On Monday morning I get driven to the airport by the neighbor and sail through ticketing and security. On the twelve hour first flight to Tokyo ANA doesn't have my veggie meal so I have a small cup of lettuce and a small cup of mini-noodles - the only thing I can eat. I stop at Narita airport and then, of course, ANA doesn't have a vegetarian meal on the flight to Hanoi (which is six hours). I just ask the flight attendant to bring me a couple of the small dinner salads that other people are getting and a couple of dinner rolls. I only get one dinner roll, but at least she tried. In Hanoi it looks like the immigration lines are long, but I accidentally pick the line near the middle where, it turns out, they have multiple immigration officials serving one line (rather one official per line) but they also let flight staff cut to the front. But my line just moves and I look back to where the people next to me in the other lines are only a third closer to their passing through. The immigration official smiles at me as I practice some Vietnamese on him and he barely checks anything out - I must be okay if I'm trying to speak his language. Right? Baggae claim is smooth as my bag is probably the 40th off the plane - which is pretty good since the plane probably holds more than 300 people. Then I just walk through customs and they waive me past. Now I need money. As I find a bank of three ATMs from different banks, two other foreigners a bit younger than me show up and we laugh and I say, "Let's each try a different one and see which ones work". They make their picks and I'm stuck with an unmarked red SeABank ATM but I know I have to put my ATM card in before it asks you what language you want. In twenty seconds I have 2 million Vietnamese dong (which is about $80) and the other guys can't get past the first steps. (By the way, it's 25000 VD per US dollar now whereas seven years ago it was only about 20000. So things will be cheap for people with US dollars.) I walk the other foreigners through the steps and in about a minute one other guy has dong using my machine and it takes the third foreigner a bit longer using my machine because he keeps looking for markings on the buttons. (In reality, you just have to know where they are from past international ATM usage.) The second I walk out of the airport I'm accosted to take a Grab taxi and I'm quoted 780000 VD to get to my hotel. I turn very quickly and start walking away and he runs alongside me saying something like discount and stuff and shows me his phone with a price of 400000 VD. I'm tired so I take it and have a smooth ride to the hotel. (Later I see that I still got ripped off because if I had used the Grab app directly, which I've used before, I could have got a price of 320000VD. Oh well.) At the hotel I get checked in near 12:30am on Wednesday and go outside the hotel and walk a couple of blocks. I'm accosted by a lot of offers for massage and "You want a lady?" and "What are you looking for?" I turn back to the hotel and go to sleep because I'm tired, but I'm a bit worried about this neighborhood.
I wake up at 4:30 and can't really sleep anymore. I stay in bed and go walk for a long time getting continually lost in Hanoi's winding streets. After walking near a nice large lake, I run across a bicycle shop and arrange to come back tomorrow (which will already be Thursday) to pick it up. I'm lucky because I was having very little luck finding a good bicycle rental place. And when I leave this shop it looks like there are three bicycle shops in a row. I go rest for a while, dress up in dress pants and shirt and a tie, and go downstairs to wait for my Grab taxi. On my way out the receptionist, who likes me because I keep trying out my Vietnamese with her, says "You look very nice", and letrs comes and points out that the back of my collar is ruffled such that the tie shows. And she ends up straightening it out for me when she sees me struggling to straighten it out. (It's been a long time since I wore a tie!) I ride out to the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology to take pictures. I'm taking pictures of me dressed up at various scientifi locations on this trip with captions on websites of, "Ray...what are you doing?" Let's just see what responses this generates. I take a Grab taxi back to the hotel, have snacks, and rest. Later I go walk more and eat some vegetarian Viet food and walk it off and then get down for sleep by 10 pm.
Wake up at 4:30am and can't sleep anymore but I rest in bed. Eventually I grab a shower, grab my pedals and helmet and saddlebag, stop at an aTM, and walk to the bicycle store. We put the complements on and I have a brand new bicycle to ride. I go back to the hotel to get changed into cycling clothes and then I go. Hanoi traffic is just nuts - like in Cambodia. So I'm a bit used to it and I ride out to West Lake which has a 17 kilometer perimter road around it that is great for cycling. I keep missing entries to the perimeter road, but finally find it and start riding counter-clockwise around the lake. I see a lot of cyclists, relatively speaking, going the opposite direction. So I turn around, slow down and ask a runner if he speaks English because he looks white. He mumbles something about "if you're an American, Happy Thanksgiving". I didn't even realize it was Thanksgiving Thursday and I return the greetings and then ask him about directions of travel. He syas he is just runs out and back, so has to run both ways. But there seems to be no given protocol. I see a couple cyclists going just about my speed so I speed up and just follow them from a distance to learn the turns, where there are zigs and zags, and to get in a good workout. They end up doing a lap and a half or so in my presence and then leave, but I continue on. Eventually I exit back into Hanoi traffic and after thinking I've figured out where my hotel is, have to stop a number of times to consult Google maps to get back home. The hotel staff have told me that I can keep the bicycle in my room, so I walk it through the lobby, call the elevator, and have to stand the bike up on the rear tire to fit diagonally in the elevator. Mission accomplsihed. Except then the staff come and tell me they want me change rooms for one night because my room needs painting. So they help me move everything to a much larger room for one night. And, assuming they finish the painting, we'll move me back to my old room where I can breathe in the new paint fumes.
I start out of the hotel on the bicycle at 8:15am after being told that I have to stay in the bigger room for another night. What a shame! I plan on riding to the lae and doing laps, but as I start doing a lap and get lost in one of those inlets. So after trying to figure it I just give up and get back on the smoothly paved main road and start heading out of the city to see what I'll find. As I go the traffic dies down and roads get narrower and I'm soon out in farmland. I find cows and dogs and a single lane bridge which holds things up a bit and lumber mills and the resulting lumber processing smells and solvents. I keep saying to myself, "Up at that yellow sign I'm going to turn around" (because I forgot water). But I keep going and going and I finally turn around and pick up a bottle of water from a one older lady mini-store and she's probably wondering what I'm doing way out here she keeps smiling and is nice as I practive my Vietnamese. On the ride back to my hotel I try the perimeter of the lake again and get lost again. It was so easy that first day when I found two other riders going about my speed and they knew all of the turns to not get stuck. Thus I get out of the lake perimeter someplace new and fight nasty traffic for a kilometer or two. After a shower I have some Vietnamese vegetable rolls which are good if a bit uninspired.
I'm again out of the hotel at 8:15am on the bicycle. I ride down to the bicycle shop and let the owner know when I'll return it and I'll ettle up at that point. I then start to try and find the bridge crossing the river and I find it, but to get back to it through some weird route seems difficult. So I continue out the main road I took yesterday and vow to try and figure out the perimeter route around the lake. I see a rider up ahead and I catch him and ask him if he's riding the lake. When he says he is, I just follow him and we end up doing a lap and half together and sharing our stories and experiences. And then I look back and I don't see him anymore. He had mentioned taking a break and I assumed I'd be given notice, but I guess not. I just continue to complete ap 2 and then do lap 3 on my own. I hope I can find the way again if needed tomorrow, but I'm going to try and find the bridge easier from the north. Each lap is 17 kilometers so I've ridden around the lake three times for 51 kilometers and I had a number kilometers getting and from the lake. So it's another 60 kilometer ride. After a shower I grab some Vietnamese veggie spring rolls and then stop in at the pharamcy to get sunscreen. It appears sunscreen (which I haven't need yet) is the only thing I've forgotten to bring. Back at the hotel I watch FP2 for Formula One from Qatar and then update two website calendars for the new month which starts tomorrow. Person Ha_V, a person that I just met here, comes to visit me at my hotel and we each practice each other's languages. And stays the night.
Person Ha_V needs the alarm set at 7am to get to work on Sunday morning and my alarm was conveniently set at 7:05am before he came over. For some reason, I have no trouble adjusting time zones but there's no need to start my day at 5:30am as I do back home. I send Person Ha_V off to work and go for a bicycle ride. The legs are really feeling the last three days of riding and I skip trying to navigate a new route and just do the out-and-back route that I did on Friday. On the way bac home I get adventuresome in the countryside and take the little roads down into individual hamlets and get some good pictures. Though everyone is wondering who this stranger is because everyone knows everyone in these hamlets. This catches me on the last (third) excursion into a new hamlet when all of the little kids come waving and yelling at me "Hello". I find this similar to Cambodia and Thailand and they must all have the same language teacher as I stop to talk with the kids. They know "Hello", "Where are you from?", "Can I have some money>" with the last punctuated by an outstretched hand. I greet them in Vietnamese and tell them that I'm from America and ignore the last question as I pull out my phone to take pictures of the kids. I get a few different groups of kids in various pictures and then head for home. I'm really worn out - which is good! After a shower I take the rented bicycle back to the bike shop, get my pedals off the bicycle, and settle up my bill with the owner. And tell him, "You made a crazy foreigner very happy with the bicycle" and he smiles and we shake hands and I start walking home with helmet, saddlebag, and pedals in hand. I stop off at a restaurant and have non-Vietnamese food because I was craving salty french fries. And then I walk back to the hotel watch F1 sprint qualifying. Later in the day after some web site updating I watch F1 sprint race.
On Mondaya I've slept well and I wake up twenty minutes before my alarm will go off. I get up and, seeing that there is no rain, I put on my running clothes and run around a small lake in the middle of Hanoi where I've seen other people exercising. This morning there are people walking and running and doing Tai Chi and other yoga/dance-type exercises to music. I get in a good 79 minute run/walk and cool down by noting the laundry place near my hotel. After a shower I take the laundry to the laundry place, go back to the hotel and pickup my laptop and walk to a coffee shop which was noted to have fast Internet. I never get the Internet WiFi to work on either my phone or laptop. Thus I just do my web updating work on my local hard drive and can upload it from my hotel. I'm already building out the 2025 schedule for the various websites and it should be done shortly. After a couple hours of work I walk back to my hotel and then across the street for some Vietnamese veggie spring rolls. Later in the day I have some diarrhea with three or four trips to the bathroom in short order. After the first trip I take some immodium that I carry when I travel. In fact, this immodium says it expired in 2019. But I take one after the first trip to the bathroom and then another one before bedtime.
During sleep there was only one trip to the bathroom, so maybe I'll be okay. Regardless I start the day with a third immodium in short order and eventually walk to a different coffee shop to work. In a couple hours I have all of the websites ready to for the entire year of 2025 - one of my technical tasks for this trip. This WiFi has a password and it works sufficiently. I don't think my laptop or phone like WiFi without a password as in yesterday's coffee shop.