I'm sitting outside a local cafe drinking in Hanoi's bustling street-scape with my eyes and my sugary watermelon juice with my lips.
A cool-looking lanky dude out front slices off coconut tops with his short machete and a fine mist of coconut water sprays me, cooling me down on this blistering hot day.
Is that spray still from the coconuts? I wonder as ever larger globules of liquid begin to descend.
Nup - the dark clouds have gathered above, have opened up and are releasing an insane tropical downpour.
Grabbing my laptop, I scramble under shelter, safe from the pelting rain.
The street quickly fills up with brown, choppy water, as the rain drops become golf-ball sized.
Soon grade 5 rapids gush past, and I half expect the Swiss white-water rafting Olympic team to skim by and flash peace signs, as they do.
My girlfriend Kat calls.
What? You want me to pick you up NOW?
Jumping on my scooter, I pursue the Swiss (actually an old geezer on a moped full of cartoon-faced helium balloons) who's now tangled up with a lady and her lychee-stacked bicycle.
Greasy water laps up around my waist as I ford the river-road, scooping Kat up as I whiz by.
As we float along, I think about how Hanoi is really a ‘City of Scooters’, with literally millions of them clogging the roads.
It's also a city of rain. Lots and lots of tropical rain.
When I moved to Hanoi and was yet to get my motorbike, my workmate, Quang, offered me a lift home.
But Quang is a dwarf. How would his feet reach the motorbike's gears, let alone the ground?
Quang dived into a sea of parked motorbikes and pulled out a modified tricycle. A chariot of sorts with a raised backend - fully pimped out.
Nice.
Bouncing along the road, Quang slid down his wrap-around sunnies, turns the iginition, and we putt putt off into the smoky chaos.
Riding pillion, I had never felt so cool. Easy-rider-style.
I was like some royal doofus being driven through Hanoi’s charming winding alleyways in a fume-belching chariot. We passed Mango Ba my proxy yoda-esque granny. She waved at us with a snagged-tooth smile.
Flash-forward to present:
In the muddy torrent, we almost coagulate with other scooters at the traffic lights. Kat shouts above the deluge that about a month ago we'd be cursing right about now - at the rain, other motorbikes, the roadside muck splashing us straight into our face-holes.
But we don't do that anymore. We are so... well, Zen. Like our fellow scooter-ers, either covered with plastic ponchos or completely drenched. They just do their thing, and never ever... everrrrr complain.
Looking down at the petrol dial, it flicks past the red 'Empty tank' wedge into the white "this-scooter-is-being-powered-on-fumes-alone" territory.
C'est la vie, we agree happy and carefree.
A blue truck rumbles past, splashing us and soaking us to the bone with the city's finest sludge.
"&^I&%##!!! &%%%%$$@!$!!" we shout as one.
Not so Zen after all, I guess.