The day our motorbikes decorate the living room… But let me start at the beginning. Attended by two dogs we ate our first English breakfast here in Vietnam. Untoasted toast, sausages and a fried egg was not that meal we expected to have but OK. We would have preferred to get one of the dogs cooked Vietnamese style.
After heaving breakfast we jumped in our still wet clothes. The problem of water resistant shoes seems to be in the time they need to get dry. So we were a bit freezing the fist hour on the road. Shortly after Mai Chau we had to go over a pass. I don’t know the name of the pass but foggy pass would fit perfectly. We just followed a truck seeing about 20 meters ahead. The pass was too steep for many overloaded trucks’ brakes. We’ve seen them smouldering.
The rest of our trip to Hanoi isn’t worth to mention. Traffic as usual, buses overtaking before blind summits and corners, cars honking all the time, no sun but no rain either.
At about 1 PM we arrived in Hanoi. Hanoi was meant to be our final destination. Now it’s a temporary stopover and a storage place with washing machine. We’ve been welcomed by our host Navid’s brother in front of a big house in the westlake quarter. First we had to park our motorbikes indoor. There’s no entrance area or floor but only one big room as ground floor. So our bikes found place in the living room. And it’s not that our Hondas are clean. This seems quite strange to me. Especially in a country where people change sandals in every room.
We wanted to have a homestay and no hotel to get connected with locals. This is actually what Navid wrote in the AirBnB description of this place. He announced to be a Hanoian since birth being able to speak English and interested in meeting people from other countries. Hrm. We haven’t seen Navid yet and we’re alone in this huge house which seems to be just like a hotel without reception. Definitely not what we wanted to have but as a base to store some of our stuff during further trips in the north of Vietnam quite OK.
In the afternoon we started to do our laundry and went to town to buy coffee, find a microbrewery and have some street food. We started to test different coffee roasts in our drip filters to discover the one we buy to bring home. Our previous tries to figure out what brand we’ve had in different coffee shops failed because of the language barrier.
We found the brewery Furbrew in a narrow house. The floor was in chessboard style and there were graffitis everywhere. We tasted different beers from sour to kind-of-IPA. Decent compared to the other beers we usually find here in Vietnam.
For street food we seemed to be in the wrong quarter. We ate some rice and noodles in a small local restaurant. Just the moment we left the restaurant it started raining again. It was like the sky opened it’s watergate and now about two hours later it’s still raining. To all those people who told us the rain in Vietnam just holds for a few minutes you have to hide somewhere I can just ask following question: Have you guys ever been to Vietnam?
Tomorrow we will explore Hanoi and make plans for our first trip to the north.
Just to spice up the day with something stupid I washed my shorts together with my purse. So I have violated the law of money laundering. At least I now have the cleanest money in all of Vietnam.
