That next morning we collected our clothes from the line, stuffed them into our bags, and hit the road, soaring back down the hill and into town. We were sorely in need of some food that did not make us feel sick after eating it, and Scott had found a place in the Lonely Planet that appeared to offer some semblance of price to performance. So we headed off in search of it. We got hungrier and hungrier as the locals directed us this way and that, unsure of where the spot was. In the end, we were directed by a woman in an alleyway toward a large restaurant she claimed was the place we were looking for. It did not have the same name or the same menu, but by then we were becoming more beasts than men and women, so we just sat down.

It turned out to be your basic traveling management consultant’s fare, the kind of thing you might get at a sit-down restaurant in LAX. It was okay, but nothing amazing. And the LAX analogy extended easily to the pricing. By then we were coming to expect these kinds of manufactured experiences, and were beginning to just roll with them, in a sort of of grouchy Scrooge McDuck way.

We ate our medium food, and poured a bunch of the complimentary nuts into Claudia’s purse to save for later, and headed back out. We were unable to find the same kind of bus depot that we had in Beirut, and were informed by a group of cackling old men that we would need to take the local. So we pedaled to the bus stop, folded up our bikes, and soon the bus arrived.

We climbed on the thing and were immediately confronted by a shamelessly predatory bus driver, who insisted that we buy no fewer than 15 tickets, despite the fact that all our things and our bodies took up no more than six seats. We argued tirelessly with him, holding up the bus for quite some time, but in the end our imminent departure and frustration wore us down first and we just paid him. He handed me a giant roll of flimsy receipt-style tickets, which for the rest of the ride proved an unending source of laughter for our fellow passengers.

And so we rode on, along the beautiful coast of Lebanon, gritting our teeth and looking forward to choosing freedom in Syria. Finally the bus arrived back in the snarling traffic of Beirut. The driver stopped the bus, and came back to yell at us to hurry and unload our things. I muttered and bit my tongue.

We were unfolding the cycles and strapping our things down to the rear racks when the usual group of passersby began to form around us, interested in who these weirdos on the folding bicycles were. Among the crowd were a number of grimy street children, one of whom came over to us and asked to have some water. Having bought a six pack of two-liters the day before, we were happy to give him a bottle.

We then watched, aghast, as he walked over to the side of the road and began to pour the drinking water all over his head in order to cool himself. One of his friends came over trying to get some water, and the two of them exchanged a brief series of blows, with the newcomer eventually turned back empty handed. With our water completely poured out onto the ground, and empty the bottle littered in the street, the two kids had the audacity to return together and ask for another bottle.

That was it, it was time to wheel out of here. We hopped on the cycles, and began to pound down the road. Insane Lebanese drivers whipped by us, honking and careening. I didn’t even care, by this point I had one thought in mind: get back to the bus station and buy a ticket to Syria.

And that’s exactly what we did, arriving just in time to catch the last three seats on the next bus for Damascus. We made friends with a Syrian chap on the bus platform who made a point of chatting up Scott for the majority of the ride back over the Ante-Lebanese Mountains. He was interested in all kinds of things: American culture, sports, the World Cup, acronyms, and the English words for all kinds of things.  “What does FIFA mean in English?” he asked Scott.  “Well it’s an acronym, composed of the first letter of each word in the name of an organization.  And FIFA is actually the first letters of four French words.”  We reflected on how strange a concept this might have seemed.

He wanted very badly for us to come back to his village with him and sleep in his house. His home was three hours outside Damascus, though, and we just couldn’t spare the time. He kept at it, however, asking again and again, and eventually we were forced to give him the partially dishonest “maybe.”

When we crossed over a ridge and the city of Damascus spilled out below us glowing and wonderful, our new friend turned back to us and exclaimed “Damascus, Ya Habibi!” (Damascus, My Darling). We could not agree more!

It felt wonderful to be back in Syria… like a breath of fresh air. We goofed around with the crowd of locals who gathered around us as we unfolded the cycles. None of them were preoccupied with ascertaining who was cooler: us or them. None of them were worried that their pants were “in” this season. They were just people, and we were just people too, albeit absurd foreigners rolling around Damascus at night on folding bikes. That’s  all there was to it. Glorious.

As we wheeled down the highway back into town, we found ourselves marveling at how patient and relaxed the traffic seemed, compared to how gnarly we thought it was when we had arrived in Syria the first time. Traffic in Lebanon had been other worldly, just hellish. We passed by a giant wedding party at one of the many liquor stores that lined the road to the bus station, and stopped to take a peek.

There was singing, dancing, screaming, rice throwing, and general merriment. A group of machine gun-toting soldiers was watching the proceedings, laughing and swaying with the music. When they saw us they whooped out in supportive tones, encouraging us to engage in a giant circular marriage dance that was beginning. As tempting as that was, we decided to keep wheeling into town.

Back at the Ziad Al Khabir, they were ecstatic to see us once again, and the owner proudly showed us to a new room, something like the flophouse version of the presidential suite. Furthermore, we could stay in this fancier and rather gigantic room for no extra charge, he explained, for we were friends now.

Damascus, Ya Habbibi, indeed.

Our friend Hossam was also just thrilled to have us back in town. As we headed out the next morning into the bright sun and dry air of that most delightful city, we got a call from none other than Hossam himself. He was interested in eating lunch with us, introducing us to some of his friends, and solidifying plans that he had been cooking up for a large group barbecue.

We felt great about all of those things, and headed out into the old city market where we met the man, looking as dapper and put together as ever. We wandered through the old city together, investigating shops and restaurants that showed potential to provide us with lunch, passing by ornately dressed tamarind juice vendors and navigating the throngs of people.

We stopped at an amazingly ornate and ancient bathhouse on the way, which was a strong reminder to Scott and I how long it had been since we’d been to one, and how much we loved visiting public baths.

Of course, having Claudia around, we couldn’t indulge just then so we continued on, past all kinds of stalls selling everything from exotic spices to fresh made bulk hummus. The bulk hummus fellow stopped us and insisted that we try some.

“You can sample anything in this market,” Hossam explained, “and you will never be obliged to buy anything ,whether you approve of the sample or not. It is the Syrian way.”

We loved the Syrian way, and continued to snack on bits of dried fruit, succulent olives, and neon colored pickles as we made our way along. Finally, we passed a particularly formidable looking organ meat restaurant and decided it would be the perfect place to eat.

And so it was. We delved into a truly magnificent meal of intestines stuffed with rice, tongue, brains, and mysterious milky looking soups. We ate the innards in the traditional Syrian style, grabbing them with flatbread, and then sprinkling onion, cilantro and lemon salt on top. It was unforgettably delicious.

As we ate, Hossam told us jaw dropping stories of his time in the Syrian military, where he had been sent out into the desert with just a knife, and expected to survive for days. He had eaten bugs, sliced himself and sewn the wound shut with his sewing kit (he had the jagged scar to prove it). At one point he even startled us all by putting a cigarette out on his tongue. What a character this guy was!

Conversation soon turned to the BBQ. We would need to do it tomorrow, it seemed, for as much as we loved Damascus, we needed to move on to other cities in Syria. So, with a little more discussion, the date and the menu were set.

We parted after agreeing to meet up again before the BBQ to purchase meats and vegetables.

We decided that night to indulge in a little Damascus night wheeling. We began by buying three cheap Syrian flashlights and some very nice British-made hose clamps. We used the clamps to attach the lights to our handlebars. The fellows at the hardware store that sold us the goods approved wholeheartedly of the system.

The streets were delightful at night, with reduced traffic and plenty of lighting.

And so we wheeled on, into an unexplored and rather maze-like part of town. Part way through the wheel, we stopped for some more of that garlic mayonnaise-soaked Syrian shawarma that we loved so much, sitting down on the curb to eat three giant wraps, the bill for which totaled less than $1.00.

Finishing up the night, we played cards and looked up curiosities on the wiki reader, becoming quite the curiosity ourselves in the process.

Our second day in Aqaba, we woke up, grabbed our bathing suites, a bottle of sunscreen, and the ukulele, climbed on the bikes and, tired of the usual Aqaba restaurants, headed out in a new direction. Claudia’s tire patch job appeared to be holding well as we pedaled toward the bus terminal, a neighborhood in which we thought we might find a good value on breakfast. I am quite pleased to report that we did. We sat down at a small local shop and ordered a delightfully affordable and quite succulent feast of fried eggplant and cauliflower, an array of pastes, and a pile of flatbread.

It was basically the standard AsiaWheeling Middle East edition meal, which we did not seem to grow tired of. It did take a while to arrive, however, so we spent the time working on better figuring out a number of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros tunes that we had been working on arranging for the ukulele.

There was plenty of good strong coffee and sticky sweet tea for Claudia. The owners of the shop also seemed quite thrilled to have us as customers: Claudia with her blond hair and formidable Arabic skills, me clowning around on the ukulele, and Scott with his ever more awe-inspiring facial hair.

From there we wheeled down to the public beach where we spent the next few hours, hanging out in the sun, singing songs on the uke, and taking turns watching our collective belongings while the others headed out to the sea to wade. The water here, though not as terrible as yesterday’s beach, was quite filthy. You would never know, though, unless you ventured in, for even at a relatively close distance, it looked a pristine sapphire blue.

We were soon joined by some very drunk Jordanian guys who were just full of lies, among which was that they were Turkish. They hung around for quite a while, smoking our hookah and singing along with us. It was a strange experience, strung up somewhere between a pleasant social interaction and being ridiculed. Needless to say, we were glad to see them stumble off.

We climbed back on the cycles from there, and thinking of our dear friend Mr. Jackson Fu, we began to hatch a plan in his honor. You see, dear reader, our whole time in the Gulf, the illustrious Mr. Fu had been talking about how much he wanted to fry an egg on the hood of the car. Fearing that it might damage the rental Previa’s paint, we had voted against it. But here in Aqaba it was startlingly hot and sunny, and we thought we might be able to fry on egg on the pavement, or perhaps a manhole cover.

So we headed down the street, and stopped at a restaurant to ask the proprietor for a raw egg. The owner turned out to be a very good English speaker, educated somewhere in the midwest, and more than happy to provide us with a complimentary egg.

In high spirits, we headed off in search of a place to fry the egg.

As you can see, dear reader, the “frying” produced not a sunny side up egg, but a lone yoke estranged from its once comfortable home of a shell.

Well, with that done, we headed out to buy some strange sports drinks. We found a little spot, and haggled for some 15 minutes over the price before sitting down triumphantly, diluting the drinks with water, and salting them. From there we headed back to the hotel, where we indulged in a quick jaunt around the corner to an Internet café.

Scott purchased a half hour’s worth of connection, and used Internet sharing to broadcast it via wifi to our computers. Claudia and I then logged on and we all spent a little while scanning our overflowing in-boxes for fires that needed putting out.

We slammed closed our Macs, and headed back to the hotel, where our bags were waiting for us. We strapped everything onto the bikes, and headed for the bus station.

Halfway there, Claudia got another flat tire, this time in her front wheel. The Knog bike porn patch was still holding well. That was good, but my faith in the D7’s tires’ ability to put up with the savage hazard-strewn roads of Jordan was quickly waning. Rather than fix it right there and then, we just rolled it the last couple of blocks to the station, and began to await our bus.

It arrived in no time, and we promptly loaded our things on. I then sat down on the pavement to watch our carry-on stuff and wait for the ticket taker to begin admitting passengers, while Claudia ran over to the same restaurant at which we’d eaten breakfast to purchase some food for the bus ride. I had just taken out the ukulele and begun to entertain myself when we noticed the bus pulling away.

No ticket taker had ever appeared. And now it was not only about the time our bus was scheduled to leave, but it was also actually leaving… with all our stuff on board. Scott sprinted off after the thing. Meanwhile Claudia and I waited back, talking with the other people around trying ascertain whether they were our fellow passengers or not, trying to stay calm.

Scott reappeared some minutes later, explaining that the bus driver had just left to refuel. The bus was just leaving late, and all was well. Soon our food was done, the bus returned, and the ticket taker showed up. He was a burly and stern man, who explained to us that food was not allowed on the bus, so we ran around the back of the bus and hid it in Claudia’s bag to sneak it on. There was certainly no way we could make it back to Amman on empty stomachs.

We headed straight to the back of the bus, where we could be secretive. As soon as the lumbering vehicle pulled out of the station, we opened up the bag to find that the food had exploded from its packaging to soak many of Claudia’s belongings. She seemed unfazed, pointing to some previous similar experiences that had occurred with chocolate, and we began to salvage the remaining food and feast.

The bus stopped at an interesting border zone, presumably between Jordanian provinces (though the exciting thought did cross our minds that we might have, in fact, boarded an incorrect bus, bound for Saudi Arabia). At the crossing, everyone was asked to get off the bus and unload their stuff, to be screened and ID-checked by a group of officers. That is, everyone except us. We were told by the driver to just stand by the vehicle and wait. So we did.

Soon everyone emerged, loaded their things back aboard, and sat back in their seats. Strange.

We began chatting with the fellow in front of us on the bus, who turned out to be in the bicycle business. He spoke very little English, but was thrilled to learn about AsiaWheeling. He twice called a friend and put Scott on the phone with him. Each time this friend welcomed Scott and AsiaWheeling warmly to Jordon, and offered to help us in any way we required. Scott was quite courteous and thanked him each time.

When we finally arrived back in Amman, we unloaded our stuff only to remember that Claudia’s tire was still flat. Seeing this, our new bike-related friend sprang into action, changing the tire with a kind of speed, precision and agility that we had not seen since China. It seemed no more than five minutes and we were back in action. He was particularly impressed by the in-seat pump on the Speed TRs. The pump on Claudia’s D7 never quite worked right.

With bikes fixed and fully loaded, we prepared to head back toward the Asia Hotel, where our ex-U.S.-military-translator friend would no doubt have a place for us to lay our heads. Just then, a young and excitable fellow came out of the night, and began chatting with us. We asked him about catching a bus to Syria, and he explained that we were in luck, he owned a hotel just next to the bus station, which, we were also in luck, was right here, and which could provide a room for all three of us for only $4.00 a night.

It’s tough to beat that, so we followed him back to the “seafront” hotel. While Scott and Claudia checked out the rooms, I waited outside and endured a bunch of harassment from tiny children. Finally I capitulated, removed the bags from my bike and Claudia’s, and allowed them to take the Dahons out for a spin. While the kids disappeared on our cycles, I looked up at the glaring yellow sign of our place. Seaside…  Amman was nowhere near the sea, and the hotel was one of the shabbiest and filthiest of the whole trip. But the price was right, and soon we locked up the bikes underneath the staircase, and headed upstairs. I had to sleep on the floor that night, where tiny beetles mostly left me alone. But man oh man was it cheap.

We left our room at the Hotel Central in Macau and headed down to the cycles. There was still plenty of space left in the sky for the sun to traverse, so we headed out in search of adventure. The traffic was thick with tour buses and taxis, as we rode back toward the hotel district. Our first mission was to buy bottles of water, but each shop that we stopped at seemed to sell water for a more ridiculous price than the last. Perhaps my idea of realistic pricing had been skewed by our time on the mainland, but I was aghast, rendered unable to bring myself to purchase that life giving and most basic necessity.

Instead we rode on, thirsty, pounding across the cobblestones, onto the smooth wide boulevards of Macau, past casino after giant glittering casino. There is a certain kind of architecture, use of a special kind of gaudy building materials, a certain relation of dimensions, which it seems is reserved exclusively for casinos. It’s somewhat distasteful, but also come-hither in a certain shameless way. Regardless, a landscape clustered with casinos is nothing if not interesting to wheel through. We decided, however, that the intensely casino-ed part of town might be, like Las Vegas, better experienced at night. So we rode on, stopping briefly for a delightful selection of famous Macanese egg tarts with iced coffees.

The island of Taipa lay in the distance, shrouded by ocean mists and connected to us by three elegant bridges. It was there, we decided, that we might be able to gain some perspective on this strange and expensive city in which we had found ourselves. We chose the central, and seemingly the shortest of the three bridges and headed out.

As soon as we left the spotless glass, giant chunks of pink marble, hideously golden, metallic painted shelters of the casino district, we found ourselves subject to quite a strong wind blowing off the Pearl River delta. In addition to the strong wind, the road had become rather narrow, and as we climbed onto the central bridge, the shoulder we had been riding on disappeared altogether. In a last-ditch attempt to avoid being killed by one of the many buses that flew by us, we decided to ride on the narrow and very high walkway that ran along our left side. This was much safer, but left us subject to a fair bit more wind, and was studded periodically with nasty obstacles, many of which required us to stop and hoist the bikes over or around them.

Once we made it over the crest of the bridge, we had gravity on our side, so I hoisted my speed TR over the two-foot drop back onto the road. From there, I did my best to cover the remaining distance in the smallest amount of time possible, riding in the center of the road, pushing with all my might against the headwind, trusting in the downward slope of the road, and hoping that my speed was close enough to that of a slow car to avoid too many nasty interactions with nearby traffic.

On the other side of the bridge, we pulled a left and began to ride along a much more relaxed seaside road. To our left, separated from us by a long thin stretch of salty marsh and a decent chunk of deep blue water, was the heart of Macau. Glowing and blinking in the afternoon sun. It was such a strange-looking city, full of bizarre buildings; it was easy to deem it nothing but a place to worship money and games of chance.

There had to be more to this place, we thought, so we rode on, toward the heart of the island. Here we found some more familiar Chinese characteristics: large blocky apartment buildings, noodle shops, and construction everywhere. In contrast though, it was strikingly clean, and the roads were all brand new and delightfully smooth. We could see what looked like the center of town in the distance, separated from us by a large cluster of identical concrete 20-story apartment buildings. Unfortunately, for all we could tell, the only way to get to the center from where we were required traversing a scrap metal yard, which it seemed would dump us onto a section of gravel roads through the back yards of these large apartment buildings. Since the dogs in this part of the world tend to be small and docile, we decided to head in.

It was a maze. As we crunched along on the speed TRs, we ended up many times staring at a peeling blue-painted sheet metal dead end. The thirst we had ignored earlier was beginning to return with a vengeance, and it was with great delight and not a tiny bit of desperation that we finally found the correct path and bounced off the gravel, over a curb and back into traffic. Luckily, right there, on our left was a circle K, the same chain convenience stores we had so often used in Bali. They were happy to sell us water at what I could at least consider to be non-predatory pricing. We bought six liters, and drained three of them there on the spot.

Refueled and full of new life, we headed out to explore this new island.  Though neither of us had any interest in gambling that evening, we nonetheless discussed the rules of various casino games, throwing around ideas about how one might hack them, given, for instance an unlimited number of plays or an unlimited amount of money. Could you develop a strategy that would be increasingly likely to make you money, or at least to break even for you in craps? What about roulette? We pulled the Speed TRs over near the island’s airport and sat down in the grass to work through our ideas on the Martingale system with a bit of paper.

Unsurprisingly, we found no such advantageous method. So we wheeled on, circumnavigating the island, through sections of dense urban residential structures, large open parade grounds, more casinos, and even a rather Providence-Rhode-Island-esque busted industrial section. As we made our way through the industrial section and found ourselves once again back at the bridge where we had started, we felt pulled toward the center of the island. It was mostly a large hill, on the side of which clung a fair bit of forest, a few parks, a cemetery, and what looked like a long snaking stretch of road.

But how to get there… We kept wheeling back toward the airport in search of an entrance. We tried a few paths, but once again found only dead ends. The sun was sinking low, and we began to discuss returning to the mainland for dinner when we passed an unassuming and very steep lane. We shrugged and gave it a shot.

Sure enough, this one poured onto a slightly larger road and that onto another. Then we were climbing on the main road. The purpose of this rather large, smooth, and spotlessly clean thoroughfare, it seemed, was to provide access to a large park and nature preserve on the top of Taipa’s central hill. The park was dedicated to the many ethnic groups in China, and as we rode, the sides of the road were decorated with statues dedicated to each ethnicity. Under each statue was the name of the ethnic group and a caricature of that type of person.  An ornately dressed woman represented the Naxi, while the Han man carried a trench-digging shovel.

The road was steep, and the sweat was pouring off of us as we climbed toward the top of the hill. I pulled ahead of Scott as he stopped to photograph some statues and we became separated. When I reached the top of the paved section, I kept riding, onto a packed dirt path, which wound its way around the crest of the hill and into the forest.

The sun was falling low in the sky, and the insects around me began to sing the approach of the night. The concentration of insects was, in fact, so great, that as I rode, they would hop across my path pinging against my spokes with a sound not unlike the country western spittoon.

At the end of this dirt path, I found myself at an outlook of sorts. It was a fascinating view. The sky was torn between light and dark. A fierce gray-blue rain was falling on the city of Zhuhai, which was just barely visible in the distance, while a golden ray of sun was spilling over Macau, which did its very best to reflect most of it back at us in radiant polished glass and gaudy golden splendor.

Soon the insects bouncing off of my legs on their miscalculated trajectories became an annoyance, and I began to wonder where Scott had ended up on his trajectory, so I turned back. I found Scott back at the trail head, gazing out at a similar view. We climbed back on the cycles, and allowed all that potential energy to convert to momentum, whipping down the hill and back onto the main thoroughfare at frightening speed.

The rain had moved from Zhuhai toward us and was beginning to fall in great cold drops, as the sunset spread orange and purple through the sky. We decided to take a different bridge back to the mainland, in hopes that it might have a larger pedestrian walkway, or even a decent shoulder on which to ride. And it was in search of this bridge that we worked our way from roundabout to roundabout, traversing the city of Taipa like Chinese checkers, and eventually following signs to the bridge.

It was a much larger bridge, which meant that cars had more lanes of traffic with which to avoid us, but we were still forced to choose between the shoulder-less traffic-filled road and a rather obstacle-laden, narrow, two to three foot high pedestrian walkway. It was raining now for real, and the sunset had faded into a dim pre-night orange gray. We chose the walkway.

It was the right choice, for the area on which we rode turned out to be much larger than initially anticipated, and even widened as we went. Cars whooshed by, and rain spattered against our helmets. All the while, Macau grew larger and larger, and the casinos began to light up with thousands of neon lights and LEDs. It was a glowing, pulsing, otherworldly light show, and we had the best view in the house.

I was suddenly forced to screech to a halt when I saw a large discarded television set looming, just barely visible in my path. It was perhaps the closest that I had come to a cycling accident on the whole trip to date. Crunching into that television would have no doubt knocked me off the three foot high path on which we rode, and likely encouraged the crushing of my body by a car. But let’s dispense with the macabre that could have been.

Back in Macau, the rain began to fall in buckets, quickly soaking us to the bone. We feared for camera and telephone as we darted through the narrow and traffic-clogged streets of Macau. The city was lit with that kind of surreal light that can only be produced by thousands of tiny moving and flickering sources. Traffic was mostly in a rain-related gridlock, and as tiny shadows danced on the periphery of each real shadow, we splashed across the pavement onto the cobblestone streets of the Hotel Central’s neighborhood.

We stumbled, sopping wet, and giggling uncontrollably into the lobby. It had been a great wheel.

By the time we had changed into dry clothes, the rain had stopped and we headed out in search of dinner. As we strolled, the streets glistened delightfully, reflecting the vast array of lights all around us. We ended up at a small Macanese restaurant, where we ordered dumplings, some eggy scallion pancakes, and a plate of sticky sweet pork. It was all quite delightful, and we chased the entire meal down with two ice-cold Tsing Tao beers.

We spent the rest of the evening wandering the streets of Macau, walking in and out of casinos, and studying the strange world that surrounded us. In the casino section of the city, every other shop is a jewelery shop, suggesting that when one feels they’ve hit the jackpot here, they immediately go out and secure the winnings in the form of gold or jewelry. Perhaps because such things are easily smuggled across borders? Regardless, it shows a more earnest attempt to use gambling to generate money for more than just one’s self. If I remember correctly our visit to Las Vegas during the AsiaWheeling planning process, that is far from the typical move in America…

Macau might be a place better described through images and video, so perhaps we should conclude this post with a brief gallery of our evening touring the casinos of Macau.

We awoke at the Liberty Hotel and made our way downstairs for breakfast. Getting coffee proved very difficult, and the resulting brew was manufactured before our eyes from some off-brand instant powder that looked like it had been manufactured around the time of reunification. Next, we headed out to a noodle restaurant for the morning’s sustenance.

The broth had been prepared with a tool for boiling beef bones and scooping noodles, almost identical to a Project K9 request we were about to ship off for our dear reader Laura.

Next we wheeled onward passing various vendors and fruit stalls.

Feeling much refreshed, we climbed on the cycles in search of more adventure. This day we decided to head north, in an attempt to get a perspective on the city not dissimilar from that we had gotten when we simply wheeled west in Saigon.

We took off heading north this time, working our way through the center of town up through an area that was filled with communist statues, large blocky headquarters, and Ho Chi Minh’s tomb (which by the way is rather similar to Lenin’s).  Onward, the architectural styles varied between communist-industrial, to modern, to French colonial in an enjoyable medley of colors under the overcast sky.

We kept working our way north, past a large cemetery, and into the suburban housing projects.

Suburbs don’t work in Hanoi exactly the same way they do in the west. What I’m talking about here is a sort of wasteland of giant concrete apartment complexes connected by giant highways. Like western suburbs, there is little in the way of pedestrian activity or small-scale corner stores. But unlike western suburbs, those around Hanoi are a little closer to the city center. No one has a yard, and the only real roads are giant highways. It was along the side of one of these giant highways that we were riding at the moment we saw a new construction project, which seemed to warrant further inspection. As far as we could tell it was another (slightly more posh) cluster of sky-scraping apartment buildings. This one was still heavily under construction, but it seems before they started any other part of the project, they had to first finish and polish off a giant central gate, which loomed in full monumental glory – something in between a communist monument and the Arc de Triomphe. Of course we were barred from entering, but it was certainly a worthy waypoint.

From there we did our best to keep heading north, though the roads seemed determined to keep siphoning us eastward. Finally, we found ourselves at another great bridge, across the same river that we had traversed the day before. At first we entertained the notion of skipping the bridge, and trying to head down the riverside back toward Hanoi’s city center. But this began to seem impossible as the road turned north once it reached the river rather than south. So we were met with a conundrum: should we…

1. cross the river and head south on the other side in hopes of faplungeoning our way back to Hanoi, or
2. head back south the way we’d come and experience that same ride in reverse

Option 1 seemed the obvious choice, but in order to execute that maneuver, we needed a little more coffee. This we were able to acquire in the form of a couple cans of Thai coffee from a large bulk dry goods shop along the road we were currently riding upon. Refueled by the coffee, we headed up and onto the bridge. This bridge had many large lanes for cars and trucks, and a separate smaller lane for bikes and motorcycles. This is the lane we took.

It was a hard, fast ride in the midst of swarming motorbikes. From time to time we would run up on another bicyclist, but he or she would be riding so slowly, on a cycle so laden down with vegetables or cement, that there was little opportunity for comradeship, and usually the situation necessitated a hair-raising pass during which Scott and I had to put our faith in our fellow drivers and our ability to accelerate into the region of the bridge one might call the fast lane.

On the other side, we pulled over to take a breather. We were badly in need of water, and a little shaken by the high voltage bridge crossing. Once we had caught our breath, we looked around. We were certainly in a new and interesting part of Vietnam. All the buildings here were very narrow and three or four stories tall. All took interesting architectural cues from both the French colonial influence and the blocky metal and concrete communist architecture of China and Russia.

We worked our way around the block, searching for a spot to buy water, and we found one right next to this strange metal device.

Speculation as to its purpose is heartily invited in the comments.

From there we began to wheel hard, right through this little city at the end of the bridge from the Hanoi suburbs and up onto another dike. It seemed so much like the dike that we had ridden on the day before that we thought it might in fact connect. So on we rode, into the wind, through a landscape that was ever-changing and so very different than I had imagined Vietnam to be. Take a look at these pictures and do your best to reconcile them with your views of Vietnam.

We wheeled on and on. The sun was beginning to hang low in the sky, and we were still yet to find that this dike was indeed the one we had wheeled on the day before. To complicate matters, it seemed that we had acquired a new river to our right, which had not been there before. We were now almost certainly separated from the city of Hanoi by two large rivers. We continued to head south hoping against hope that we might find ourselves near something that we recognized, but still all was unfamiliar.

Then we saw it… across the river, a large communist party building we knew we had passed the day before. So the good news was we were close to the road that we had ridden before. The bad news was that we were still separated from that road by a pretty large river, with no bridge in sight, and the spot we could see was still quite a way from Hanoi and our beloved Liberty Hotel.

The sun was sinking low… perhaps two hours left before it was too dark to ride. We pulled over to have a conference. We finished the last of a red bean and fig cake we had purchased at the water stand near the strange metal object.

We decided our only rational choice was to keep wheeling south in hopes of a bridge, and if it got dark before we found one, we’d need to come up with a new plan, most likely involving folding the bikes up and getting in a cab.

So we wheeled on hard, keeping our eyes peeled for a bridge. Not that much farther down the road, we passed a sign indicating that if we kept going forward we would reach Hanoi in 23 kilometers. This was a good sign, and it gave us renewed energy to pour into the Speed TRs. We started really pushing the pavement underneath us, as the road grew larger and more filled with traffic. Finally, this road T-ed into a larger road that almost certainly led to a bridge over the river. We pulled into the traffic and triumphantly rode over the bridge.

On the other end of the bridge, we found ourselves back in the place where we had turned around on the previous day’s wheel. The same woman was there packing up her stand after having sold all her crabs and ducks. We paused for a moment to catch our breath. We were on a giant busy street and staring down the option of taking this huge street directly into Hanoi, which would be faster and might even get us in before darkness had fallen completely, and taking the route we had taken the day before, which would have us on quieter roads, but would certainly have us riding at least half the ride in the dark.

Since our ill-fated misadventures with bearings in Cambodia, Scott was left without the use of his dynamo hub. This meant that he had no headlamp. And we had neglected to bring our Knog Gekko lights with us….

We decided to take the busier, but more direct street, and to do it at highway speeds. We exchanged one last glance and then raged downhill into traffic. Keeping to the right side at first, we pedaled hard along with the stream of motorcycles, joining the throngs and breathing the fumes of burning oil. We tore through the small city that we had encountered the day before, and followed the road onto a larger bridge than the one we had taken yesterday.

Now I was really thriving on the energy of the ride, feeling great, and flying along. I was passing the slower motor bikes, and ringing my bell like a maniac. Old men on motorcycles would turn to me and smile in approval.  If I came up on a cycle burning a lot of oil, I would just lay extra hard into the old Speed TR and pass it. It was amazing – like some kind of drug. I felt great flying along there, safer and more in control than normally. As I crossed the bridge, a motorcycle with two beautiful Vietnamese women on it pulled up alongside me. The one riding on the back turned to me and smiled, giving me a peace symbol, and yelling something in Vietnamese through the wind and engine noise. I felt like a character in Easy Rider, raging through the noise of motors, smiling and interacting with my fellow traffic. I was in a world without cars, where two-wheeled vehicles ruled the road. Ah, Hanoi, one of my favorite cities yet.

On the other side I pulled over to wait for Scott. He pulled up seconds later, looking similarly ecstatic. We were back in Hanoi. There was still light left; we’d made it and we knew where we were.

We wheeled back to our hotel taking only one wrong turn that put us onto this giant street full of even more motorcycles than before. Perhaps the immensity of it is best communicated using video and photography.

Once we finally made our way back to the Hotel Liberty, we decided to stop at a nearby place for a glass of Bia Hoi. It was the perfect beverage for the end of a wheel. Mellow and malty, cool, not too sweet, and not too alcoholic. As soon as we saw it, we knew the place. It was a grubby open-air curbside beer joint. There were about 20 men there already, all Vietnamese and between the ages of 35 and 65.

As soon as we sat down, we made friends with one of them, who insisted not only on buying our beers, but also in introducing us to his extended family, talking to us in English, Chinese, and Russian, and also leading me by the hand to the bathroom.

After finishing our beers and bidding our friend goodbye, we climbed back on the Speed TRs to look for a restaurant. Without needing to wheel too long we came upon a jam-packed restaurant that emitted the most delightful smells.

We sat down to a feast and took special pleasure in engaging in a fair bit of shtick with our surly but adorable waitress.

The elderly Vietnamese family that had shared our compartment on the Reunification Express had already climbed down from its lofty perch by the time that Scott and I awoke. We were in the Hanoi Station, and we were just able to get ourselves vertical in time to help our — well I would not quite call them new friends, but at least new acquaintances, who appeared to tolerate our monopolization of the luggage space — to unload their bags. This appeared to heal at least some wounds, and they bid us a reasonably hearty farewell once we were out on the platform.

Hanoi was cool. Almost chilly by AsiaWheeling’s standards hitherto. In general, we are in places where existence outside air-conditioned environments is by definition sweaty. Here it was cool and breezy and gray. We unfolded the Speed TRs on the platform while a crew of railway workers arrived to wash down the startlingly dirty exterior of our train.

We climbed onto the cycles, and wheeled out of the train station, right by the horde of cab drivers and guesthouse touts who lay in wait. We took a right and headed down the street in search of a little pho and coffee. Instead what we found was stand after stand selling Chaco sandals. Chaco is my (and many other members of the AsiaWheeling team’s) preferred brand.

These were either knock offs or taken straight from the factory, for they were being sold at bargain basement prices. We stopped to further investigate, considering a replacement of Scott’s Sri Lankan faux leather sandals. Unfortunately, the gigantic nature of his feet precluded us from purchasing any sandal in their entire stock.

As we wheeled on, we commented to each other on how gorgeous this city was. Hanoi has a decidedly European feel to it, with large tree-lined promenades, and small side streets with plenty of outdoor cafes. Much of the architecture takes cues from the French, and many of the buildings are built from brick or stone.

It was just starting to sprinkle when we came by a shop that would at least be able to supply us with coffee.

As we parked the Speed TRs and made our way inside, the sky opened and began to soak the city of Hanoi.  While the rain fell in buckets, we ordered cup after cup of absolutely delicious iced coffee.

We had shied away from the Vietnamese coffee these past few days, after our initially terrible sample, but now we were kicking ourselves, so delicious was this shop’s offering.

Let me divert the narrative for a moment to explain this glorious brew. You are given two cups, one filled with ice, and one that has a thin pool of condensed milk in it. Onto the milk cup is placed a kind of aluminum brewing device. The device is filled with coffee and then hot water. The resulting slurry is tamped down with a  kind of of metal cap, and the whole apparatus is covered with a larger cap that is later used as a drip tray. The consumer of the coffee is then encouraged to wait while a thin stream of very strong and fragrant coffee drips through the device and into the cup. This is an opportunity for conversation, answering email, smoking cigarettes, and generally enjoying one’s self. The waiting period is an important part of the coffee consumption event and as such should not be taken lightly.

We were indulging in the email-answering functionality of the waiting period, and as our tab grew from four to eight coffees at this place, we feasted on one of the many free wireless networks that pervade the big cities in Vietnam. After about three hours, the rains finally stopped and we climbed back on the Speed TRs to begin wheeling around in search of a decent hotel.

We soon found ourselves in a delightful little neighborhood, filled with little food markets and spice shops. It seemed reasonably central and would make a great home-base for Hanoi. Unfortunately hotels were few and far between. It took us quite a bit of wheeling before we finally found one that fit our needs and our budget. It sported free fast wireless, and a nice comfortable room for less than we’d paid in a while.

The catch was we had to walk up seven floors to reach the room. But we figured this would be good training for our upcoming stint in Mr. Stew Motta’s apartment in Kunming, so we booked our room at the Liberty Inn. We dropped our stuff and began consulting the front desk as to noodle shop recommendations.

We were, of course, looking for Pho, but the man at the front desk convinced us that we might consider branching out into a new style of noodles. We agreed and followed his directions to a joint down the road that served nearly brothless noodles.

It was an amazing bowl of noodles. First each bowl was filled with a handful of fresh greens, onto which were piled steaming rice noodles, from there a spoonful each of spicy savory beef, deep fried crispy onion, and crushed peanuts were added. The entire bowl was blended with spicy and sweet condiments at the table and stirred relentlessly before eating.

Ah, we felt great after that bowl, ready for anything, and just revving to wheel Saigon. We took off toward the main river in the city, and when we saw a huge group of both motor- and bi-cyclists heading onto an old metal bridge, we took the opportunity to follow.

It was a long, old rusty bridge, which led across the river to the opposing hamlet of Cu Khoi. We wheeled over a number of river beds, some of which showed signs of being low for so long that people had begun to plant them with crops. On the other side of the bridge, we found ourselves in a smaller, slower city, which appeared to be where most of the Bia Hoi was produced.

Let me depart from the narrative once again to discuss Bia Hoi. Bia Hoi is a very weak home-brewed beer that is very popular here in northern Vietnam. It is made in small batches and transported in small plastic kegs all around the city on a daily basis for consumption at small street-side cafes. As we wheeled through this part of town past many small scale breweries, we could detect the warm sour stench of fermenting grains passing over us in waves. We decided we’d need to try some later that day.

The landscape was so different than I had imagined Vietnam to be. It looked more like Scotland, with overcast skies and deep green grassy hills. As we rode along, we had a choice of taking either the high road or the low road. The high road seemed to skirt around and out of the city along a great dike, while the low road snaked its way through the many small structures that made up the city itself.

We took the high road, and began pedaling hard, making our way around and out of the city in record time. The traffic was an interesting combination of cattle, fellows transporting large or oblong pieces of industrial equipment or building materials via motorbike, and dump trucks.

Soon we were riding along a river, and the city had dissolved into farmlands, industrial parks, and Communist Party offices. Finally, the road we were on T’ed into large iron bridge. I looked around the green land, dotted with bits of rust and concrete, which, for a moment, conjured up Pennsylvania coal country.

We stopped for a moment to investigate the wares of a very popular roadside seller, who was hawking crabs, large insects, and live birds. I found myself unable for a time to stop staring at a fellow who had bought two live ducks and strapped them quite violently, by the legs, upside down, to the front of his motorbike. The ducks looked none too excited about their immediate future, as they swung inches above the pavement.

Let me get this straight, though. I eat plenty of meat here on Asiawheeling, and when I am back in The Empire. I am in favor of killing and eating animals, but something about the predicament of these ducks unsettled me. It seemed like they were being tortured, strung up by the legs, being blown by the wind, flailing with their faces just inches above concrete which was whipping by at 40 or 50 kilometers per hour. I am sure that most of the experiences that animals undergo leading up to their consumption by humans could be construed in one way or another as torture. And I would not be surprised if inside the U.S., it is actually a more torturous approach to dinner than here in Asia. So, in the meantime, I am going to chalk this up as one of those cognitive dissonances one must acknowledge and schedule for later consideration. For certainly, I am not about to stop eating meat. Perhaps I’ll come up later with a justification for a more callous view on animal rights. In the meantime I’ll continue to pity my food as it suffers and turn right around and happily ask for seconds while I wipe the grease from my chin.

Back in Vietnam, we wheeled along the same high road, now taking the opportunity to divert our travels to the low road for the way back.

Here the smell of brewing beer was stronger than ever. The Speed TRs were put to a little test, scrambling over piles of garbage, fording deep mud puddles, and navigating a generally unwelcoming road.  They passed with flying colors, bringing us finally back to the bridge, which we crossed, finding ourselves now on the other side, in the midst of a giant kitchen wares market.

We spent some time perusing the market, and purchasing some K9-related kitchen goods.

Back on the cycles, we made our way back toward our hotel, noticing quite suddenly that we were starving. But we were deep in the touristy section of town, which seemed to be filled only with expensive western-style restaurants. We scoffed at these and kept riding, calling random turns until we had made our way out of that district. Finally we found a little roadside outdoor restaurant, where we ordered some dishes with rice, and a couple of Bia Hois.

Another great thing about Bia Hoi… it’s alarmingly cheap. A glass costs about 25 cents, and is served in a very attractive thick green glass, full of tiny bubbles. The glasses generally have a big “H” stamped on the bottom.

We were squatting on tiny wooden chairs enjoying our Bia Hois and snacking on the free peanuts that accompanied them, when a man called over from the table behind us. He spoke very little English but called out to us in what he had, asking where we were from. I said “America” and though he instantly became a little more wary of us, we began to chat. He commented on our Bia Hoi and asked whether we were enjoying it. We were, quite thoroughly, and informed him. He smiled and asked whether they had such a type of beer in the U.S. We explained to him that we did not really have such a system of down-home brewers who sold beer in small batches for widespread consumption. Sure we had micro-breweries, but microbrews are trying to be distinctive, luxury goods, and most were pasteurized and regulated. Here in Vietnam, everyone was just trying to crank out this cheap, unregulated, weak, unpasteurized lager, which was the drink of choice all over the city.

I turned to our new friend, “You know the only other place I’ve heard of this type of beer being produced?” He looked blankly at me — “Russia.”

Suddenly, the man leaned in close to me. “So you’ve been to Russia?” he said. “да,” I answered. And then we were off speaking in Russian. It was so unexpected, it took me quite a while to remember how to say certain things. I explained to him that I had studied in St. Petersburg a few years back, and that we would be visiting Russia later on AsiaWheeling. He explained that he had been sent to Russia as part of his training to fight the Americans in the NVA. Now that we were speaking Russian, his whole demeanor had changed. He congratulated me, and complimented my filthy broken Russian.

“So few Americans can speak Russian,” he said, “Did you study Russian to spy on them? Are you a soldier?”

I did my best to explain that I was just a curious fellow, hated war, and had no interest soldiering. I did my best to communicate that just like Vietnam, Russia was an enemy of the U.S. at one time, but now I am hoping that friendship can replace animosity.

He really seemed to like this, and began to go on at length about Vietnam today, comparing it with Vietnam during the war. My ability to understand him was severely hampered by my poor grasp of the Russian language, but I was able to ascertain that much of what he was saying was about how much better off they are now, mostly due to the fact that Ho Chi Minh was able to re-unify the country. He also spoke at length about the Cuban Embassy, as well, which he showed me was just visible down the street. He knew that the U.S. did not have one, and commented on the proliferation of affordable Cuban cigarettes and cigars in Vietnam as highlighting one of the great drawbacks to our embargo. I agreed with him heartily.

It was then that he started talking about vodka. I think there is something about speaking Russian with another non-native speaker that gets one or both of the parties thinking about that old Russian vice. He spoke at great length about the way that Vietnam has learned from the Russians to make very good vodka. It was still somewhat early in the day, and we had quite a few kilometers yet to wheel before we arrived back in the neighborhood of our hotel, so I declined his repeated offers to drink.

The Bia Hoi is a very weak sauce. A cup varies between 2% and 3% alcohol, but I knew that if we started drinking vodka with this fellow, we would soon be in a rather compromised state. In fact, if my estimates were right, after such a hard wheel, and under the kind of peer pressure which Russian-style vodka drinking generally encourages, we would soon be more beasts than men. So I had to stick to my guns.

Despite my refusal to drink, he ordered a bottle of the Vietnamese vodka to the table, simply to prove to me that here, like in Russia, the vodka is kept in the freezer and served cold. “This is the only proper way,” he explained.

He then shook my hand repeatedly and returned to his little table. Throughout the rest of the meal, he came by from time to time to say something congratulatory and shake our hands.

Once we had paid the bill, I bid him farewell, and we climbed back on the cycles.

We had just enough time to get hopelessly lost on our way back to the hotel before night fell on this most fascinating city.

We crawled our way through Vietnam on the Reunification Express. At times I found myself unable to do anything but stare transfixed out the window.

Vietnam has a great piece of land. Really it does. It snakes along the entire eastern coast of southeast Asia like some great dragon, with mountains, productive plains, and biologically rich coastline.

The train line gives a most flattering view of this country, which already needs no flattering to be impressive.

Our compartment had emptied out early that morning, so for most of the day Scott and I had the place to ourselves. Eventually, a woman appeared, nervously offering us fruit. We refused a few times, and then accepted, to her great delight. The fruit was great. I believe it was durian, or another variety from that glorious family of gym-bag/fruit hybrids.  Then she revealed some sliced dragon fruit, which proved particularly tasty.

This woman kept returning to our bunk from time to time. Soon we began to suspect that she was, in fact,  a new bunk mate. We quickly rearranged our belongings to make room for her. She seemed to confirm our assumptions by sitting down, and we began attempts to communicate our welcome to her, offering food from our bag (all of which she refused), and posing together with her for a team picture.

The picture may have been a step too far, though it came from a kind place, for she began to blush uncontrollably and scampered off. She did reappear again and again, however, throughout our journey, mostly to offer us more fresh produce (sweet corn, dragon fruit, bananas, cucumbers). We felt bad about scaring her earlier, and did not want to eat her out of house and home, but at the same time she was pushing the food quite vehemently on us. We did our best to walk that line, leaving some food behind for her. But we never saw her eat.

Then all of a sudden, night was falling and she was still nowhere to be seen. The woman had been absent for some time. We never saw her again, though her plastic bag of fruit stayed with us for the next day or so.  To supplement the fruit, we ordered some of the tasty train food offered by the kitchen.

At about 11:00 pm, just as we were crawling into bed, a group of elderly Vietnamese people with tons of luggage made their way into our compartment. It turns out they were to be our bunk mates for the night, and were none too keen on our monopolization of the under-the-bunk storage. It was no easy task, but with some reorganization we were able to get everyone’s luggage into the compartment, and soon all concerned were once again asleep while the old magic carpet made of steel drew ever closer to Hanoi.

We awoke on our last morning at the Blue River Inn in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Scott was not feeling well. Wheeling, it seemed, would be out of the question. He was unable to eat much, and felt too delirious to mount a cycle. We lounged around our room giving Scott as much time to rest as we could; then it was checkout time.

We moved our stuff downstairs and stashed it behind the front desk. From there, we set out on foot, in hopes that a bit of gentle strolling would help Scott’s condition. We wandered around slowly, getting fairly lost, wandering into shops, eating more Pho, and eventually finding ourselves once again in a giant grocery store. There is something about being a foreigner in a grocery store that I find monumentally engrossing. Time just slips by you. Given this strange phenomenon, you would be not surprised to find that we exited the grocery store quite some time after entering.

We were laden with a great bag of snacks to eat on that night’s Reunification Express. We would be in the train for the next few days, so plenty of food seemed appropriate.

We were just sitting down to a cup of overly sweetened coffee at a little shop outside the grocery store when I decided to take a trip to the bathroom. As I walked toward the john, I found myself suddenly walking within a group of Vietnamese police officers. I looked around, but they all had very stern expressions on, and refused to make eye contact. I briefly considered aborting the mission to the bathroom, but such a mid-swing reversal seemed, perhaps, a suspicious move. After all, I had nothing to hide.

So I made my way inside and settled my business. I was about halfway back to Scott at the coffee shop when I heard a bunch of screaming. I snapped my head around to see a bunch of cops screaming and running. One of them knocked over a display advertising crock pots, and as it clattered onto the ground I felt the electric shock of adrenaline pour into my system. Was there a bomb? A man with a weapon? I dashed around a corner and sought cover behind a large display about exercise machines. I whirled my head around.

The people inside the shop were confused and looking around. The cops were running out the door. It seemed calm was returning. I called over to Scott, “What just happened?”

“A guy just ran out of the shop with something he’d stolen. The cops are after him.” A crowd had formed outside the shopping complex. People were now smiling, joking around, enjoying the return of a feeling of safety. I certainly didn’t need another cup of coffee, so we headed back toward the hotel.

We got there, and had about three hours to kill. Scott was drifting in and out of consciousness in a chair in the lobby, when the woman at the front desk offered him a free room to sleep in for a bit. If the Blue River had not already been in seal-of-approval territory, it certainly was now. Going for a bit of a stroll, we came across a Banh Mi sandwich stand and indulged in some quick dinner.

I worked on correspondence for you, dear reader, while fireworks went off all around us. It was Independence Day here in Vietnam, and the people of the city had poured into the streets to sing patriotic songs and celebrate the reunification of Vietnam. I took a break to watch the fireworks on the lobby television. Just as they were getting into the grand finale, a thunderstorm broke out in the city.

The rain kept falling, and was still doing so when it was time for us to head to the train station. Because of the rain, we decided to take a cab. It was our first time experiencing the streets of Saigon in a car. It certainly hammered home my previous observation that the automobile is merely tolerated, and not quite welcome here in Saigon. Motorcycles poured around us, cutting us off, and generally making our traversal difficult. Multiple times, our cab driver stopped to yell insults at the motorcyclists. They generally paid him no heed.

At the train station, we were forced to wait for some time as the train was late. This, we were told by the locals who were waiting with us on the platform is actually quite abnormal. By the time the train arrived, I had been standing for quite some time with my pack on and must have been quite the sweaty mess.

We finally got onto the sleeper, and I threw my bags down on the bed. We had gotten two opposing bottom bunks. The train was set up with three levels of bunks, separated by thin walls into six-person compartments. The cycles just barely fit under the beds, which were presumably communal luggage space. We were quite glad to find that our bunk mates arrived with minimal luggage and did not need the space. They were quite friendly, and spoke a tiny bit of English. The six of us chatted for a bit before turning off the light and letting the rhythm of the rails lull us to sleep.

Ah, trains. It had been so long since we had ridden one.

What a fine way to travel.

We woke up to the gentle chimes of Sim City 2000 in the roomy coolness of our digs at the Blue River Inn. We made our way downstairs to the free breakfast to find that today’s offering was a kind of smallish блин . It was tasty, but none too filling. After some deliberation, we decided that this might be just enough calories to fuel us through the short ride to the Reunification Palace.

We collected our things and climbed on the cycles. It seemed the Speed TRs were getting along especially well with Vietnam. Mine felt smooth, tight, and responsive as we wove our way through the surging waves of motor bikes.

The Vietnamese coffee, in all its cloying sweetness, was beginning to kick in and we made short work of the ride, purchasing the 85 cent tickets and entering the palace grounds.

To call this place a palace is both right and wrong. It certainly is a palace in the grand-structure-with-which-one-impresses-others sense, but it is so very communist, that one might better call it an official headquarters, or even a diplomatic reception building.

You see, dear reader, at one point, on the same ground on which one now finds the Reunification Palace, there was a very real palace, made of ornately carved wood. This was destroyed, and a new palace was built by the French, when they took over the running of Saigon after a slow but brutal campaign in 1868. The French ruled from this, though they kept the king of Vietnam around as well, doing some minor ruling from the old royal capital in the central Vietnamese city of Hue. During the second World War, the place was briefly occupied by the Japanese, until the defeat of the Axis in the Pacific and the forcible reinstatement of French rule in Vietnam.

The French had a strange habit of calling Vietnam Cochinchina, which to AsiaWheeling makes about as much sense as deciding to call Malaysia Varanasiindonesia, and this might have had something to do with the subsequent troubles that a France still recovering from crushing defeat and occupation in during WWII had in establishing control over their previous colony.

In this time of strife, Ho Chi Minh, and his communist organization, the Viet Minh took power in Vietnam and eventually, after a string of military victories, forced France to sign the Geneva Accords, which returned Vietnam to local control, with the north ruled by the communist Viet Minh, and the south ruled by the marginally democratic Republic of Vietnam, split along the fabled 17th parallel. The north was led by Ho Chi Minh (the guy on all the money here in present day Vietnam), and the south was led by a fellow named Diem (a rotten, paranoid, murdering dictator — heavily supported by the U.S.) Diem ruled from the old French palace, now dubbing it the “Independence Palace.”

During the early 60s, North Vietnamese bombers destroyed the palace that had been built by the French, so it was rebuilt in wonderful 1960s mod South East Asian Art Deco glory. To this day, it still retains the original facade and interior decoration. It also sports some interesting exhibits and re-education videos, so we figured it was worth a visit.

Inside we found it to be decorated not unlike a cooler version of the rooms in one of our grandmother’s houses. I’ll let the photos talk:

We also were sure to watch the re-education videos in the basement, which tell the story of the Vietnam War from the North Vietnamese perspective (to them it is the American War). It was very interesting and embarrassing to see how sinister and destructive my country could seem through the eyes of our one-time enemy. While I am sure that in reality the truth, as always, lies somewhere between the version of the Vietnamese War that we are taught in American schools and the one taught in Vietnamese schools, one thing is for sure, it was an ugly, wasteful, crying shame of a war.

Before we left, we made sure to tour the basement of the building, which was set up somewhat like a level from that old Nintendo 64 game, GoldenEye.

This video should corroborate:

We left the Reunification Palace hungry, and climbed on the cycles to weave our way back into the wild traffic of Ho Chi Minh City, looking for a place to eat. When we spotted a Vietnamese crushed rice restaurant, we called a waypoint, but were for one reason or another tempted even more by a restaurant across the street advertising Hue (pronounced “Hway”) food. Hue food is from the central part of Vietnam, and since we had bought tickets that skipped right over that part of the country, we figured we had better try the food.

I ordered a bowl of thick square yellow noodles with a spicy sesame broth, Scott got a clear soup with round white rice noodles. We shared a plate of tiny fried clams that we spread on pieces of toasted rice paper, sprinkled with fresh garlic and hot peppers, and scarfed down.

As we ate, a man came into the restaurant, and noticing that there were no more tables left, planted himself next to us. We exchanged greetings, but he did not appear to speak much English. It was not until we had finished eating and begun to take turns reading aloud the Vietnam War section from the Wikireader that our table partner spoke up.

It turned out that, in fact, he did speak quite good English, and presented himself to us as a Vietnamese journalist. He was interested in what two young chaps, interested in Vietnamese history were doing riding folding bicycles in this city. For one reason or another, we intrigued him enough that he agreed to meet with us later that day, at his hotel, and allow us to interview him about his life and perspectives on Vietnamese history. As you can imagine, dear reader, Scott and I were tickled pink at the opportunity, and spent the next few hours wheeling around Saigon, brainstorming questions to ask the man, and hunting down a fresh supply of pens and paper.

When we met up with the man, he had changed his clothes and was welcoming us into his luxurious room at the New World Hotel.

He called for a maid to assist him in making coffee for us. With steaming mugs in hand, we sat down in his heavily air conditioned room, and he and began to tell us his tale, and perhaps more exactly, the story of Vietnam in the 20th Century.

And this was it:

His father was born shortly after the turn of the century (the 20th). He was of wealthy intellectual background, so he studied at a good French school, eventually becoming a lawyer and securing a position within the administration of the last Vietnamese king, who still held a fair amount of power and popularity with the people at that time. Our friend was born during this time, as his father was rising to his final position as the Chief of the Office of the King. As you can imagine, this is a rather high position, and our friend’s father had become a trusted adviser to the king.

With the end of WWII, and the aforementioned unstable power switch between the Japanese occupiers and the old French colonialists, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh had come to power. It was actually our friend’s father who, in light of the growing communist power in Vietnam, suggested that the king resign once and for all, appealing to Ho Chi Minh. The king did this, and in response, Ho Chi Minh offered him a position in his new communist government, as supreme counselor. So with this, our friend’s father found his way into the Communist Party, and our friend moved from Hue to the northern communist capital of Hanoi.

Meanwhile, while the English and French are invading the south of Vietnam, attempting to re-establish colonial rule. Our friend is 16 at this point, and along with his father, joins the resistance. They worked in the military administration, with our friend eventually reaching the rank of Chief of Company. In 1954, the French and English are defeated, and the country is split according to the Geneva Accords along the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh’s administration is new, and the country is war-torn. He realizes that in order to catalyze development, he must educate his people in the ways of science and industry. And with that, our friend was assigned to be sent to Beijing (they called in Peking then)  to learn metallurgy. After spending a year in Hanoi learning 中文, he made his way to Beijing where at the Vietnamese Embassy, he overheard a conversation that would change the rest of his life.

A telegram had just come in from Hanoi requesting that five students be selected and reassigned to learn journalism rather than their respective scientific or industrial vocation. He promptly presented himself as a volunteer and the officials agreed. It was in this way that our friend became a Chinese-trained journalist.

He returned to Vietnam four years later, in 1955, to find the U.S.-supported Diem regime in the south to be unstable and losing popular support, while meanwhile the communist Vietcong insurgency was slowly, under the direction of Ho Chi Minh, eroding the power of the Southern State. Meanwhile open war had broken out between the Soviet- and Chinese-supported North and the U.S.-supported South. By now U.S. forces were playing an active role, not just training and advising South Vietnamese military, but engaging directly in ground combat and devastating bombing of the north. Even the U.S. became fed up with Diem’s inability to lead, and he was assassinated in a U.S. supported bit of regime change. Unfortunately, subsequent leaders were no better, and were instantly seen as puppets of the Americans, which of course they were.

In the meantime, our friend is working for the North Vietnamese newspaper. Interestingly, we later noted that this fellow had a parallel occupation to the protagonist of Full Metal Jacket, “Joker”, who wrote for the American wartime newspaper Stars and Stripes, telling stories of American valor and the failings of the North Vietnamese Army.  When we asked him if he felt the press was free in North Vietnam, he explained to us, “I was free to write anything which would raise the morale of our people. I was not told what to write, and I did not write lies.  I just only wrote stories that were uplifting for our struggling citizens. You may call it what you would like, but I will call it free.”

America, of course, lost. And when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, the official moment is often considered to be when an NVA tank bulldozed its way through the gates of the Independence Palace, taking over. They renamed the place, Reunification Palace. As soon as word of the fall (or liberation) of Saigon made it to Hanoi in the north, our friend made his way down to witness the event. He told us the story of walking into the old U.S. Embassy, which was now in ruins, riddled with bullet holes and stained black with the soot from burning vehicles. He walked through the interior, which was in shambles, having been ransacked by the Vietcong. Amidst the sea of documents that covered the floor, he saw a bolt from an American rifle on the floor. He picked it up and has kept it since as a paper-weight.

Since the war, our friend went on to work in Vietnamese television news, traveling the world, and even visiting America five times, to such exotic locales as Nebraska, Kansas, San Fransisco, and Washington. On his trip to Washington, he was accompanying the Vietnamese prime minister, taking an historic image of the American and Vietnamese flags side by side on the president’s limousine.

Our friend now works in a senior capacity at Viet-My, a Vietnamese-U.S. relationship magazine published by the Vietnam-USA society. His magazine now works to build good faith and friendship between the people of the two countries. AsiaWheeling would flatter itself to think it is working to do the same.

Many people have told us not to disclose that we are American while traveling. It’s safer they say. But also, as our dear friend Mr. Stew Motta so eloquently put it, “You’ve got to represent, man.” And we agree. In traveling, AsiaWheeling has enjoyed so many more positive experiences connecting with people from other countries than we have negative ones. And in many of these, we are playing the role of representatives of our country and our race. With so many jokers out there, and so many idiotic things that have been done by Americans in the past, it would be a crime for all of us decent folk to hide behind Canada or England, rather than starting to rack up a few more positive interactions on behalf of America.

With that I’ll sign off. From the AsiaWheeling mobile offices in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, good night and good luck.

While the Red Shirts were doing their best to bring the city of Bangkok to its knees, Dane, Scott and I had been enjoying the finer points of the expatriate lifestyle. And time was flying. Life was good. Life was easy. And, thanks to Steve, may his beard grow ever longer, even somewhat affordable. However, our list of things to see in Thailand was growing shorter at an almost imperceptible pace. Meanwhile, Dane Weschler had been elaborating at great length about his love for the north of Siam, about his times in Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai, the beauty of that part of the country, and its magnificent food.

“This is nothing,” Dane would explain to us over a steaming bowl of succulent curried noodles. “The Khao Soi in Chiang Rai will blow this out of the water.” All that aside, despite the strange time warp that was Bangkok, we were beginning to near the end of our time in the country. And we were well overdue for some more exploring outside the capital.

It was with all this in mind that we sat down with Dane Weschler in yet another of the many delightful, but rather aristocratic, coffee shops in the city to plan our next adventures. Dane immediately began to counsel us against bringing the Speed TRs. My first reaction was sputtering indignation.

“But this is AsiaWheeling,” I attempted to explain… “To travel without the cycles would leave us feeling naked, helpless and alone.” Dane didn’t look convinced. “And who would we be, stripped of our precious steeds? What would we be doing? This is not AsiaTaxi-Cabbing, or AsiaWandering-the-Streets-til-Your-Feet-Hurt.”

“Oh, you’ll get your wheeling,” Dane assured us. And he was right.

We arrived in Chiang Rai after an overnight bus ride, and as the anti-anxiety medications wore off, we found ourselves riding in a little red pickup truck, into the back of which had been installed two long wooden benches.

It was taking us from the bus station to the center of town, where our mission was to rent motorcycles.

Once in the center of town, we quickly found that Dane was even more of a master of this city than of Bangkok.

He led us first to a place where we could purchase a couple of cups of fragrant, strong espresso, laced with plenty of thick golden cream.

And with the caffeination problem out of the way,  we followed Dane around the corner to a motorcycle rental shop.

My experience riding motorcycles added up to the few odd times that I was allowed to putt around on someone’s dirt bike during social gatherings in the farmlands of Iowa. Needless to say, the current situation was quite different. With judicious use of Dane’s formidable Thai bargaining skills, and some minor leveraging of the AsiaWheeling brand (I believe three matching business cards, one of which was in Thai, helped), we were riding off on three brand new Honda Wave 110’s, putting along and struggling to re-wire neural pathways long burned in by wheeling in order to operate these new terrifyingly powerful machines.

I’ll have to be honest with you, dear reader, I am quite conflicted in my views on the motorcycle. It is certainly a scary and monstrously powerful machine. However, on the back of the thing, I found myself somewhat drunk on the sheer power that lay between my legs. And these were by no means large motorcycles.

The more I rode, the more I began to enjoy the feeling of whipping along on this beast, leaning into the turns, and watching the scenery go by.

I let the whip of the wind and the hum of the motor fill my ears, as we tore through the beautiful countryside.

We had little time to get used to these new beastly wheels. It seemed no sooner had we begun to get comfortable with using the transmission and properly signaling and braking than it was time to take our first long cross-country ride.  We were going to ride north, up into the mountains toward a city called Doi Maesalong, once again on the Burmese border. It was tea and opium county, though many of the old opium farmers had been encouraged by the Thai government to switch over to coffee production.

Before joining the AsiaWheeling team, Dane had worked for the international coffee magazine, Coffee T&I, and so was bubbling with data about the local coffee world.

There is little time to chat, though, when motorcycling. Most communications require a fair bit of screaming over the road, engine, and wind. So I just let my head nest into visions from films like Easy Rider, while bits of 70s rock songs swam through my head, and I thought about how I got so close to finishing “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” That was a good book…

Dane can always be counted on to call waypoints for expensive and delectable coffee, and this ride was no exception. We stopped at a place called “Parabola.”

They provided us with a refreshing sip of free WiFi, and also some delightfully rich and potent coffee drinks, and a startling view of the countryside. It was smokey here too, if anything even more smokey than it had been in Sangklaburi, lending that strange unrealness to the environment, for which I must admit to you dear reader, I was growing a taste.

As the sun began to lower into the sky, the amount of smoke through which it must be filtered increased exponentially, reducing it quickly to a red ball that hung so dimly that it could be observed comfortably by the unaided eye.

As the sun became a different star, we climbed on the cycles up into the mountains, at times finding ourselves climbing mountain roads so steep that we needed to shift down into first gear. The addition of the smoke made the mountains feel unbelievably high, as though we were floating in an infinity of cloud. Once we had made it to the top, we began to work our way along the crest of the mountains, whipping down the startlingly smooth and new Thai country road, past a number of security checkpoints designed to address the rampant problem of Burmese drugs crossing into Thailand. The security guards were neither interested in us, or, as far as I know, effective in stopping the drug traffickers. From my understanding they mostly serve to hassle the local hill tribes, many of which lack proper identification.

The sun was finally giving way to darkness as we pulled into the town of Doi Maesalong, where the road wound way even more tightly and steeply by little shops, restaurants, and, most surprisingly, a giant 7-11. Thailand, in case I have not already emphasized this, is deep in the throes of a love affair with 7-11, and with branches spreading all the way to this remote outpost, who knows what can pull it out of that spiral.

Our hotel was the site of an old Taiwanese military base. The Taiwanese had been in this region fighting against China. As you no doubt already know, dear reader, Taiwan broke away from China in 1949 when the Republic of China (now called Taiwan) lost to the communist Chinese forces. As part of the war between the two factions, Republic of China troops called Guo Min Dang had been placed here, in the north of Thailand and had built the base that later became our guest house.

There were many classes of rooms at the base turned resort, but ours, being one of the least expensive was a wooden shed, with cold running water, three firm futon-esque mattresses on the floor, a gnarly roach problem, and a stunning view of the smoke enshrouded mountains amongst which Doi Maesalong finds itself.  A rustic, yet very comfortable setup.

By then it was high time for eating. We were starving, despite the fact that we had spent most of the day sitting on vibrating metal beasts.

I thought back to how hungry the characters always seemed to be in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and also back to a study about rats that I once came across, which suggested that merely vibrating the rats bodies stimulated their metabolisms in a way almost akin to actual exercise. I’d be the last to draw any conclusions from those two data points, but regardless, we were quite glad to find ourselves feasting at a completely empty Chinese restaurant, laying into some crispy pork and Chinese greens.

We spent the rest of that evening chatting about Thailand, the Red Shirts, AsiaWheeling, and the south-east Asian coffee industry with Dane’s friend and owner of a local coffee and cake joint called Sweet Maesalong.

The next morning, we woke up on Dane Wetschler’s couch in Bangkok and took stock of our consciousness. Dane was already brewing some coffee in the room, pouring hot water over a cone of freshly ground beans, filling the room with a rich aroma. Scott and I were instantly brought into the present. After drinking just one 2/3 full mug of the stuff, we were just nipping to wheel.  While Dane was finishing off the coffee, Karona began making us bowls of muesli and yoghurt, taking care to stir each one lovingly, blending the cereal, milk, and fruit yogurt before giving them to us. For two hard-boiled wheelers used to the hard-scrabble streets of Tiruchirapalli, such hospitality was melting us like butter.

Before we left, we gave a little gift to Karona and Natsumi from AsiaWheeling Global Enterprises and our friends at Maui Jim. Along with the sunglasses, they had sent us a number of women’s small tee-shirts.  Being not small women ourselves, we were thrilled to find a couple on which to bestow these gifts.

Karona, Natsumi, and Dane agreed to take a taxi cab to the bike rental place. Scott and I would, of course, be wheeling there.

Dane marked the place where we needed to meet them on a map. It was a small enough Soi (the Thai word for side alley) that it was not actually shown on the map; we were wheeling toward a little blue circle in a blank part of the map on the other side of town. We would be getting there by taking one of the main Bangkok thoroughfares, a street called Rama IV. Rama IV is an English way to refer to the fourth monarch of Thailand under the House of Chakri. The current king is Rama IX. Rama IV, (his Thai name is Phra Bat Somdet Phra Poramenthramaha Mongkut Phra Chom Klao Chao Yu Hua — we dare you to look up the translation, and provide it in the comments) was the king for the better part of the 1800’s, and is also the Siamese king portrayed in that old favorite “The King and I.”

Today’s Rama IV is a boiling highway, populated with a cocktail of brand new Toyota Camry cabs and whizzing motor cycles.

It crosses the heart of the city, and always seems to have plenty of traffic. Bicycles are making a comeback in Bangkok, but are still a pretty rare sight on Rama IV.

You see, dear reader, it was not so long ago that cycles were, due to lack of funds and industrialization in Thailand, a necessarily popular form of transportation. As Thailand has developed, the new wealth has attempted to divorce itself from its poorer past in many ways. From Thailand’s worship of Japanese and Korean culture, to its embrace of fashion, flat screens, and frappes, the country is determined to show the world it’s made it. And it has. No visitor to the city can be confused about that. Unfortunately, though,  there still exists a scorn for bicycles, being seen as a vestige of poorer, harder times. But what about posh bikes, you ask? There must be a market for posh American, European, and Japanese-made bikes. And it’s true, there is. There is even a fixed gear hipster cycling scene here, but its expansion is relegated mostly to the hyper-wealthy. Due to a massive import tariff on cycles and components from abroad, most people here can only afford a heavy and poorly manufactured Thai cycle.

Rama IV is the nearest big street to Dane’s apartment, in a part of town called Sathorn, right near the giant Lumpini boxing stadium and as such would be one of our main avenues of transit in Bangkok, so we had better get used to the traffic, which while thick, was quite welcoming and none too fast (during the day at least). We took Rama IV through a number of fly overs, and stop lights, pedaling hard in the morning sun. Bangkok was surprisingly hot and humid for being the farthest north that we’d been so far. We were quite soaked by the time we made it to the old city, and began having to make turns.

We were totally unable to locate the streets that Dane had suggested, but with prudent use of our compasses and kind locals, we found the bike shop in no time.

Dane, Karona, and Natsumi were just finishing getting fitted for their bikes when we rolled up. Scott and I quickly sprung to action, teaching our new team the rules of wheeling.

After a little test run on some of the tiny Sois that ran around the bike rental place, we were ready for the real thing.

It was great to have a larger team of wheelers again. We’d had the pleasure of wheeling with Dane back in Providence, but we were most gleefully surprised to find Karona and Natsumi to be not only hard-core wheelers, but startlingly quick learners at the field commands and general rules of wheeling.

Dane took bishop and headed toward the river, where he took us off the road and onto the sidewalk (a “Mario Cart” call). When we exited the sidewalk, we found ourselves in a huge, semi-open-air market.

Here we locked the bikes and headed to find some grub. We started with some Thai rotis, stuffed with crab meat, then settled on a little restaurant.

The restaurant was a sort of point-and-eat place, and we wasted no time in pointing relentlessly. Dane had, during his time in this country, gained not only an impressive grasp of the Thai language, but also a deft sense of what to order at restaurants. “It’s much cheaper to eat out here than to cook at home,” Dane explained to us, “so I just eat out almost all the time.”

He assured us that the best was yet to come. And Thai food in Thailand was well on its way to a firmly applied AsiaWheeling seal of approval with just what we’d had already.

Our lunch consisted of a number of spicy curries, a sweet dish of meat and potatoes in a soy gravy, Thai sticky rice, a tonkastu-like piece of fried pork, a Chinese-esque garlic broccoli and chicken stir fry, and a plate of fried noodles. Paired with our rotis, it was quite the feast.

Back on the road, we headed toward the more historic temples and palace district of the old city, stopping by Khaosan Road, previously AsiaWheeling’s only port of call in Thailand.  It was so over-run with tourists and touts, that we wondered why we ever would have visited such a place. AsiaWheeling was obviously lacking a Thai Bureau back then.

Dane called a coffee waypoint shortly thereafter.

Although it was not cheap, it was the most delightfully European coffee of the trip to date, produced quite masterfully by Thai hands from an Italian machine.

Before leaving the table, I applied some of Karona’s peppermint essence to my back with a pump-action spritzer, which elicited an unexpectedly intense sensation on the skin.

We kept wheeling, now meandering aimlessly though Bangkok’s old city, stopping from time to time for water or a little shape to eat, until the sun fell low in the sky.

It was time to drop the bikes back at the rental joint, since Natsumi was catching a flight that evening back to Japan. Rather than wheel back on Rama IV at night, we just folded the speed TRs and threw them into the cab. Our new Sri Lankan bungees proved invaluable in securing the trunk, which would not quite close over the Speed TRs.

As we bid farewell to Natsumi, she and Karona were already making plans to do a little Japan wheeling.

AsiaWheeling: spreading the gospel one city at a time.