussie women, four young Australian blokes, and our tour guide, Scott—an Australian expat
who's been leading bike groups through Southeast Asia for the last several years.
Ostensibly, the point of this tour is to experience Vietnam at the leisurely pace that a bicycle affords. We'll
be at ground level, with no windows to separate us from our surroundings. We'll be moving faster than we
would on foot, but not so fast that we'll miss any of the more visceral details. I can see, however, that in
addition to the sightseeing, there will be a countersubtext on this tour: an underlying competition to be the
fastest, fittest cyclist in the group. The buff Aussie lads are already comparing their workout regimens. And
Yukihide, the Japanese fellow, has let it slip that he's an avid triathlete.
This is depressing news for Rebecca and me. The tour company's website recommended that we prepare
for the trip with several weeks of strenuous biking, but it would have been hard for us to pedal a bike down
the corridors of the trains and ferries we'd been riding around on. Besides, we couldn't quite bring ourselves
to take this preparation advice seriously. A friend of ours used to lead bike tours through the French coun-
tryside, and she told us the people in her group (all of them older and wealthy) would generally dump their
bikes on the side of the road after just a few miles, giving up in a huff and hailing the comfy support van.
We'd imagined the people on our tour would also be plump retirees, and we assumed our relative youth
would act as an equalizer. The unfortunate truth is that over the past year we've bicycled for a cumulative
total of seventy-five minutes.
Sixty of those minutes came in Kobe, when we rented a pair of three-speeds and took a leisurely pedal
around the city's flat, paved streets. The other fifteen minutes happened in Beijing, the day after we'd made
the reservations for this bike trip. Thinking it might be a wise idea to get more practice in the saddle, we
rented ten-speeds and set off on what we'd planned to be a full-day excursion. Things ended quickly: I
tackled an incline with ill-advised gusto and popped the bike's chain. Luckily, there was a man with a bike
repair stand on a nearby corner. (These stands are everywhere in Beijing, because everybody bikes.) The
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