I ride a G S scooter with my hair cut neat

N 21 02.238 E 105 50.913 13m - Hanoi - 30 November 2008

Ok, more recent pictures now too. Finished uploading this directory which starts with our near Tibet birding trip, and this which starts with the end of Kunming and our journey out of China and into Vietnam, and here which has the end of Sapa, Vietnam and down to Hanoi.

And I've sort of updated the route map (it does seem to be off, like everything is skewing too far south, I'll have to correct it later). Strange looking at that map, we seem to have covered the majority of the vast distances we will go on this trip. We have half of Vietnam left, Cambodia, Thailand (hopefully Thailand will have calmed down by the time we get there, we weren't planning on flying anywhere from there though), and probably a quick run through Malaysia to get to KL where we have our flight booked on January 12th to Australia. So, the flight will cover some distance but our future overland distances won't be quite so substantial.

Anyways, Hanoi then. We arrive really early in the morning, after a sleeper train (didn't sleep so well on this one and we are both a little crabby) from Lao Cai. There is the inevitable gauntlet of touts to greet the train. We can usually get it to work in our favor, pick one who is in the center of a lot of cheap hotels, let them pay for your taxi to take you to theirs, then look at it and then wander off to the other hotels in the area to comparison shop. Today it is 5.30 am, it is early, we are sleepy, no hotels will really be open to show us rooms, so we just get past them and to a taxi to the place we had a business card for from somebody who stayed there before.

It is still super early when we get there and the front door is open but the night shift guy is asleep on the couch and tells us there are no rooms to show us until 7.30 (meaning, I'm sleeping, come back when the day shift arrives), so we have a early morning to walk around the Old Quarter as it is just waking up. It is amazing how things transform. There are only a few people about, a few stoves cooking things on the sidewalks and doors half opened. Most everything is shuttered. When we come back an hour or so later, we don't recognize anything with all the shops open and stuff put out on the sidewalks.

Each street in the Old Quarter was controlled by a certain guild, metal pipes, fish, woven baskets, rope, packing tape. Ok, maybe not so much now since every other shop is some sort of travel agency, but there is a remarkable consistency to different blocks. The street around our hotel seems to be selling Christmas decorations. Weird, I forgot Christmas was that close, as well as weather that doesn't seem very wintery. There are nearby streets (like every shop on the street) that sell bathroom fittings, or the one I really liked was the entire street of packing tape.

I'm not sure I'll write so much about Hanoi. It was sort of an unfocused few days there, tired mostly and wasn't so motivated to see all that many things. There are a few things that will remain in my memory to represent Hanoi. Ok, the constant background noise of "hello, motorbike", "where are you from?", "cyclo?", blah blah blah. I flirt with different strategies, either waving back at them, saying hello back, saying I'm from America, or most of the time just head down, pretend I don't hear them and keep going. Although if you don't hear them, sometimes they will follow you and keep yelling, tapping you on the shoulder to make sure you hear. The "where are you from" question really gets tiresome, 100 times a day. Stopping to answer just hooks you into their sales pitch. Better to just keep walking.

At least America seems to have redeemed itself by finally nearly ending the embarrassing Bush years. Obama seems popular here. I suffer a bit of guilt or a strange mix of something a few times here. We find a shop that has old propaganda posters, hundreds of different ones from mostly the 60s and 70s and a few 80s. Stylistically, they are pretty beautiful. I really like the public posters I see all over town, most have some sort of Ho Chi Mihn picture leading his people into a prosperous and harmonious future, or whatever, but they just look amazing. Flipping through them, the "Grow more soybean" or "Towards better pig breeding" or other things like that, they are just amazing works of art. The ones from the war years, glorifying the 4000th American jet shot down, understandable giving the circumstances but also hard to stomach. Or a lot of anti Nixon ones, also understandable, but, ok, Nixon was pretty horrible. On the train then from Hanoi to Hue, which was just south of the North/South border and DMZ area, the area of the fiercest fighting during the war, towns have burned out tanks on display in the center square and the cyclo driver yesterday informs us that his father was killed 35 years ago, machine gunned. Gosh. So yeah, Vietnam.

Hanoi though, I think it will remain in my memory as yellowish fading buildings, vaguely French colonial, thousands of phone numbers stencil painted on every available wall surface (I assume they were phone sex numbers or something like that), and just crazy powerlines, massive coils and stray lines, a maze of them barely able to fit on the poles. And then the traffic, sadly not bicycles but thousands of beeping motorcycles and scooters with too many taxis and cars mixed in. Here crossing the street isn't so much like in Ulan Bator where you just have to walk and run or anything to not get run down, here you just start walking, steady pace, don't look, and they will go around you. It is maddening walking after a while, it is so noisy and you just feel so hyped up from all the noise and movement, but it does also kind of make an amazing symphony of movement.

A few days then of that, walking around the Old Quarter, lots of shops and street side food stands. I go see the Ho Chi Mihn mausoleum one of the days. I finally give into a motorcycle ride after walking everywhere else and ignoring them. Some say you should get the price first, another thing I read said that's silly, that length ride should just be 20000 (a little more than 1 USD) and just give it to them at the end. I try this getting there. He says he wants 100,000 which makes me laugh and I say is crazy (which it is). (I can't wait to get to Cambodia where they don't bargain.) He argues how far it is, eventually 50,000. I should have just stuck to 20 but I give him 30 and walk off and end it.

I didn't see Lenin when I was in Moscow or Mao in Beijing, I needed to see at least one frozen communist leader, so Uncle Ho has to be it. It was quite an experience, about 90% of the people there were Vietnamese. The line moved fast and the security was tight, not just explosives and all that but making sure you didn't have your hands behind your back or in your pockets or anything less respectful. You got about 20 seconds, walking around him, strangely lit, looking really white, in a fancy sort of glass case with carved wood. It is rather bizarre experience. Then walking around his old stilt house which maybe he lived in. (The guide book does point out that if he had been there all the time, it would have just been a matter of time before a B-52 would have dropped bombs on it.) The guides are giving tours to other people, he woke up early every morning, walked on stones to massage his feet, clapped his hands to get the fish in the pond to come over to feed them, etc. Maybe some of it is true. National myths, I guess. You know, George Washington chopped down a cherry tree too and then couldn't tell a lie.

The Ho Chi Mihn museum then is just incredibly frustrating. It seems like an interesting art exhibit, lots of funky sculpture, like giant tables and chairs with giant bowls of fruit on them. However, as a source of information or insight into his life or Vietnam or really anything about the various time periods, I get nothing out of it. One part of the exhibit, says it is the cave where he spent some of the 1950s planning the resistance to the French, but the cave is "represented as the human brain." Huh? And I couldn't even figure out how the thing looked anything like a brain. I don't know, maybe if I had known lots of stories about him before I got there, maybe some of it would have made more sense.

Maybe my favorite part of the stay there was seeing the water puppet show. It really was pretty mesmerizing. The story is that it started in rice paddies way back, entertainment back in the countryside. It takes place in a pool with a background and the puppeteers hide behind that and use long poles to move the figures around. They are short skits about fishing or planting fields or a college graduate returning to his village. Most of the stories were simple and it was mostly pretty just watching the puppets zipping around the water and dancing and swimming.

Next stop then, the sleeper train to Hue, down in central Vietnam. Better known as the DMZ area.