So you fancy yourself a bike messenger...

After hearing my courier friends talk about the good old days when a job to Bellevue carrying twenty pounds of architecture blueprints only made you $4 richer, I have been amazed at the things carried around on bicycles here in Vietnam. We've seen a family of four on a bicycle (one sitting with child on lap, one standing pedaling, and one sitting on the rack), dozens of live chickens strung up by their feet, a ridiculous amount of pommelo fruits, multipe four foot tall blown up Santas, a man riding with a six foot vase in each of his "panniers," etc. By the way, this is what the panniers look like:


This isn't even mentioning the stuff the Vietnamese will pile onto a cyclo or a motorbike.
In the museum of ethnology there is a bike loaded with one minority man's daily load of fish traps:


It is something like 180 fish traps! I wouldn't have believed it if there weren't a photograph on him riding with all of it. In the markets people transport their goods to and from almost every day and this includes glassware, jeans, raw meat, eggs, live ducks, etc . I'll try and be swifter with my camera from now on to not miss so many amazing bike loads. I thought that I was doing well fitting three twelve packs in my bag, now I'll have to get an extra extra large one to up the ante...

We tried to rent bicycles again in Nha Trang, but ended with similar results to the ones in Ha Noi (i.e. a broken chain and me covered in grease).
























I feel like I could make a fortune here with only a bottle of chain lube, a 15mm wrench, and some grease for bottom brackets and hubs. Unfortunately the bike mechanics that we've seen on the street seem to charge next to nothing and mostly change tires. We have seen someone completely rebuilding a wheel on a street corner, but we've also seen someone fix a rear hub by forcing a flat head screwdriver into it with a hammer.


















I'd be surprised if there was such a thing as trueing a wheel here. I'll be happy to get back home where I can bring my broken bikes to Counterbalance and feel bad about myself whenever my chain gets to be black.