Day 23 - Hanoi, Vietnam

Day 23 – Hers

Another interesting take on the hotel breakfast – this morning I had vegetables, fried rice, crème brulee, lemon juice and spring rolls with my eggs and bacon – and we were off to explore Hanoi. We walked along the banks of the West Lake, skirting the parked scooters and impromptu cafes set up on the pavement – illegally there, apparently, as they quickly packed everything up and moved it all across the road when a police van went by.... – and shaking our heads at the women with baskets of exotic fruits hanging from poles over their shoulders. “ Bananas?” they would ask – “No, thank you.”  They didn’t even ask us about the other fruits – maybe they don’t know what they are either.... Invariably, the woman would then motion that she could put the pole on my shoulder for a photo.  “No, thank you,” we repeated, and walked on. 

We visited Ho Chi Min’s palace and mausoleum, the One-pillar Temple and looked over the wall at several other temples not named in our guidebook.  The guards around the Presidential Palace pointed tourists- quite a few Europeans, many more than in China - in the right direction when they weren’t sure and blew their whistles if anyone stepped over the painted line indicating the restricted area.  We visited the Confucian Temple of Literature and University – founded in the 11^th century and restored and extended in 2000 by the US Indochina Reconciliation initiative (I suspect it may have suffered some damage being right in the middle of Hanoi.) – and listened to some traditional music in one of the courtyard buildings.

We strolled through parks and along busy streets – playing dodgems with the scooters every time we had to cross a road – often walking in the road as the pavements are used as additional shop areas, parking areas and, where there’s a gap, as roads.  On one street, cockerels had been tied to trees – perhaps in preparation for a cock fight later? On another, groups of people picnicked outside the gates of some official-looking building.  Nearer to our hotel, back in the Old Quarter, each street has a preponderance of one kind of shop – clothes, leather goods, sweets, scooter tires, etc.  – and the indoor market  in the centre has it all – piled so high and so close together that it was difficult to negotiate the aisles.  We had obviously arrived at lunchtime.  Shopkeepers ate their rice or noodles while sitting on little blue plastic stools in what aisles there were;  the protocol apparently is to just step over them.

It is actually quite different here to China.  The people seem less open, more guardedly courteous and there is an undercurrent of danger that we never felt in China – but perhaps that is just the constant fear of being mown down by a scooter.  They also don’t carry umbrellas.... In China, nearly every woman had an umbrella to use as a parasol on sunny days.  Here, the women wear facemasks against the pollution and hats.  I say ‘hats’, but to get it right, your hat must look as much like a lampshade as possible.  We did see a bit of this in China – on the last day in Shanghai, we passed a woman who I am sure must have dressed in the dark, donning her colourful bedside lampshade instead of her hat by mistake, but it is much more common here.

 

Day 23 - His

Patti mentioned the scooters and she is right there are hundreds of them. To imagine what it is like think of yourself standing in a cross roads and all around there is a swarm of people sized bees that can only move backwards and forwards. Then, as if someone blows a whistle, imagine that they rush towards each other from all four points of the compass and madly pass each other at 30 miles an hour and you are standing in the middle of it. Then think of this going on for hours and hours – if you do this you will have some idea of what the street traffic in Hanoi is like. China was crazy but this is pure insanity on two wheels. It never ends and to cross the street the only option you have is live a life where you never leave the block you are on or step into the mad swarm of bees and hope you don’t get hit. We’ve been doing it all day and it gets a little tiring. The only relief was to see we were slightly better at it than other terrified newly arrived tourists that we saw dashing across in little huddled groups. The sidewalks are an adventure in themselves. What isn’t covered in parked cars, motor bikes, impromptu cafes, moving traffic and people just sitting is taken up by shops and tiny outdoor businesses. The tiny outdoor businesses consist of people who load all they need to carry out their trade onto a bicycle and push it to a vacant part of the sidewalk. Here they tip out their tools and get on with whatever job they do. There is cycle repair, body shops, foot massage and barbers – I was offered two haircuts, even though I think I am looking quite stylish at the moment – obviously not.

The city is much more human in its scale. The tallest tower block we have seen is about 15 floors – quite different from the 50+ floor behemoths that inhabit large Chinese cities – and there aren’t that many of them. The streets themselves are lined with crumbling French influenced town houses that are more thin than they are deep and all the streets are very similar. This isn’t a problem to navigate though. All you really need is a better than average map, a good sense of direction (or a compass) and enough bravery to cross the roads and you should be fine.

 Our five hour walk around the city took in the major sights which are compacted into a relatively tiny area and if you plan to spend more than a few days here it’s probably for the night life which, as far as I can make out, consists of Karaoke bars and foot massages – though we did come across the Playboy Club as an alternative. Karaoke is enormously popular here. We are due to meet the new group at 6 – in about half an hour – and if they suggest Karaoke as a thing to do I am going to cry.

 Well, it wasn’t karaoke – we went for dinner in a typical Vietnamese restaurant designed for European tourists to try the speciality of Hanoi, which is some kind of fish thing served in a pan on a bucket of hot coals. It was all too Disneyland for me so I ordered fried noodles. Personally I would have preferred to eat in a street restaurant – but ah well – I guess you have to do these things sometimes. In this way group trips are a little like marriage a degree of flexibility is called for. The guys in the group are an eclectic lot including a retired guy from England – who is travelling to make up for lost time, a girl from California and a down to earth Aussie girl whose parents are Brits.

 Peter is 65 and has swollen feet so we took a taxi to the restaurant and he took a taxi back but we walked – it was only 20 minutes and the route back was along the same market street we had walked this morning. The market was actually very different in the night. They closed the roads to traffic and filled the centre of the road with stalls so it was even more crowded than before – one thing the Vietnamese seem to know how to do well and that’s crowds. Tomorrow we set off for the coast and we will be on the boat or travelling by train for a while so we are going to be out of touch but – hey ho – we’ll upload everything in a couple of days!