Hanoi dispatch

These days, the only basic training you’ll need for a tour in Vietnam is idle curiosity and the simple art of lifting beer glass to face. The only gear: an internet-procured tourist visa, a pair of flip-flops, and a fanny pack stuffed with dong—and with the Vietnamese rate of exchange at approximately 19,500 dong to the dollar, your wallet will be filled with more dong than a Shanghai public urinal.

Here, in disjointed narrative, unverified notes, and hazy recollection is my dispatch from Hanoi:

“Hello, welcome to my hotel!” said a smiling pimply boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Factor in Asian youthful countenance and twenty-one, max. He was waiting for us on a busy street in the old quarter of Hanoi, in front of the Asia Palace, our home for the next four days.

Groggy from the airport and fresh to the country, I took the young man for some sort of Vietnamese hotelier wunderkind. Then the porter came for the bags. “Hello sir, welcome to my hotel!” Only once we got past the doorman and the concierge did we realize that every employee of the Asia Palace—from piss boy to omelette man— thought of it as ‘his’ hotel. So this was what happened, I thought, when the workers took control of the modes of production, put an end to the wage slavery of surplus capitalism, and reclaimed their own labor from its alienated state.

Little else in Hanoi, however, reminded me I was in a communist state. Granted, the light posts on the main highway around town fly the hammer and sickle and Ho Chi Minh keeps benevolent watch over you from atop billboards, in restaurants, and in your wallet. But rapacious capitalism in its myriad brand-names runs rampant on the streets. In fact, everything runs rampant on the Hanoi streets, a tourist site in their own right.

In the center, at least, Hanoi feels like a small city, or more like a frantic town that has been overrun by a two million member motorcycle gang. Perhaps you’ve seen pictures of old Hanoi with women in woven conical hats, wearing long traditional gowns, daintily pedaling bicycles. Well, that image has been swallowed up by the scooter exhaust of modernity. The conical hats can still be seen on laborers and fruit vendors. But the new image of the Hanoi commuter sits astride a shiny red motorbike with the hand permanently engaging the horn, the face obscured by a burberry-patterned cotton surgical mask (for protection from sun, pollution?), and upon the head, instead of a motorcycle helmet, a rakishly donned equestrian helmet, also burberry-patterned.

This image flits before your eyes millions of times a day in Hanoi, always to the sound of blaring horn, and often while you are attempting that most daring and death-defying of feats—crossing the street. But, miraculously, in only four days, parting the sea of motorcycles went from seemingly impossible to second nature. No less miraculous was how the traffic in a city that appeared to be utterly devoid of stop signs, and with only the occasional traffic light, managed not to pile up accident after accident. Americans drive according to abstract principles, while much of the world drives according to the empirical reality of the road. But the empirical reality of Hanoi roads almost defies belief. Fortunately, the sound of a horn arises every fraction of a second to rouse you from your skeptical stupor.

On the taxi ride from the airport, our driver pointed to a policeman on the highway shoulder and said “wrong way,” and then tried to tell us about the problem of wrong-way drivers on the highway. Why do they drive the wrong way, I asked, thinking I was misunderstanding him. “They bad man, sir, I think.” I was left puzzled, until a few minutes later, sure enough, along came a motorcycle on the four lane highway—on the wrong side—going the wrong way—weaving his way through the congested traffic. Bad man, indeed.

Traveling on foot on the sidewalks of the old quarter was no less of an adventure. The narrow sidewalks, when not buried under parked motorcycles, played host to every activity of daily life imaginable, with eating and loitering chief among them. Unlike the old quarters of European cities, Asian ones don’t seem all that old (on account of the high turnover rate of wooden architecture). But, in contrast to the Euro tourist playgrounds of cobblestoned shopping malls and wax museums, they house real people doing real things. In Hanoi, these real people and their doings all occur on the sidewalk at six inches remove from the ground—cooking, laundry, gossip, watching T.V, you name it. Instead of chairs, people sit on what appear to be tiny plastic foot stools. These are expertly designed so that your chin can rest on your knees while your splayed crotch catches the gaze of all passersby. Vietnamese people naturally display more grace in these chairs than your average Westerner with legs and have designed their outdoor kitchens and desks at correspondingly diminutive scale. Despite the danger of catching blowing refuse in the gaping leg holes of your shorts, it’s good fun sitting on the tiny street corner on a tiny foot stool with a small glass of beer on a small table watching the maniac traffic go by.

Which is exactly what we did when we first arrived. Bia Hoi (fresh beer) was apparently introduced by the Czechs in the spirit of cold war camaraderie. It consists of small kegs of unpasteurized beer served cold and watered down in little outdoor stalls all over the city and costs about 8,000 dong (40 odd cents) a glass. It brings much needed relief to the sweltering exhaust-filled streets, which sizzled at over 42 Celsius when we were there.

Even better than Vietnamese beer is Vietnamese food. Our first night for dinner, we went to a tiny restaurant up some rickety wooden steps called Cha Ca La Vong. Like a lot of restaurants in Hanoi, they only make one dish and they do it perfectly. Cha Ca La Vong’s specialty was a sautéed white fish, marinated in turmeric, cooked at your table over a barnacled clay pot filled with hot coals. Once the pan gets going, you dump in a heaping bowl of dill, chives, thai basil, and peanuts, and mix with vermicelli. Rinse with local brew, Beer Hanoi, and repeat. Over the course of an hour long meal, we made a quadruple order.

The next morning, with dill and turmeric oozing from our pores, we paid our respects to Ho Chi Minh. Inside his marble sanctum, sleeping the dreamless sleep of the embalmed, protected by crimson-backed gold star, hammer and sickle, and a cadre of white-uniformed soldiers resembling the humorless stewards of a Caribbean cruise ship, Uncle Ho’s rubbery glowing body rested in an elegant carved wood casket of floating flowers.

The adjacent Ho Chi Minh Museum had some interesting documents and photographs from the leader’s long and dedicated life— from his down-and-out days in Paris and London as a dishwasher to his final years as a national hero against the American imperialists. The exhibit did a good job of convincing me Uncle Ho was a great, perhaps admirable, person. Of course, I had little evidence to consider other than the authoritarian government-sponsored portrait of their patriarch. “If you want to reap the fruits of your labor in ten years,” Ho said, “then plant trees. “If you want to do it in 100 years, cultivate human beings.” Kind of inspiring, kind of scary, depending on your mood. But one thing is indisputable: he had a refined yet austere taste when it came to architecture. Next to the museum was the stilted wooden house Ho lived in during the 50s after getting rid of the French. The house looked like Southeast Asian traditional with a touch of Mies van der Rohe. Certainly, there was a lingering hint of an elegant Parisian aesthete in the Spartan communist.

We ate lunch at a place called Koto—a nonprofit restaurant that provides vocational training in hospitality to Hanoi street kids. It’s a great idea and makes a pleasant lunch feel like a charitable deed. You can tell which of the kids have completed most of their two-year training, as they seem fluid and self-possessed, while the others are still wrestling with the script, battling disorientation and low self-esteem. To see the difference between the two at your table makes you realize what a valuable impact this organization has in these kids’ lives. M. and I felt that their banana, passion fruit, and mint smoothies had an equally valuable impact on our lives.

After lunch, we visited the Temple of Literature, an 11^th century Confucian school for the sons of Chinese Mandarins in then Chinese-controlled northern Vietnam. The grounds were beautiful and shady, with a long pool, flanked by stone turtle seats and bronze cranes leading up to the red lacquered wood temple.

On the way back from the temple, a man stopped me on the street and began pointing and yelling at my shoes. Before I had even broken stride, he grabbed for my shoes and started dabbing glue on them. He was an itinerant shoe cobbler who saw in my tattered shoes a day’s wages. I figured I’d make it easier on both of us by removing my shoes, at which point his partner showed up, gave me a foot stool to sit on and a pair of slippers to wear, and both of them went to town on my shoes. Ten minutes later, I was wearing renovated footwear. He assured me the new soles he glued on would last me at least five years and then demanded I pay him 500,000 dong (about 27 bucks). I told him my shoes hadn’t cost me that much to begin with and told him I would give him 100,000 at most. They looked at me like I was spooning shit into their mouths, so I threw in an extra dollar for their wretchedness. Three days later, my new soles fell off.

The soles of my running shoes almost melted off, too, trying to run in the Hanoian miasma. The city is marked by lakes, which I imagine make for fine oases in more temperate weather. We got up at 5:30 one morning and were at the lake by six for a jog. Already in the weak dawn light, it was like trying to run through gravy. But it was worth the sweat to witness the geriatric carnival around the lake—droves of oldsters engaged in group exercise from tai chi to go-go dancing to vigorous crotch-stretching. They must have been getting ready for a long day of sitting on tiny chairs.

Our eating exploits over the next few days continued to deplete the city. We devoured grilled ostrich and bitter herb, squid with dill, garlic, and Vietnamese celery, deep fried squash, bun cha (a meal of pork meat balls, rice noodles, fried spring rolls, and a colossal mound of raw herbs and greens), snail soup, pho, steamed crab, whole sweet and sour fish, and in a buffet finale, an arsenal of coconut- and taro- based desserts.

Only twice did we turn away from the food in front of us. The first was when we asked our bicycle taxi driver to recommend a restaurant, after the one we tried to go to was closed. Thinking he would take us to a true grit locale where he went to nourish his calf muscles, we were disappointed to arrive at a restaurant with linen table cloths and no people. Not wanting to be rude, we went in and politely pushed around dessicated octopus, raw pork spare ribs, and sliced bitter gourd on a bed of ice—so bitter that you had to immediately stuff the accompanying dried shredded beef into your mouth in order to neutralize your gag reflex. The second time we declined was in an outdoor market, where a woman tried to sell me roast dog head. There, sitting upright on the hot grill staring at me was a small miniature Pinscher-like decapitated dog head.

After a couple days, the streets of Hanoi lost their novelty and began to turn sinister. The heat would not abate. The French quarter, despite an imposing opera house, a haunting cathedral, and sundry other handsome colonial relics, was hot and boring. Unlike in the snaky Old quarter, life withered on its wide Gallic boulevards. Amped on ultra-strong Vietnamese coffee and sweetened condensed milk with sweat gushing down my buttcrack, I seemed to be about three inconveniences and two horn honks away from beating someone senseless. It almost happened when a bicycle taxi driver suddenly doubled his fee after I paid him and refused to make change. Instead, I spent my visit to the Hanoi art museum fantasizing about boxing his ears.

We escaped Hanoi just in time, leaving all the taxi drivers with their hearing intact, for the tranquil waters of Halong Bay. A few hours outside of the city, we boarded a wooden junk for a three day cruise along the bay, one of the most gorgeous places I’ve seen, with turquoise waters, green-topped karsts, and sea caves. We spent our days kayaking, swimming, squid-fishing, and enjoying the company of our fellow cruisers—an improbably wonderful assortment of American teachers and writers, Australian doctors and dancers, and Catalan economists. At last, in the vacation we had taken from our vacation, which itself was a vacation from our original vacation, we felt like we were truly on vacation. The days dissolved into the warm waters of the bay.

Epilogue: a week after we left Vietnam, a monster typhoon wracked the northern Vietnamese coast right at Halong Bay, killing many people.