March 10 2007 Hanoi and Halong Bay Vietnam

Hanoi March 9 07

Well I knew there had to be a reason that I’ve never heard a single bad thing about Hanoi. Hanoi is a trip! Its millions of motorbikes zipping around crazily. Its tiny streets in the Old Quarter with every imaginable item for sale, each item having its own street. Its beautiful faded French colonial buildings and very Asian vegetables being sold in small piles on the streets. It’s a incongruous, dirty cathedral, surrounded by beggars, and old ladies in coolie hats, and young men selling postcards. It’s walking past an old gate and seeing a grand yellow mansion, with an even grander banyan tree growing next to it. Its tiny Buddhist temples and French cafes selling Vietnamese noodle bowls, and baguettes. It’s TOTALLY cool!!!

We arrived here this morning and checked into our hotel. Vietnam is really cheap so we are indulging ourselves. We had a limo pick us up at the airport. We’re staying at the Sofetel Metropole, an elegant 5 star hotel, that could be somewhere in Paris. This afternoon, while Lee took a nap I wandered around the hotel and found a peaceful bar in their outside courtyard. It’s chilly here today so the bar had bamboo curtains down and heaters on. I read my New Yorker and drank a glass of white wine and felt very quiet and happy.

We’re kind of clueless of course. It’s funny, because I live in a foreign country that is a major tourist destination, I’ve become used to seeing tourists on the streets of Hong Kong. I’ve started to feel superior to these poor shmucks staring at their maps and guidebooks on a corner in downtown Central, while I confidently stride along to the wet market to buy my flowers. But here I am in Hanoi and of course I’m the one staring at the map and the street signs trying to figure out where I am! Serves me right.

Crossing the street here can be pretty scary. It’s more or less no-holds-barred, but once again my well-traveled husband has come to the rescue. “Oh it’s just like China” Lee blithely declares, and strides across the street, sidestepping the motorbikes as they weave in and out of traffic, with me clinging tightly to his jacket. “Hold the jacket, not my skin please” he admonished me at one point. At another I got stuck in the middle of the street and just shut my eyes as the motorbikes whirled around me. I opened them and made it to the other side, and smiled sheepishly at the young guy that was trying hard not to laugh at me. By the end of the afternoon I was doing much better, but I still have a tendency not to look at all the traffic and hope for the best as I cross the street. Lee says that’s not a good idea. He’s probably right!

The only thing we saw today that was a reminder of the war we fought against this country were some silver cigarette lighters in one of the shops. They had strange quotes in English on them and they had obviously at some point belonged to American servicemen. The one that really struck us said “If I had a farm in Vietnam and a home in hell, I’d sell the farm and go home”. Whew…I wondered aloud where they came from. I was thinking maybe POW’s, but Lee said they could have gotten them off dead bodies too. God.

Hanoi March 10^th and 11^th

We’ve spent the last two days being Hanoi tourists. We’ve had our own car, driver and guide, which have made seeing the major tourist destinations in this city easy. Yesterday morning we went to see the Temple of Literature and Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum, house and museum. The Temple of Literature is an old Confucian temple. Vietnam has a heavy Chinese influence and the Chinese had actually conquered this country for several centuries. They instituted a Mandarin-like set of laws where the most intelligent people were sent by their villages to take very difficult tests in order to become doctors and lawyers. This temple was dedicated to the people that succeeded at passing these exams. But Vietnam also has a lot of indigenous tribes that have kept their traditions and identity, and this has also been incorporated into the overall culture. So, the scholars were also honored by having their names inscribed on tablets. The tablets were balanced on large stone turtles. The turtles are important creatures in Vietnam mythology, so you run into stone turtles all over the place. You also see crane-like stone birds that they call phoenixes. Our guide said the turtles and the cranes represent yin and yang – earth and sky, fire and water. The Vietnamese also seem to revere water. So in all the town centers and at all the temples you find these stone ponds with water-lilies growing in them.

It’s not like Japan, where everything is so beautifully preserved. It’s not like China (or Hong Kong anyway) where the temples are obviously still in use and an active part of everyday life (hey if they weren’t used in a Chinese culture they’d probably tear them down!). The temples in Hanoi look tired and worn, old and war-torn, genteel and shabby. They seem beloved, but the poverty of the over-all society and the tumult of the last century have taken their toll.

The second place we went, Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum was just SO odd. Its one of those “gotta see it” tourist destinations in this city, but it was so peculiar that I just haven’t figured out how to process it. His very well-preserved body is kept in a glass case in a chilly stone crypt on a huge empty piece of land. It was a blast of the past…kind of reminded me of Soviet propaganda films from the 1950’s. It also, more than anything reminded me of the little pope-mummy we saw at the Vatican when we were in Rome. At least with the pope we didn’t know what we were about to see; we just got in a line with a bunch of tiny Italian ladies and eventually ended up looking at a dead body. Here we purposefully got in line to see this dead guy. Oh well…

On the adjoining grounds they have a pretty nice exhibition showing his house, his pond, his garden, etc. It really was like going to any historical monument, only this one happened to be in Vietnam. You want to know the most exciting thing about this whole experience…I ended up peeing in a WC that was definitely the most primitive one I’ve run into in Asia yet. Well, and actually there was a regular toilet, which I stood in line to use, but I also had the option of standing on some bricks right out in the open and peeing that way. I didn’t even know what the little area with the bricks WAS until I saw some Vietnamese ladies using it. Ah….

After an excellent Vietnamese lunch we went to the museum of Vietnamese Ethnology. It was about all the different people that have lived in the Vietnam over the centuries. It showed the different languages groups, where they had migrated from and where they have settled. Then it told you something about all the major tribes. It was a well-done museum, but pretty extensive and by 3 pm we were definitely fading. We had a 4 pm reservation at the water puppet theatre, so we collapsed at the hotel for about a ½ hour and then trekked out once again.

The water puppets are a Vietnam tradition. They are basically a puppet theatre on water. The guys that operate the puppets hide behind a curtain and manipulate the puppets as they fish, swim, travel to school, fight tigers, hold boat races and dance, all on the water. The puppets are beautiful and they are accompanied by traditional Vietnamese music. But it was obviously a tourist thing. The audience was all westerners (or Japanese). I asked our guide about that. He said the Vietnamese like the water puppets, but they like it when the theatre is performed on real water, on a lake. It would be neat to see something like that, but those performances are only held in the summer.

Last night we tried a French restaurant. We really should know better….although Hanoi has beautiful old French colonial buildings and lots of French tourists the French bistros in Hong Kong are better than the restaurant we went to last night. We decided to stick to Vietnamese food for the duration.

Today we visited a couple of the craft villages outside of Hanoi. It’s kind of hard to explain. The villages didn’t really adhere to what I thought a “village” would be. They were more like Hanoi suburbs, although they had their own little village center (with a stone pond and a temple). In the morning we went to a silk village. We saw a demonstration of silk weaving that was fascinating. We also gazed at some sweet potatoes in a basket and they were immediately offered to us. Lee was like “oh Lynn loves sweet potatoes” but I didn’t really want to eat it. We had to politely take some bites though. I felt bad eating their food when I didn’t even really want it. I kept handing it back to Lee so he ended up eating most of it, and he doesn’t even LIKE sweet potatoes. It was an unfortunately embarrassing situation. We wandered around the village looking at silk cloth and various products. Some of it was actually made there, but a lot of it was stuff you see all over Hong Kong - pashminas, silk Chinese shirts and robes, embroidered purses, etc. I did buy a silk shawl that our guide said was in the style of one of the hill tribes (white Thai I think). It’s pretty, and different from other things I’ve seen. It looked a little like some of the stuff we saw at the museum yesterday.

Our guide, figuring out that we like native food more than anything, took us to a really cool local Vietnamese restaurant for lunch. He showed us what to order. We were the only westerners in there, and we were given a place of honor on a chilly balcony by ourselves. The food was great – a spicy salad and a bowl of grilled pork, broth and noodles. I had a diet coke, but Lee had a Vietnamese beer and our guide had iced coffee.

In the afternoon we went to the pottery village. Again we got to see a cottage industry factory where they were painting ceramic pots and then we wandered around the village looking at the wares in the various shops. We did buy one bowl, but mostly so we could at least say we bought something there. Our guide made a joke…he said that they stuff there all had an “MS” degree – “More of the Same”. Haha…cute.   

Halong Bay March 12, 2007

We left Hanoi this morning around 8:30 AM, and drove for over 3 hours to reach Halong Bay around noon. As much as we have enjoyed Vietnam, the weather has been terrible. Each day the weather forecast has been for cloudy weather with highs in the 80’s. Each day has turned out to be rainy, misty, with highs in the 60’s if that. Today was no exception. The drive to Halong Bay was like an extended version of Hanoi, with rice paddies and occasional mountainous clumps in-between the modern version of a Vietnam village. Forget those images you’ve seen of thatched roofs and jungle, at least in this part of the country. According to the guidebook, over 5,000 North Vietnam villages were totally destroyed in the war, and it shows. A village around here means a cluster of concrete buildings lining a paved highway with crazy traffic consisting of buses, trucks, the occasional private car, motorbikes whizzing between the other vehicles, laden with all sorts of goods, and bicycles laden with even more people and goods of all shapes and sizes.

The village dwellings are at least 3 stories tall, and very narrow. They are painted cheerful colors, with ornate balconies and beautiful wooden shutters and doors on the front. Sometimes they are connected and sit in a row along the main road. Sometimes they stand, like a sentinel, in the middle of a field. Our guide yesterday said that people scrimp and save to build their houses and that it can take a number of years to acquire enough money to finish it. He said that at least in Hanoi extended families don’t live together anymore. Young people get married and go out on their own, but stay close to where their parents live.

These houses look like a Vietnamese fantasy of what suburbia should be like, but they are often set next to a rice paddy, or fish farm. Water buffalo roam about nearby, and it’s likely that a woman with a fruit stand is sitting by the roadside, gesturing at the traffic and encouraging it to stop.

The thing that went through my head off and on all day long was “what am I seeing?” Is this extreme poverty - the mud, the scraggly dogs, the piles of garbage, and the beggars? Is this a country on the rise - the little towering houses, the road-side enterprises, the huge factories with well-fed workers emerging from their gates, the happy kids in matching wind-breakers riding bicycles home for lunch at noon? Is this some crazy culture that I don’t know and could never understand where everyone is moving somewhere all the time, on a motorbike, bicycle, bus or truck? What is this? I am fascinated by this country, but why? Is it the history we have with them? They are so intertwined in my growing-up experiences. I went to anti-war protests about this place. I watched the Deer Hunter, and wept. I watched Apocalypse Now, and shuddered. So here I am, and its nothing like my imagination thought it would be, and it’s everything I thought it would be, and more. What am I seeing?

Halong Bay is supposed to really be beautiful. I think it is, but for us it’s mostly misty and mysterious-looking. Think the little island bumps of Phuket meet the Pacific Northwest. We could be on a lake in Scotland and the Loch Ness monster could arise in-between one of these little islands, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all.

We are traveling around on a replica of a French steamer from the 1890’s. The rooms are charming, and the bar, with its rattan chairs would be fantastic if things weren’t so wet. We tried sitting at one of the rattan tables, but soon retreated to the bar itself, where things were a little dryer. I didn’t mind. I could see the islands and the mist, sip on my gin and tonic, nibble on nuts and read my New Yorker. I could be Graham Greene, maybe.

We stopped earlier this afternoon to visit a very large cave on one of the islands. We were accosted by begging people in boats. “One dollar mister, one dollar!” those of us that had read the guidebooks resisted the fake-sad faces of the kids. We made a donation to Smile Vietnam, an organization that provides surgery for facial deformities for Vietnam children instead. But some people did give them money, which just perpetuates the problem. And you can’t blame them; if it’s a profitable enterprise, why not?

It’s fun at lunch and dinner to talk to our fellow-passengers. French, Japanese (can’t talk to them, oh well, although they have their own private interpreter), Belgium, Canadian, Iceland. No other Americans, except one couple we met that currently live in Beijing. Is this too strange of a destination yet for Americans or is it just too far? The Canadians were from Alberta; the man had worked extensively in Asia and the Middle-East and they were on a two month trek. The Europeans all speak at least two or more languages. The French are obviously attempting to rediscover their lost colonial glory. I guess most Americans wouldn’t know what they were doing here. It’s great though; I want to come back. And why not? Less than a two hour flight from Hong Kong, so many diverse places to explore, and I feel strangely connected to this place. I guess I have something to work through here. It’s just another country, exotic, interesting, but particularly special, to me.