After a bus ride through my first and only experience of thunderous monsoon rain, I arrived at Hanoi airport and retrieved my bike from luggage storage (hotel guy was onto it!). I still had to wait two hours before check-in opened for my 1:30am flight, so I sat in the corner doing some embroidery while a Vietnamese family watched. The kids, around 13 and 7, were cheeky and fun to hang out with. I offered them my drawing pad and pens since they were getting restless and the mother looked harried; they offered me some sweets.

Once checked in and past security, I wandered around and found a totally empty floor of the airport. I think it was a new floor that was being built, although I’m not sure why they had left it open since it was completely bare. It was kind of spooky, but it had a bathroom with a shower! Which didn’t work very well despite being supposedly new, but I felt very clever to have found it all the same. I was at the end of a very long last day in Hanoi, so naturally everything I was wearing had been drenched in sweat at some point. I freshened up, got into clean clothes, and had my last bowl of pho before getting on the long-hauls.

Hanoi to Dubai

The flight from Hanoi to Dubai was uneventful, although once again quite empty - I had the full row to lie down, and managed to catch a couple hours of sleep. I had been a bit nervous about flying through Dubai airport given current events, but everything seemed normal and bustling even at 5am. I’ve never been through this airport before, and the regional distinctions felt very salient to my under-exposed eyes. There were lots of people wearing bright African prints or long white thobes, folks of different Middle Eastern and African ethnicities that I don't often meet in New Zealand, and many languages that I didn’t recognise.

There was also a prominent immigration campaign advertising for people (of a specific type, I imagine) to come and live in Dubai. People in polo shirts with very white teeth smiled down from billboards featuring slogans like “Americans live in Dubai!” and “Dutch people live in Dubai!". I didn't dwell on it.

Dubai to Frankfurt

The flight from Dubai to Frankfurt was too short. Two 6 hour flights meant only a couple of hours of sleep in each. Give me a classic Kiwi 11-hour long-haul any day over these unhappy middles. We touched down in the afternoon to a dreary and rather desolate Frankfurt airport, where the bags took an hour to come out.

Going through customs, I had a breath-hold moment when they asked where the bike was from. I prayed they weren't going to ask if I'd cleaned off every speck of dirt before landing on their soil like NZ Customs would have. I said “New Zealand”, blessed adored New Zealand, and they waved me through.

Frankfurt to Berlin

In a corner outside, I rewatched the videos I'd taken of Ferg explaining things and got the bike assembled after 1.5 hours 🫠 One of the rear brake pads had lost a doodad and was loose and rubbing, but I had to get going. The airport worker kindly let me leave the box and mountains of discarded duct tape there. I genuinely don’t know what I would have done otherwise - ripped off all the barcodes with my name and done a runner, probably.

As soon as I left the airport with my laden bike, it started raining torrentially, like truly the heaviest rain I had ever cycled in. There had been a weather warning with strong gusts and thunder, but there wasn’t really much to be done about it; I had to make it to my train to Berlin. Fortunately there was a cycleway all the way, flat and through lovely forest paths, so it was a very easy 1 hour ride. The thunder was epic and I stress-tested all my waterproofing, so that was also a plus.

I skidded into Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (central train station) only to find that my train has been delayed an hour. Since I couldn't leave my bike with its million attachments (theft risk when in a big city; even with a bike lock, someone could take my panniers), I stood around waiting for the train in my soaked pants, eating a cold sandwich. I had been trying to order a Bretzel (appropriately German and exotic), but my travel phrases were not up to the task, and the serving guy rolled his eyes impatiently at my poor language skills, so I panic-bought this sandwich instead.

Here, I felt a tinge of wistfulness for Vietnam. Generally, I don’t like it when people of the Global South fawn over tourists making an effort to learn a few words, as if they are shocked that anyone would deign to learn their economically disenfrachised language. Encouraging language learners is obviously a good thing, but it’s a balance between supportive and obsequious. Language learning also has inherent benefits - even a few travel phrases can open up a world of connection, regardless of how “useful" the language is elsewhere.

Despite knowing this, I’d become accustomed to being praised by Vietnamese locals for my handful of travel phrases. So when Sandwich Man was unimpressed with my 1 week of Duolingo, my shoulders caved in a little. I suppose it's understandable that Europeans, with their 3-4 languages under their belt, are far from being impressed at a few badly pronounced words, and find the constant “sprechen sie Englisch?" (“Do you speak English?") a bit tiresome. And I do wonder if some of the confidence I felt in Vietnam was from being an Asian who is lucky enough to be fluent in English, and from a privileged country. Either way, I generally felt a bit intimidated stepping into Europe for the first time in over a decade. I noticed myself doing apologetic little head-bob bows, on auto-pilot, a gesture that I usually find servile and grating outside of Korean cultural contexts.

Anyway, I got on the delayed Berlin train with the help of a kind older German couple (who spoke perfect English, naturally). Turns out the technique is to get your bulkier panniers off, quite literally throw them into the carriage (out of the way of the passage), then get your bike on. Same when getting off, have your pannier bags in you rhands ready to yeet out the sliding doors as soon as they open. It all has to be done in a tremendous rush, as if you’re at an F1 pit stop, because soon the train will threaten to leave with terrifying beeping sounds at the door because it's only 1 hour late and it can't possibly spare another minute. Once in the bike carriage, you can hook your bike into your assigned bike space number, which you should have pre-booked and paid for when you booked your human seat (I learnt all this from Man in Seat 61, absolute legend train dude with the best first-hand info on European trains).

Deustchebahn (the German national train carrier) is notorious for delays, and this train was no exception. The estimated time of arrival kept stretching out langoriously, from 10:34pm out to eventually 11:49pm. At this point I'd slept maybe 4 hours in the past 48 hours. I had finally changed out of my wet pants, but I was still damp and cold. It all felt rather tortuous, forcing my eyes open onto the cold fluorescent lights and fighting against the waves of sleep to avoid missing my stop.

Berlin to apartment (by bike, yay!)

Finally at Berlin Hauptbahnhof, I tossed my panniers, my bike, and myself off the train, waved goodbye to the nice German couple who wished me luck on my journey, and biked the 20 minutes to Dillan & Donna's apartment. It was remarkable how immediately alert and energised I felt - cycling really is such a stimulating way to travel.