Hanoi has traded most of its bicycles for scooters, paying a steep price in smog and traffic. But there are still bicycles, serving as platforms for the sale of an unbelievable variety of goods.

I have been in Hanoi three times in the last year for work. The last time (just after New Years) I got sort of obsessed with documenting the variety of goods being sold from bicycles – everything from toilet paper to china to socks to fruit to chains and locks.

In a city of 2.6 million people, there’s the necessary population density and street culture to put a viable small business onto a bicycle. Here are a few of the images from three trips:

The Tet or new years holiday was celebrated this week in Vietnam, a time when people use peach blossoms as a traditional decoration. I was there in early January and loved these bicycles peddling and pedaling large branches in full bloom.

The complete set of these images (55 of them) is on the Bikejuju Facebook page. These days I post to the Bikejuju Facebook page a little more frequently than the blog, so you might want to “like” Bikejuju while you are there.

Welcome to the year of the dragon!

PS these images are also on Flickr, and Creative Commons licensed. Help yourself.

With a hat tip to Root Simple for starting the whole “Let’s watch Hungarian videos on YouTube” meme.

Portraits from Panama by photographer José Castrellón.


From the photographer’s website:

The term priti baiks is an evident parody of ‘pretty bikes.’ However priti – widely used among young urban Panamanians – does not exactly mean ‘pretty.’ Something is priti when it possesses an ingenious and striking grace.

José Castrellón’s website. Found via Street Use.

That bike is the bomb-diggity.

Hat tip to Gurldoggie for the image, which is © Philip Poupin, found on PDN.

This is a truly horrific story from Brazil, made all the more terrible by the fact that is is so well documented and you can watch it unfold close-up, and by the fact that I have not been able to find any English-language coverage of it at all. Given the footage below, which shows a close-up of the accident attempted murder as it occurs, it is extremely fortunate that no cyclists or bystanders were killed.

The video below is very very hard to watch- it shows a peaceful, pleasant-looking dusk ride, with a hundred or more cyclists of all kinds (fewer than half of whom are wearing helmets) riding through a medium sized street in Porto Alegre. Young and old riding together on a warm evening: a friendly looking woman on a trike with her dog on the back, a guy in Red Bull kit, people on cruisers, some hipsters. It looks like a really fun, friendly evening ride.

And then, at 1:00 into the video, a black car literally mows through the cyclists from behind, carrying several cyclists on the hood and windshield, and the rest of the video is of shocked cyclists, twisted bikes, the injured being comforted on the pavement, and finally ambulances, and twisted bikes being carried away. Click below to play the video.

Added: Here is a better video that edits together footage from multiple cameras to provide a more complete narrative, with English subtitles, including witness testimony and outrage at the end.

The Porto Alegre Critical Mass blog has links to more videos and reflections on the incident.

The local news site Zero Hour says police have identified the driver and are waiting for him to turn himself in voluntarily (apparently as of yesterday he is not at his home address). It also have video of the accident from a different perspective, shot from high above out an apartment window. The same video appears in this TV news report.

In the words of our friend Cabelo, who alerted me to this story, “Much light and energy to all who lived through this horrible experience.”

Shot in Hanoi, Vietnam in December.

December was a whirlwind. An unexpected trip to Vietnam came up, followed by Christmas, New Years, and suddenly it’s 2011! I’m just sorting through my photos from Vietnam and will be posting about the bicycles of Hanoi in the coming weeks. But this guy wins the prize for goofiest bike – I love the contrast between his expression and his cute Tweety Bird ride.

Captions, anyone?

You may remember that a few months ago we helped load a container in Seattle with our friends from Village Bicycle Project.

Most of the bikes in the container were headed to VBP’s programs in Ghana, but also nestled in the container was a stack of goodies headed further afield, to the “Racing Squirrels” national cycling team in the West African nation of Benin. Parts, frames, tubes, shorts, shoes, and other equipment donated in support of the team.

The Racing Squirrels are a ragtag team I’ve blogged about before, whose exploits have been documented by recently-departed Peace Corps volunteer (and former bicycle racer) Christopher Herby in a series of articles on CyclingNews.com. He recently followed the team to Burkina Faso where the team competed in an international race, the Tour de Faso, and got a taste of competition at that level. His guest post on Bikejuju and blog posts on Cyclingnews.com (with titles like “Things Fall Apart“) were great reading.

So it was incredibly heartwarming, in the midst of the Christmas season of excess in the USA, to read that after several delays, the container of bicycles had finally made it to Accra, Ghana. Christopher Herby’s last CyclingNews.com post describes how, when word finally reached him that the container was in Accra, Ghana, four days before the end of his Peace Corps tour:

I piled into a taxi with Coach Gandaho and the secretary of the Cycling Federation, Roger Zounon. We traversed Benin and Togo, finally arriving in Ghana late at night. The next morning, we woke early to meet the good folks at the Village Bicycle Project. We arrived to a bee’s nest of activity: piles of bicycles surrounding the shipping container, and people running in every direction with bicycles and wheels and parts. Amidst all this chaos stood George, the coordinator of VBP in Ghana. Somehow he orchestrated the unloading of the container and the allotment of bikes to various individuals who sell and distribute them throughout Ghana.

Tucked neatly to the side, we found that special pile of bikes with Benin tags on them. We were so excited to explore our treasure pile! Ventilated helmets… sturdy wheels…. fresh tires, even a few complete bikes! All this stuff will be put to great use. (Read more…)

Happy New Year, Team Benin! And Christopher, thanks for sharing so many great stories from Benin, and we wish you luck on your next adventure, a documentary project among the Fulani people.

I’m in Hanoi, and despite ferocious jetlag, my colleague Wendy convinced me that we should go visit Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum tonight after dark. On our way back we came across a park where, under the paternal gaze of a giant statue of Lenin, couples were learning ballroom dancing to the sounds of Abba, teenagers were skateboarding, there were two hip-hop dance classes happening, and hipster 20-somethings were drinking beer (sadly there is no PBR in Hanoi), smoking cigarettes, and riding BMX bikes off the ledges. I swear we caught a whiff of ganja.

I spent half an hour shooting video of Hai and his crew, but I lack the bandwidth or the mental fortitude to edit it right now, so I’ll just post a few quick stills. I’ll post a video here some day soon, because the internet was invented for posting videos of hipsters doing bike tricks, right?

Hanoi: I pictured ladies in conical hats on ancient roadster bikes and instead (well, actually, in addition…) I found hipsters in trucker caps on BMX bikes. Those moments are one of the greatest joys of travel!

Gurldoggie pointed out this great series of images of bicycles in Isfahan, Iran, by the Iranian photographer Alieh Sâdatpur, which were originally posted by MehrNews and the Poemas del Rio Wang blog.

Not surprisingly given Iran’s political alliances, it looks like most of these bikes are classic Chinese roadsters. The head badge in this photo reveal this cycle to be a Phoenix.