Hanoi

hanoi

A very important purchase

Water  puppets!

Snacking like a Hanoian: Lemon iced tea and sunflower seeds on the sidewalk

The gothic St. Joseph's Cathedral

Discovering milk apples at Hoan Kiem Lake

Hanoi is an immediately likeable city.  The Old Quarter is a fun and easy area to explore, where the small streets and alleys are named after the products that were sold there by the medieval guilds (P Hang Gai, for example, translates to "Silk Street").  Shops have diversified somewhat, but you can still walk for blocks down a main road and find only rows of hat shops, or vase shops, or silk dress shops, etc.  Hanoi sidewalks are used for everything but walking.  Hanoians cook, sit and drink, repair shoes, cut keys, play badminton, and sell produce and bread on the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians out to the street to contend with the over two million zooming motorbikes.  A small two lane street might have ten "lanes" of motorbikes navigating around each other.  How do you cross a street where the traffic never lets up?  The best strategy is to very slowly step out into the street and just keep walking.  The stream of motorbikes break around you, and as long as you keep walking and do not make any sudden movements, they will compensate for you.  It is terrifying at first, but once you get the hang of it, you feel a bit like Moses.

Our time in Hanoi was divided into two main segments: the hour we spent attending the Municipal Water Puppet Theatre, and the steady and endless emotional let-down of the days that followed.  The art of water puppetry originated over one thousand years ago in the flooded rice fields of the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam.  Farmers carved the puppets from water-resistant timber, creating miniatures of themselves, animals from their work and leisure (water buffalo and fish), and mythical creatures such as the dragon and unicorn.  Traditionally, the skills to operate the puppets were only passed down from father to son out of fear that daughters would learn the secrets and then share them with the males of the family they married into.  In our urban performance, eleven puppeteers stood out of site in waste-deep water behind a bamboo screen where they controlled the performance.  The murky water on stage obscured the puppet-operating equipment below, so in our darkened theater it appeared that the water puppets were standing on or swimming in the water independently.  A ten-plus musical ensemble performed the soundtrack (a great performance in itself) and we were transported.  We howled with delight as a fisherman puppet battled with his catch, eventually being pulled into the water to swim alongside it, as a young male puppet struggled to climb a coconut tree to spy on the village girls bathing in the river, and as a carp magically transformed into a dragon, leaving the water and flying around the theater while breathing fire.  It was graceful and hilarious.  We'll see it again in Saigon.

Cat Ba Island - Lan Ha Bay - Halong Bay

cat ba

Avoiding rabies on Monkey Island

Cat Ba fish market

 

A small clam farm

Halong Bay is the largest tourist attraction in the Northeast of Vietnam, with crowds of day and overnight visitors leaving from Hanoi every morning.  Lan Ha Bay is farther south, and is therefore less accessible to and mostly forgotten by the larger tour groups.  We went big and chartered a private boat to take us on a two day, overnight adventure leaving from Cat Ba Island.  Neither Christina nor our two Vietnamese sailors would address me as the preferred "Skipper Pete." Missed opportunities.

Approaching the bays, you sail toward what appears to be a body of water completely enclosed by a range of mountains.  But as you get closer, the fog reveals the mountains to be at varying distances, and the range to actually be over two thousand dark islands rising independently out of the Gulf of Tonkin.  Separating the peaks are channels of calm water, while grottoes, carved out by time, wind, and waves, dot the floors of the islands.  Primed for exploration, we left our boat by kayak, and followed the maze of passes and caves to private lakes, swinging monkeys, and enormous karst amphitheaters that reflected and amplified our voices and primate calls through the uninhabited jungle.

The weather was frigid, cloudy, and often drizzling, which contributed to the mysterious air of the bays.  We stayed warm on the deck of the ship under a pile of heavy blankets, and escaped to our cabin when things got too wet.  Our tasty meals were cooked for us onboard and presented as a great banquet on the deck, a mix of vegetables, fried treats, rice, and fresh seafood (the stir fried baby squid and pineapple was a surprise hit).

Hundreds of people live scattered throughout the bays on small floating houses.  They farm shellfish for Cat Ba and the mainland, run boating operations, and spend time with the two or three dogs that protect their isolated property, from European scuba diving thieves I imagine.  We docked at one such home, friends of our captains, where we were graciously welcomed to drink homemade rice whisky and sing and dance karaoke.  More Vietnamese poured in, and we had a party, one of the most fun I've been to.  Christina and I struggled to guess melodies for some obscure American folk songs which were selected for us, before we sang a powerful rendition of "Boys Don't Cry," which did actually make a small Chinese boy cry.

Tears mean bedtime.  We slept anchored and alone in the middle of the bay.  Somewhere beyond the fog there were stars.

Entering Vietnam

tet

Imperial Pert Plus

Trang An

Hoa Lu

Our first week in Vietnam left us somewhere near culture-shocked.  The northern cities are louder, more aggressive, less patient, and less English-friendly than anywhere we've visited, and we were over-charged, given the wrong change (you'll be missing a few zeroes on your notes if you don't look), or plainly rejected service with regularity.  And while it is not the wet season, there is a constant thick fog settled above.  This is not high cloud in the sky: there is no sky.  What can you do but sleep, eat, and drink coffee?  Except the coffee, which I was really looking forward to (it only seemed to get better the farther north we traveled) has this bizarre and overpowering alcoholic twang to it.  Worse still, the food in the north is horrible.  We were warned by a chef in Luang Prabang, but I didn't believe him.  This is Asia, I thought, how bad could the food be?  Really bad it turns out!  One of the great joys of our time in Laos and Thailand, our mealtimes turned into sources of stress and pain.  We regularly paid two to three times more money for bland food that invariably had pork hidden in it somewhere.  (Not eating pork is my dietary thing, and I can't explain myself in Vietnamese, so who am I to get upset about the food I've ordered?  I know this.  But after several meals of surprise-pork, Christina and I took the time to write out careful instructions in Vietnamese.  "I am vegetarian.  Can I get this without meat?"  What arrived was our exact order plus a towering mound of ungarnished pork in a bowl.  It was the most expensive meal we had.)

To be fair, the first cities we saw in Vietnam, Than Hoa, Ninh Binh, and Hai Phong, are not known for their tourist attractions, or even for being pleasant.  And it wasn't all bad.  We visited Hoa Lu, the ruined capital of 10th century Vietnam.  And we took a private rowboat tour through the Trang An Grottoes outside Ninh Binh city, gently paddling through the limestone ranges, caves, and rivers that inspired the Vietnamese government to pour so much money into its tourism development.  From Hai Phong we caught a hydrofoil to Cat Ba Island.  I think we both secretly felt compelled to cut our losses and catch the train to the sunshine, cuisine, and culture of the south, but Christina had a package arriving in Hanoi nine days later, so first this.

Vieng Xai

stone

The cave network is buried under limestone karsts

A garden outside the caves

Politburo meeting table

The bombing fields

An unexpected bedroom guest!

Failing to trap him in a cheese container.  We did not represent the USA well when we required a twelve year old Lao boy to come in and kill it for us.

The remote and beautiful Vieng Xai was sparsely populated before 1964, when the Pathet Lao (the revolutionary communist party in Laos) made the city its political headquarters.  Vieng Xai was an attractive center not only for its proximity to North Vietnamese support, but for the geological features that would help the movement outlast U.S. bombing.  From 1964 until 1973, over two million tons of ordnance were dropped on Laos, more tonnage of bombs than fell on Europe during World War Two.  Laos is, per capita, the most heavily bombed country in history.

Underneath the limestone karsts which compose the Vieng Xai scenery is a series interconnecting caves, chambers, and man-made tunnels.  The Pathet Lao sought refuge from U.S. bombers inside the caves, and there they directed the war against the Royal Lao Army in the south and against the U.S. in the air above.  Hidden behind thick blast walls were the military high command, a small hospital cave, a factory for sewing clothing, a large theater, an artillery cave, and, in the large Khamtay Siphandone and Xanglot caves, the barracks.  A water and drainage infrastructure made the caves habitable for the 2000 staff and soldiers that lived therein.  An air filtration machine had to be operated by hand to bring fresh air into the caves through meters of limestone, while natural spring water dripped continuously through the rocks, providing fresh water.

The caves were our reward for venturing so far off the worn path.  There may have only been six other tourists in town.  The caves are scattered about, so we travelled by bicycle to see as much as we could in an afternoon.  We were accompanied by a guide, though she did not speak English.  But we did have personal audio players, which had corresponding tracks for each site we visited.  In addition to the historical narrative, backed by music and sound effects, the guides featured first hand accounts of surviving Pathet Lao (translated to English, though you could hear the original voice behind the dubbing).  The accounts were alternately humorous, uplifting, and upsetting.  Hearing a night-watchmen describe how to spot incoming bombers, and what actions he took during an attack, while looking out from his post at the mountains from which an attack might arrive, set a powerful scene.  And some details were downright amazing: that there "were so many tigers outside the caves at night that you didn't know one was near until you stepped on it;" that all white chickens and ducks had to be slaughtered, because it was the light-colored fowl that bombers were trained to target.  These voices paired with the atmospheric and fascinating cave environments brought us intimately close to, what is to us, a distant past.  I wouldn't be this excited about an audio tour if it weren't really, really well done!

Without passing judgment on the politics of the war, I'll say that the contrast between the poverty of Laos and the military might that fell upon it is incredible to me.

Nearly as memorable in Vieng Xai, oddly enough, was the Indian food at the small (a box room with a kitchen and four plastic tables) restaurant Sabaidee Odisha.  The young owner Prakash migrated from eastern India to work in the Lao mines for three years, and he set up his kitchen on his way out.  For our inaugural dinner (we ate with him every meal we had in town), we placed a long order and drank a beer before we watched him disappear on a motorbike down the main street.  Confused and hungry - had we been betrayed? -, we sat anxiously in the empty room until he returned a half hour later with a bag of groceries he purchased from the outdoor market.  Relief.  Ultimately, our final plate arrived over four and a half hours later!  But once we adjusted our time expectations, this became part of his charm.  And what else can you do in silent Vieng Xai at night?  For three nights we waited and watched Bollywood movies (SINGHAM!), warmed by the small wood burning stove set at our feet (so far north it is actually cold during the winter), while Prakash prepared, sometimes with the encouragement of his mining buddies, what was easily the best Indian food I've ever had.  It was so far beyond any Indian food I've had elsewhere, I don't know what to say.  He is also just unbelievably nice.  He is moving back to India, partly, because he receives only a few customers a week in such geographic isolation.  How fortunate we were to catch him!  He deserves a statue, but this is my internet tribute.