Grabbing my laptop, I scramble under shelter, safe from the pelting rain.

The street outside quickly fills up with brown, choppy water, as rain drops get bigger and faster. Soon there's a grade 5 river gushing past, and I half expect a yodelling Swiss white-water rafting team to skim by.

My girlfriend Kat calls.

What? You want me to pick you up NOW?

Jumping on my motorbike, 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 really is a ‘City of Scooters’, with literally millions of them clogging the streets. Defying the laws of physics, Hanoians stack everything on their bikes: geese, pigs, kids, concrete piping - a shaky Jenga tower that hopefully won’t choose to fall down when I’m riding along behind.

Scooters are the red-blood cells that oxygenate this living, breathing city, and keeps it going and growing. But none of this would work if it weren’t for one thing.

Zen

Locals move around on their bikes like Jedi Warriors. They shift as one collective body, and if they meet an obstacle, like a giant concrete block that oddly is in the middle of the road, they glide around it like a shoal of herring – the sun reflecting off bright plastic bike casings like off shimmering fish scales.

In the chocolate-coloured torrent, Kat shouts above the deluge that a month ago we'd be cursing right about now - at the rain, other motorbikes, the roadside muck splashing us. 

But we don't do that anymore.

We are so... well, Zen too.

Gazing at the pack of bike-riders hedging us in. We’re all sopping wet. Some wearing rain ponchos. Some not. Some with four generations of family, from youngest to oldest, squeezed onto one Yamaha Wave. Some with only one generation.

And amongst this organised chaos there’s nothing but serenity. Lots of noise, sure, but each face is a perfect picture of composure.

We look down at the petrol dial as it flicks past the red 'Empty tank' wedge, and disappears into the white "I-am-now-being-powered-on-fumes-alone" zone.

Eh - C'est la vie, we agree happy and carefree.

A blocky blue truck rumbles past, splashing us and soaking us to the bone.

"&^I&%##!!!" we shout as one.

Maybe not so Zen after all.

                                                                                                                                                         Joel Katz