Five exceptional students are awarded new bicycles

In Hanoi, a bicycle is probably the best available mode of transportation. Cars and buses slowly lumber down the packed streets here, awkwardly staking out a patch of road amid flowing streams of motorbikes and bicycles (this flow is typically described as ‘chaos’ by the uninitiated, and ‘organic’ by those who have learned the rules). Motorbikes, the vehicle of choice in Hanoi, numbering at least 2,000,000 at last count, lurch heavily in the stop-and-go traffic, creating a semi-permanent exhaust cloud above the street, roaring and sputtering like badly muffled chainsaws.

This leaves the lowly bicycle, once king (or queen, if you prefer) of the Hanoian streets. Nearly silent, negligibly expensive to operate, more maneuverable than a motorbike and faster than taking the bus – at least during rush hour – the bicycle is practically perfect. Too bad mine got stolen.

It was a Monday night, and I was at home with my host family. The front of our narrow house opens onto the street, with an accordion-style metal gate that slides aside, allowing the car to pull in directly beneath the second-floor kitchen. That evening, the gate was unlocked, and while we occupied ourselves upstairs, out of earshot, my bicycle was swiftly liberated from where it stood just inside the gate. Nobody saw it disappear, and, truthfully, I wouldn’t even recognize the bicycle if its rider knocked me down on the street. The design is identical to thousands of other bicycles plying these asphalt routes.

The morning after my bike was stolen, I spent more than an hour standing on a crowded city bus crawling its way uptown. That day, for the first, and so far only, time since I have been here, I felt like I needed to be somewhere else. I read the web logs of other SALT participants, and dreamed of being in Mexico or Haiti or Bolivia.

Now I have a new bicycle. It is faster, it is sturdier, it makes me glad to be here, and it is always securely locked.