Matthew Wegner

Mind? Blown.

The view from my hotel:

And again, the whole Flickr set.

Exactly 24 hours ago I left my apartment and headed to the airport.  And where am I now, at this exact moment?  You may have guessed it—sitting on a plane!  There’s one more hour to go until touchdown in Hanoi, and maybe an hour past that to find our luggage and hotel.  I’m awfully tired but am going to fend off sleep by thrusting myself into walking around the city.

More Riders!

I met up with some of the other riders on the tour in Taipei.  I recognized Nathan Hoover, who was traveling with three others (Andy, Irene, and Corbin).  Turns out Corbin was a developer on the iPhone and the iPhone SDK.  In it seems that unicyclists are definitely a different breed of people.  I look forward to meeting everyone and getting to know them a little better over the coming weeks.

Overnight Trip

Apparently some of the group is going on an overnight trip to a nearby bay, and Corbin was in the process of emailing the tour organizer about joining up (with his iPhone, of course).  I piggybacked on that, so hopefully there’s still room for a few more people. Apparently it’s a gorgeous area.  Sounds like we’ll be sleeping on the boat!

Photos

I haven’t been snapping many photos yet.  There isn’t much of interest, at least to my untrained photographic eye—just a ton of people in crowded, dirty airline terminals.  I’ll leave the exact imagery as an exercise to the reader.

Good lord. I’m writing this at hour 11 of the flight. And there are nearly 3 more hours to go! I swear these seats have a little less leg room than other flights I’ve been on, too. I was really cramped when I started out, but thankfully the flight attendant took it upon herself to move me to a slightly more spacious seat. Slightly. I guess it makes sense—95% of the flight is Asian, probably Chinese, and they all seem to have plenty of legroom.

Why I’m Going

So before I left I ended up in this discussion with Ruiz about why I was going. The funny thing was, I didn’t have a very clear answer for him. I think partly this is because that’s one of the goals of the trip—to experience something unexpected and unpredictable. I’m not really sure what to expect. The few expectations I do have are the obvious ones: I’m going to be really sore and hating riding in parts, I’m going to be loving the view and enjoying riding in parts, and in general things are going to be more awesome than not.

Training Results

In the end I think I did a decent job of training up. The longest day on the tour is a little over 70 miles, which is quite a bit more than I’ve done in one day, but it’ll also be spread out over an entire day’s worth of sunlight. Aerobically I should be fine. I ended up doing a ton of training on the recumbent bike in front of movies (p.s.: movies in general—not the kind that come with crazy recommendations that you have to see, but the average kind you would watch if you rented one every weekend—are pretty much terrible). The big barrier is going to be saddle soreness. I’ll report how that goes as the tour unfolds!

Important Space-Staring Business

Well, I guess it’s time to space out for a bit. The lights are still on after the breakfast service, and I’ve already half-slept for 9 hours, so I doubt I’ll be able to sleep anymore. It’s still dark, too—this night is going on 16+ hours for me. Flying west is odd like that.

Broken English

One more random observation: I’ve only seen the flight attendants talk to passengers in English. They do announcements in Mandarin, and talk to each other in Mandarin, but only in English when they’re asking if you want coffee or tea. Every interaction around me needs to be repeated several times as a result. Eventually somebody points, an understanding is reached, and coffee or tea is served. I wonder what’s up with that.

I’m on the plane to LA! I can’t believe it snuck up this fast. I had moments of panic throughout the trip to the airport. Weird stuff, too: Did I bring the seat/handle for my unicycle? Did I bring pants? Eventually I just had to trust that I have everything I need. After all, I did have everything laid out on my apartment floor for the last few days. Panicked on-the-way-to-the-airport Matthew is certainly not a very good judge of whether I have everything covered.

Vietnam Guidebook

So I picked up a guide book to Vietnam at Changing Hands today. It seems pretty thorough. It has a walking tour map of the Old Quarter of Hanoi that I’m going to check out in my two days prior. The restaurant lists look fascinating. Some places serve a single item on their menu (usually for $0.80 or so, too)! I decided to go for a mix of higher-end, fancy restaurants, and some genuine street-side fare. Deliciousness awaits!

No Turning Back!

Overall, it’s odd to be so completely locked into the trip. I used to plan out every excruciating detail of a trip; by the time I departed I was completely into the mode of thinking for it. With this, though—and many of my recent trips—I’ve learned where that “good enough” boundary lies, and I do just that much work. On the plus side I feel like I can up and do something like travel to Vietnam without worry. Maybe it’s a downside, or maybe it isn’t, but I also feel like the transition period is much smaller. It’s like one minute I’m in the office, coding some stuff for a Cisco project, and the next minute I’m sitting on a plane en route to being immersed in completely new experiences for the next two weeks. It’s somewhat odd!

More Soon!

About to land in LA, so time to sign off. I’m typing this all on the EEE, which is actually pretty easy to get used to. The right shift key is completely lame, but that’s about it. Should be able to type up my thoughts on a daily basis…