Some days (ok, every day I possibly can) on the way home from work, I decide to take the scenic route. Where I come from, when someone says "the scenic route", it means a lot of corn, or trees, maybe a river, and maybe an hour detour. My life here is a lot more compact, perhaps more suitable for my rediscovered hobby of bicycling.
These shots are the view from my watering hole (and sometimes my office) on West Lake. It's a good sized lake, with a nice route you can ride right along the lake shore clear around it - about 16km. And best of all, you can't go more than 50 yards without running into another cafe! That tower they are putting up over there, I'm sure will include a few cafes, but I probably won't go there much. It will be, once it is finished growing, the tallest tower in Hanoi.
After using up all my lake-watching minutes for the day, I start homeward, which now involves a bumpy pedal across the Long Bien Bridge. There is a railroad in the center of the bridge and a small deck for motorbikes and bicycles on either side. The ramp up to the bridge always smells like something-bridges-shouldn't-smell-like, but once you are up on the bridge the air is fresh - especially when going past the bakery! I don't know where the bakery is, I just know where I smell it every day on the bridge.
The sign on the bridge is about traffic safety. The sign, it seems to me, is a great idea. The actual traffic safety, it seems to me, is still bottled up somewhere and they've forgotten where it is and can't let it out anymore.
The first thing the bridge crosses is a big road, alongside which is the 'ceramic wall', a long stretch of artwork in ceramic by a wide variety of artists, and non-artists I think, which was put up before Hanoi's millennial celebration in 2010. Some of it represents historical figures or events, and some of it is just fun. Behind the wall, and under the bridge here, is the wholesale fruit and veggie market.
Long Bien Bridge was built by the French, and goes from dike to dike - across the river and a fair bit of land on either side that is on the river side of the dikes. You can see they grow corn here too! And bananas, which seem to grow like weeds, and taste way better than weeds where I come from.
Having hopes of staying alive in traffic, I equipped my bike with a bell which happened to come with a compass on top of it. Fun while it lasted, however, it now seems to be lost - you can see the "S" arrow is pointing more or less up to where the North Star should be - but the bell still works. In the heat of the afternoon, traffic is pretty thin. At 7.30 in the morning, not so much!
Once across the bridge, I can follow the even more bumpy alley straight ahead along the railroad. You can't really see it but the railroad is up above the wall on the right.
This guy passing me here is well-prepared for the hot day, he's carrying along a mattress on his head - keeps the sun off, and when you get tired you can stop and take a nap in comfort!
This place put up a tarp to keep the alley (and the house, their front door is there on the left) cooler. Lots of people here also spray water on the street in front of their house on really hot afternoons in an effort to keep things cooler.
After a bit I duck through this motorbike/bicycle/basket lady underpass, neatly equipped with spot mirrors, to get under the railroad. From here there are a couple of tiny alleys which pop out on an actual street again before very long.
The carousel is pretty quiet on hot afternoons, gaudy, colorful and empty!
And, to match the gaudiness of the playground equipment, the red fuzzy tree and the Pepsi umbrella...
After the park there is a greenish not-so-refreshing lake lined up with houses and a bia hoi - the 'green space' is, after all, the lake!
Cross the highway and I pass this giant mural on the front of the Air Force Museum.
This road, err, construction zone, goes beside the airport...
Hanoi's very own paintball range ... who knew that Hanoi had paintball!?
A lot of vegetable fields beside bluish-blackish irrigation (?) ditch.
This is the scenic route, remember? This little path goes beside the paintball range and (almost) into a military post - this is still right next to the airport and you can sort of see the antiaircraft guns on the left of the picture - but at the last minute cuts around the edge of that and then goes by the neighborhood football field.
Across from the football field are banana trees - yummm!
And finally I get home, and go up to the Friday Afternoon Office which looks pretty lush these days (much lusher than this fuzzy not-so-smart phone picture might suggest!)
