Hop on Pop: on boxing a bicycle in Vietnam

My last dinner in Vietnam. I ate snails with lemongrass and garlic. I'd been seeing (and hearing: they are rather chewy) Vietnamese people eating snails all over the country, and decided to join in finally. Snails are very high in Selenium, Vitamin E, and Magnesium. I did a lot of chewing and then decided to focus on the lemongrass and garlic instead.




Tomorrow I fly to Taiwan, then to Seattle. I left Seattle heading east in December, and now I am heading west there. I will have completely circled around the globe.


The task for this last day was to box my bicycle. This was easy on the journey here: I had a local bicycle shop with whom I had a rapport (bike shops usually have used boxes from their new bikes just in), a car to transport said box, and a lovely Mr. Anurag to help me disassemble and convince it into the box.

But in a city as tangled as a hairball, with no Vietnamese language at my command, finding a bicycle shop and then communicating with them about a box seemed insurmountable. And it almost was.

The first shop I found (actually: the first shop I could find again) was big and fancy and they had old boxes--yay!--but they tried to charge me $15 for one! But they did speak some English. I argued and negotiated for some time, but they held stubborn, and I left feeling deflated.

Fine then: find another shop. From the windows of the tour bus the other day I'd jotted down what I hoped were the cross streets of a bike shop. I tooled over there and my notes were correct. But here Mr. Shop and I had no language overlap (save for him able to ask "how old are you" in English, although the conversation stopped there) and I ended up doing a lavish production of charades (including the scenes Big Box, Flapping Airplane, and My Bicycle Pedaling) to try and communicate what I wanted. After plenty of bemused eyebrows, I gathered he didn't have old boxes.

One last hope. In the foggy stalagmites of my brain I remembered passing a bicycle shop on a long walk with Lady Elise when we'd just arrived. If only I could remember where this could possibly have been. Straining my hippocampus, doing memory push-ups: nothing. I walked then, just to clear my head. And then, only then! after some space, did the memory return. A divided street, somewhere west of town, on our way to the museum. A long ways away. But it was worth a try. So I hopped on my bicycle and pedaled off.

So satisfying to find it. What might it hold, however?

They had boxes! But no English, so Mr. Technology brought out his phone with a little translator app, after I'd given the second performance of my Bicycle Box Theatre. Oh, the hilarity of communication. He tapped in something in Vietnamese and handed the phone to me: "Have You No Bicycle Box His Country?" it read. Hm.

Be that as it may. Finally they sold me a box (and their roll of packing tape) for a wopping 20,000 dong (which is just about a dollar) and I happily had my box. Now to transport it back to my hotel so I could set about with my tools to fit my bike in it. Once Mr. Bike realized I was taking this big box with me he gave me the look of well where are you going with this and your bicycle now?

But this is a country of impossible loads: wide baskets of pineapple, two people on a motorbike with a huge painting between them, a man with a potted palm behind his seat. So for Mr. Bike to take my single bungi cord (thanks Daddy!), loop it around the box, and fix it to my rack this was not out of the ordinary. Now I had a tail fan: I was a cardboard peacock.

So I set out bicycling the clogged city streets of Hanoi like this, feeling at first precarious and hilarious, but then placid and accomplished, and finally enjoying being part of the Vietnam scenery. I was at least 5 times wider than usual and had to carefully avoid completely taking anyone out, like those men carrying planks in the movies. Buses, taxis, and 300 motorbikes skirted around me and nobody gave me strange looks.

But let me tell you: when there was the slightest breeze in my face it was like pedaling through glue. Like pushing a hole in the air the size of a box.

Bike Box on Bike to be Boxed. Hop on Pop.

Wide load.

My bicycle has been "boxed", as it were.

 Hehe. This ridiculousness made me very happy.

 [epilogue: bicycle now successfully taken apart, surrounded by packing material of souvenir jackfruit chips and coffee, and enclosed in box using enough tape to feed a family of four for a week. Seattle here we come!]