A Trip Through Northern Vietnam
Up the garden path approached another group of tourists – Vietnamese or Chinese, we were never quite sure. They pointed excitedly at one young lady in our group, whose strawberry blonde hair appeared golden in the afternoon sun. Then, they pointed to their camera, and the next thing we knew, all but one of the Asian tourists gathered around her for a photo op, as if posing in front of the Eiffel Tower.
It didn’t take long for us to realize that Westerners, particularly blond ones, were as much a tourist attraction to our hosts as they were to us.
Hangin’ in Hanoi
Our first lesson in cross-cultural tourism was actually in Hanoi, Vietnam, a city in perpetual motion. My initial impressions of the city seem almost hallucinatory, following two days of plane rides that took us from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands to Kosrae, Pohnpei, Chuuk, Guam, Taipei and Hong Kong, before arriving at about 2 a.m. at Hanoi’s small international terminal.
From my journal, dated Aug. 2: “Shaken like a martini a few times, especially during the last flight from Hong Kong, as lightning flashed all around us like a strobe light at a rave party âÂ?¦ First impressions of Hanoi âÂ?¦ Horns and flashing bright lights [from impatient motorists], near collisions; shanty towns less bleak than Peru’s; motorbikes, scooters and bicycles – seemingly always at peril of being killed by a maniac car driver bleating wildly on his horn âÂ?¦
“An interesting confluence of the modern and the Vietnam of the movies – conical hats, cyclo cabs, bicycle trailers dangerously overburdened with everything from hay to beer kegs âÂ?¦ did I mention the horns? And rain, rain, rain âÂ?¦”
But as we decompressed, the city came more into focus.
Our hotel, Nam Phuong Hotel, sat at the edge of the city’s Old Quarter, which circles Hoan Kiem Lake. For something like $16 a night, we had our own room with an attached bath and air conditioning, a necessity in the country’s persistent and oppressive humidity. Each morning we would circle the block to the hotel’s sister establishment, where we would enjoy a complimentary breakfast of farm-fresh eggs, warm French bread and sugary pancakes.
In the evenings, dinner was “always an elaborate buffet among all of us – squid, fish, wild pig, venison, curried vegetables âÂ?¦ less than $4 per person, including beer. Lots of eggs, so fresh and rich, the yellows are the color of the rising sun.”
Life is lived in the streets of the Old Quarter. Aged, wrinkled women, nearly bent at the waist and hunchbacked, carry fruits and vegetables in baskets that are attached to either end of a stick, walking in a sort of bouncy step as they balance the burden on one shoulder. Everybody is selling something; nearly every block is packed with tiny trinket shops and simple restaurants, where diners gather around low tables, nearly squatting next to the floor on short stools for meals of soup and meager pork dishes.
And everywhere there are markets, though we were generally leery of sampling the street stall foods. Another Aug. 2 entry: “Overwhelmed by a street market this afternoon that offered all manner of seafood and meats, much of it still alive or in the process of butchery. We watched with grim curiosity the slaughter of a chicken by a woman – deftly holding its legs while slicing its throat open and pouring the blood into a bowl, which sat on the crowded pen of ducks and chickens. What a way to see your own fate âÂ?¦”
Hanoi also assaulted our olfactory senses: “Street garbage, incense, humanity, street pollution, curry and many other smells I can’t process. It alternates between vomitous and pleasant, often depending on where you are and how wet everything is.”
August is still monsoon season in Vietnam. And by our third day in Hanoi, preparing for an overnight visit to Halong Bay, a World Heritage Site, the rain had flooded the city, turning streets into knee-deep rivers. But the city pulsed on; cyclists and mopeds sloshed on through, while everyone pulled out clear plastic rain ponchos in an effort to stay dry.
Halong Bay
Naturally, to escape the wet weather we headed to the coast and the Gulf of Tonkin, specifically Halong Bay, via mini-bus, a ride as terrifyingly dangerous as a Mad Max road race across the desert. The countryside blur included jade-green rice paddies, children riding atop water buffaloes and the ubiquitous mopeds, motorcycles and bicyclists that were forever being lapped by the larger vehicles. If there was one rule of the road – and I doubted there were many rules – it was right of tonnage.
Halong Bay lives up to its World Heritage billing. About 3,000 pinnacle islands crowd the bay, somewhat resembling Palau’s rock islands, but larger and not quite as lush. Our little tour, for somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 dong (about $30), not only included the bus ride to the bay, but a cruise through the islands and an overnight stay at Cat Ba Island, the largest and most populated of the group.
From our Cat Ba hotel, we could look down into the harbor, where hundreds of boats made up a floating village. Aug. 4: “Up early this morning (5 a.m.) but mostly slept through the night, my body finally adjusting to Vietnam’s rhythm âÂ?¦ Then out to the bay, where a flotilla city of boats – fishing, houses, taxis, restaurants, even a gas station – sit. For 40,000 dong (less than $3) we spent an hour of leisurely cruising this floating organism – people squatting and brushing their teeth, cooking breakfast, selling wares from their boats, waving at the oddball tourists staring at them and clicking their cameras rapidly; carrying out the daily chores of their lives – mundane to them, exotic and incomprehensible to me âÂ?¦
“Our taxi driver apparently lives in his little dinghy, maybe 12 to 14 feet long. Under his rowing bench is stowed (I guess) all of his worldly possessions – from the corner, peeking out behind a blue tarp, I glimpsed a plastic cup with comb and toothbrush âÂ?¦”
These are a poor people, yet they smile, often toothless, and laugh.
Sapa and sales
We returned for a couple of more days in Hanoi, where we joined our organized tour that would take us from the city through northern Vietnam and into southern China. Using what’s called a backpacker tour (i.e., cheap with little frills), our group consisted of about a dozen people, from America, Canada, the U.K., Switzerland, Italy and, of course, Australia. (Apparently, Australians are the roving ambassadors of the Western world. Most Asians we met simply assumed we were Australian, despite an obvious lack of accent and a distaste for vegemite, the penultimate Aussie condiment.)
Our first and most challenging moment of group bonding probably occurred during an overnight train ride from Hanoi to Lao Chi, near the Vietnam-China border. To those familiar with train travel in Europe, an “express” ride on the rails in Vietnam could be called adventurous or atrocious, depending on your sense of humor.
Recalling an Aug. 6 journal entry, the train ride was a “mixture of heat, cramped spaces and herky-jerky jostling and frequent stops.
“Sometime during the night âÂ?¦ at one of the stations, we had a prowler climbing on the screen window at our compartment. One of the popular nighttime activities is to reach through a gap in the screen and try to grab something from a sleeping passenger.” A quick bang on the screen sent the fellow scampering away, but the incident turned an already fitful sleep into an all-night vigil.
But Sapa, an hour bus ride from Lao Chi, is worth a week of such travel conditions. A small town at over 3,000 feet in elevation – reached by a slow, winding bus or jeep ride from the train station – Sapa is a perfect place to waste day after day trekking through rich countryside and time-forgotten villages. The area is home to several hill tribes, people called the Hmong, Tay and Zho, who dress in elaborate and colorful costumes.
Upon arriving at our guesthouse, we were immediately introduced to a strain of the Hmong people called the Black Hmong, for their dark clothing. What must have been a score of young girls swallowed our group as we wearily got out of the mini-buses. In impressive English, the girls began asking us our names, our country of origin and other bits of personal history. Our new friends then quickly started peddling their wares, from jewelry (bracelets and necklaces of heavy, roughly shaped metals) to brightly colored clothes that they dye an indigo blue. The dye is all over their skinny hands, arms and legs – and can get all over you unless it is set correctly.
The novelty and attention by these young entrepreneurs quickly grew tiresome.
By Aug. 8, I wrote in desperation: “A quick trip through town quickly turns into an obstacle race as diminutive Black Hmong and the taller, red-turbaned Zho scurry after us, clutching at us with their blue-dyed hands, broken, stained fingernails âÂ?¦ It’s like a school for Amway salesmen. The little girls are the worst – so very cute, they make a point of learning your name, and soon every Black Hmong is saying, ‘Peter, you buy from me. You buy from me.'”
But further in the hinterlands of the Sapa valley, the ethnic tribes, particularly the Flower Hmong, who disdain tourists, are far more reticent. At a market in a rutted and flooded field, reached by foot or water buffalo (with tourists transported by aging, clunky Russian trucks), Vietnam showed us yet another one of her many faces. Here, subsistence farming is still the rule, families live in shacks with no plumbing and naked children sit atop water buffalo, waving and belting out their only English, “Haylow!” The jungle is as thick as a wall, the humidity sticks to you like glue and the color green comes in a hundred different shades.
Here, Hollywood’s Vietnam recedes, sizzled away in the heat and the stark simplicity of life that moves at a rhythm that is exotic and alien. That ineffable essence of Vietnam is the one souvenir I wish I really could take home.
