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VIETNAM
HANOI :: South to North
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Vietnam Page 1: Hanoi
Hanoi was the first stop on our Hong Kong to Sydney odyssey. We visited for about a week in April 2002. Deb had travelled in Vietnam before (and she covers a couple of the same sights on that page); this was George's first time there.
Green rice paddies being tended with hand tools, water buffaloes drawing plows and wallowing in the ditches, small women in conical hats and flowing white dress riding bicycles along the raised footpaths. And that's just the view from the airport-to-city taxi.
Hanoi city
Hanoi is a fading beauty - the old French colonial mansions are getting run down, the busy streets are full of more noisy, polluting mopeds than bicycles and pushcarts, and increasing tourism has brought all of its usual mixed blessings to town - but it's still got a lot of charisma.
Our package deal landed us in one of those mixed blessings - a big new hotel with Western amenities and Communist charm. After the required two nights we moved to an older hotel which was both cheaper and quirkier.
We also got a half-day city tour in our package, and after a bit of miscommunication hooked up with our guide and visited the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and its surroundings. Well, we didn't actually go into the mausoleum, because (a) there was a Disneyworld-length line outside and (b) we find rather creepy the Communist tendency to turn Dear Departed Leaders into tourist traps. Our guide mentioned that it was pretty much a required field trip for primary school kids, which sort of puts the "no dead bodies" field trips from our school days into perspective. Anyhow, we walked around the rest of the area, which includes Uncle Ho's traditional-style home and the Presidential Palace(?) which was left over from French colonial times and used for official functions by Ho. Surprisingly, both buildings escaped the war without being bombed. The details about Ho and his lifestyle were actually pretty interesting, though obviously from a biased source - it would be interesting to read a detailed comparison of Ho and Mao. One other amusing tidbit from our guide, in response to our mention that there were a lot of Chinese tourists around: "I ...[pause as he searches for the right word]... hate them." We spent the next few minutes exchanging "obnoxious Chinese tourist" and "rude Hongkonger" stories.
Across town, the Temple of Literature is, in a lot of ways, the opposite of the mausoleum: old, traditional, understated. And dedicated to knowledge rather than a personality cult. It's a relic from the days when the Vietnamese equivalent of Mandarins came here to be educated in the hopes of earning a place in the bureaucracy - not so much a temple as a college. Some of the old markers are still present commemorating the students' achievements. The temple is a little island of quiet contemplation situated smack in the middle of the city. It seemed like a fitting place to help our guide with some English homework that he'd brought along to ask us some questions about (pretty tricky stuff, by the way; it's a bit worrisome that Vietnamese kids may get a better grounding in English than many American kids do).
In the evening, the must-do thing in Hanoi is a visit to the water puppet theater. The live music (CD included), finely-crafted puppets, and folk tales with a touch of humor (in Vietnamese, but you get the gist) make it well worthwhile. And you have to love the obvious enthusiasm of the puppeteers, who must get tired of doing this show several times every day.
There's a lot of art and theater and cultural shows to be seen in Hanoi. We visited the cultural museum on our half-day tour (displays on traditional housing and crafts of various indigenous ethnic groups such as the Hmong), and on another day stopped into the art museum which had a good assortment of paintings and sculptures from all periods of Vietnamese history. We also spent some time wandering around the local art galleries, noting that 5 or 6 of the best-known artists dominate the offerings. We don't know all their names, but they had themes, so we called them "monochrome guy", "white-dress-women guy" , and so on. We even bought a couple of paintings (which happened to be by the one artist whose name we bothered to remember). After the extended negotiations were finished, one of the staff drove George back to the hotel to grab a credit card. On a scooter. Eeesh. The insane traffic is no less scary from the back of a motorbike, that much is certain.
In the evenings, we tried a couple of good local restaurants, including Indochine, which (despite the less-than-unique name) has converted an old colonial house into a restaurant with good atmosphere and very tasty food. The sugarcane prawns and the tamarind prawns were particular favorites.
Perfume Pagoda
Our first trip out of Hanoi took us on a tour to the famous Perfume Pagoda, a major draw for tourists and pilgrims alike.
The highways in this country are capital-S Scary. Not so much because the roads are bad, but because the traffic is a bizarre cocktail of death on wheels. Imagine a two lane road with narrow shoulders. Cars travel in each direction at high speed, sometimes risking a passing maneuver, but there aren't very many cars, so so far so good. There are a lot of mopeds and scooters and motorcycles, all moving at different speeds and passing each other willy-nilly, but at least there's the shoulder so the slower ones can move toward the sides. Except that the shoulder is taken up by tractors, bicyclists, and the occasional water buffalo. And then there are the many heavy vehicles, trucks and buses and the like. Guess where they go? Yep, smack down the middle, because it's the only place left after all the smaller stuff squeezes down each side of the road. So the thought process while looking out the front of the bus is something like, "whoa, almost creamed that cyclist...water buffaloes are funny...hmm, not sure we're going to make it around this car before that big semi AAAHHH OH MY GOD didyouseethat he missed us by maybe an inch oh man we're all gonna die hey is that girl in the front seat crying or throwing up?". Repeat periodically for approximately two hours.
Once off the highway, you're into a small village where you pay local women to ferry you upriver in a small boat. There seems to be no land access to the temple area, so this is the way everyone goes, whether they're Vietnamese, tourists, or Vietnamese tourists (there was an elderly guy from HCM City on our tour). There's a bizarre flotilla of little boats constantly plying the river, like a long string of ducklings. As a bonus, there's some lovely scenery along the river. The only drawback is feeling a tad guilty that a little middle-aged lady is working her buns off to scull you upriver.
Once the boat docked, we enjoyed a nice long hot hike up the mountain towards the Pagoda. All along the way are little stands with trinkets, refreshments, religious items, etc. We aren't sure exactly what we were expecting the Pagoda to look like, probably something like the little temple complex that sits about halfway up the mountain. In fact, it is a giant cavern. A long stair leads down into the mouth of the cavern, and little altars are scattered through the cave as you make your way into it. There's a fair amount of smoke in the air from incense and candles, and a constant subdued chatter from hundreds of people echoes off the walls. It's not quite like anything we've seen before.
Hoa Lu
Hoa Lu was the seat of the first Vietnamese emperor. Some ruins still remain, scattered around what is now an unassuming farming village. There are some interesting archeological tidbits, and the guide can tell you more than you want to know about early Vietnamese history, but the landscape alone is enough to make the trip worthwhile.
Tam Coc
Tam Coc means "three caves", and this place is famous for the way the local river meanders straight through three of the local hills, creating big, low-headroom caves underneath them. The setup is similar to the Perfume Pagoda in that tourists are taken upriver in small boats, the difference being that instead of having a destination, the boat trip is the tour.
The caves were interesting, and the rice paddies and mountains were their usual striking selves. And there was the occasional odd sight like the giant dragon statue snaking along the edge of a ridge far above the river, or the great squarish hole cut into the side of a towering cliff (a mine? a natural cave? an orc lair seemed the most likely explanation but we doubt there are any in Vietnam). Tam Coc was also where we glimpsed the only interesting wildlife of the trip - a hummingbird and a mountain goat (who knew? maybe we were too hasty about the orcs).
Our guide was a nice lady who did her best to make conversation with us. We got through on a combination of her very basic English and our even worse French. There was a nasty turn near the end when she took the opportunity to hard-sell her knitted wares to her captive audience (apparently they all do this, it's just the local revenue-boosting gimmick). (Yes, we did eventually succumb, but only because she showed us something we wanted.)
The verdict
We'd recommend Hanoi in a second - good food, cool urban bits, fantastic rural scenery, friendly people, interesting history. No trouble being American. Stuff to be aware of: hazardous traffic, omnipresent street vendors, potentially nasty weather and bugs, non-tour sightseeing can be limited.
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