the horror, the horror > travels in indochina

Hanoi and Halong Bay: Honk if you…

Posted by Jeff

1. Hanoi
The first thing you notice about Hanoi after fending off the inevitable taxi drivers at the airport is the traffic. Everyone drives like a cross-country trucker on seven lines of speed with a load of salmon that’s starting to smell and a thousand kilometres to the next fridge.

Everybody overtakes whenever they can: it’s not unusual to swerve onto the wrong side of the road to overtake only to have another car or scooter overtake you at the same time (on a road with one lane each way and oncoming traffic). The Vietnamese make Aucklanders look like models of patient, copybook driving; if this strikes fear into your hearts, well it should.

Unsurprisingly, there are lots of accidents. We witnessed the immediate aftermath of a couple including a particularly brutal push-bike vs. bus head-on collision (the bus won).

Then there’s the tooting: most Vietnamese drivers honk their horns at least once every ten seconds. After careful study I have deduced four specific messages:
• I am about to drive over you;
• Please do not drive over me (many times we wished for a pedestrian version);
• I have just had a new horn installed which plays a beautiful warbling melody and wish to share the gift of music with my sleeping neighbours; and
• It has been ten seconds since I last honked.

There is something almost existential about the tooting. It is a statement of identity and defiance in a huge uncaring world where 3,000,000 other people have the exact same red scooter as you do. Clamo ergo sum.

2. The best guesthouse in Hanoi

We arranged to stay in a lovely guesthouse just off To Ngoc Van- one of the more exclusive streets in Hanoi. It was run by a lovely couple with excellent English named Ros and Bill who took us in, fed us, clothed us and showed us the sights for two weeks out of the kindness of their hearts. We cannot thank Ros and Bill enough for their hospitality- we left feeling refreshed, replenished and pampered.

Towards the end of our trip we decided to take Ros and Bill out for a meal to thank them for looking after us. They suggested one of the local restaurants just around the corner. I decided again to broaden my horizons: this time with a tortoise (one of the four auspicious animals of Vietnam with the dragon, the phoenix and the other one). The others looked a bit worried so I confirmed with the waiter that this would be a single serving.

True to Aesop, the other meals appeared, were consumed and taken away while the tortoise made its slow way to the table. About an hour and a half after we arrived the waiter proudly deposited a huge casserole dish in front of me. They had cooked a whole tortoise. The poor beast had been dismembered and pieces of dark grey meat floated in the yellow broth; the dark grey colour was because they had left the skin on. Cooked tortoise has a particularly vivid smell that is close to indescribable: it smells a bit like fat being rendered for soap mixed with an almost-perfumed scent. Summoning it to mind makes me feel faintly nauseous.

I picked out a leg with my chopsticks and chewed it half-heartedly, spitting out the claws. Surprisingly the taste was tolerable: a mix of fish and chicken rather like crocodile. I noted that the underside of the shell had also been sliced and stewed. As I did the following thought occurred to me: somewhere in this dish, waiting like the telltale heart, is the head of the tortoise. I feebly ate another leg. Bill gallantly also had a couple of pieces but I could not bring myself to stir the mix.

Feeling quite ill now, I asked for the bill. The tortoise, listed as “market price” in the menu, turned out to cost 540,000 Dong or about $43 NZD (around ten times the cost of most main courses). Of this we probably ate about $3 worth. The waiter asked several times whether we wanted the tortoise wrapped up to go; when we insisted grey-faced that we did not he looked very pleased. His family were sitting down to dinner in the next room and I do not think it went to waste. For my part I think I’m swearing off amphibians for a while.

3. Uncle Ho and the damned Yankees

As is obligatory for budding revolutionaries we decided to pay our respects to Uncle Ho. While I haven’t done enough reading to judge Ho Chi Minh on his merits (and he did some terrible things) one has to be impressed by his guiding hand in Vietnam’s independence. There aren’t many colonies that first overthrew their colonial masters and then defeated the most powerful nation on earth.

Paying our respects involved queuing with thousands and thousands of Vietnamese to be whisked past Uncle Ho’s preserved remains. Uncle Ho is lit up with a strange yellow-orange light that makes him look like nothing so much as an eighties children’s toy called a Gloworm:

Uncle Ho seems to have been quite a humble and modest man. He wanted to be cremated when he died but ultimately the Party’s need for a freeze-dried figurehead took precedence over his wishes.

The nearby Ho Chi Minh Museum was also very interesting. This was largely due to the symbolic (and bizarre) way they had decided to tell Uncle Ho’s life story and the history of Vietnam during this period. The rise of industrialism, for example, was symbolised by a model of a Ford Edsel smashing through a wall. The World Wars were represented by a pastiche of various European Expressionist and Surrealist art from the time. Not the most scholarly approach to biography but fun nonetheless.

Later we visited the remains of the Hoa Lo Prison (the ‘Hanoi Hilton’). Most of the complex was demolished to make room for a huge apartment building called the Hanoi Towers.

The French built Hoa Lo just before the turn of the last Century and housed many of the Viet Minh’s most important members. The exhibits make a pretty convincing case for the French as despicable colonial overlords: most of the prisoners were kept rigidly shackled at the ankles for much of the time. The prison was built to house about 500 people but at the height of the resistance in the 1930s held four times that number.

During the American War Hoa Lo was used by the Vietnamese to hold downed American pilots shot during bombing runs over Hanoi. They included America’s next first runner-up for President, John McCain. The information about the American pilots is amusing largely because of the transparency of the propaganda. Judging by the photos the Hanoi Hilton was essentially one long summer camp with bars on the windows and broken glass atop the walls. Here the pilots are playing basketball. There they are celebrating Christmas with a tree and presents. Here are their handicrafts. There is a letter from one pilot to the warden asking to take her cat home when she went back to America.

4. Big head strikes again

The Vietnamese are world leaders in at least one aspect of their culture: the appreciation of male beauty. Indeed I have realised that I am, in point of fact, the Vietnamese George Clooney. A few telling examples (most not from Hanoi- I’m jumping ahead) will suffice:

At one point we rented motorbikes with guides to take us around the sights. As I hove into view our guide’s jaw dropped a little. He exclaimed “Big body!” with a sense of awe and (I suspect) trepidation. The guide fetched a helmet, which sat daintily atop my melon-sized head. “Big head!” he cried, his eyes widening in amazement. “You are a big man.” I was rather saddened to realise that I was Mr Potato Head in three quarter pants but our guide later explained that in Vietnam junk in the trunk is seen as a sign of importance and prosperity (partly due to the resemblance to the happy Buddha- one of his more beloved aspects). My Rubenesqueness was actually quickening pulses all across the country (not just those of the people who had to drive a motorbike with me on the back and prevent wheelies). Yet another guide told me that I had “big face” but I think he was actually being rude.

I have also developed a pronounced farmer’s tan (brown arms, face, and neck and white, white, white everywhere else). The forward thinking and progressive Vietnamese aren’t interested in the nut-brown and chiselled Europeans who lurk near picaresque beaches everywhere showing off their many languages and shallow personalities. Nope, what wows them is the pure creamy, corpselike pallor of my back and chest (or they have been momentarily blinded). I mentioned this curious inversion to a tailor and she smiled sadly and said, “We all want what we can’t have.”

Some of you may also know that I have hugely flat feet. Indeed, were I not a land animal they might fairly be described as flippers. I showed these to a cobbler in the manner of a carney drawing back the curtain at a freakshow only for her to explain that flat feet are considered very lucky and a sign of great future wealth.

There it is, ladies: big body, big head, big face, pale skin, flat feet. The complete package.

5. Halong Bay

Something everyone recommends in Northern Vietnam is Halong Bay. This doesn’t make it any less necessary although certainly more crowded. We jumped in a mini-van and drove the four hours out there one morning stopping only on the way for the inevitable rest stop at the giant souvenir warehouse. If you’re in the market for a life-sized marble statue of a dolphin riding on a mermaid riding on another couple of dolphins, have I got a deal for you: only $5,000 USD for this beauty.

On the way I chatted with a labourer from Milton Keynes with more than a passing resemblance to Right Said Fred. Fred (name changed to protect the guilty) saves up all his leave and most of his pennies each year and gets as far from Milton Keynes as he can. For the last couple of years, when his allotted leave proved insufficient for his relaxation needs, Fred had concocted bogus illnesses and emergencies to get a few more weeks in Asia (back-ache in Thailand ‘06, biking accident in the Philippines ‘07). By this stage Fred’s boss had become suspicious and Fred was trying to think of a really good medical condition this time around. Putting all my employment law skills to work I suggested monsoons washing out the road in Cambodia.

At Halong Bay we were shepherded towards our boat with the precision of a military operation—if said operation was Dunkirk. Here’s a picture that may give you some idea of the chaos:

Halong Bay is another trip I’m going to give you mostly in pictures:

We kayaked for the second day of our trip. Unfortunately we didn’t bring the camera for this bit (a big mistake). Due to the porous nature of the limestone our guide would paddle into tiny openings in the rock that would open into big caves that would open into marine lakes. We saw:
• Monkeys swinging through the trees on the islands;
• Either bat-like birds or bird-like bats in the caves. I asked our guide, “Are those bats or birds?” and he replied “yes”;
• About the best seafood meal I’ve ever eaten, cooked basically on a primus in the back of the wee boat that pulled our kayaks around;
• A black pearl fishery;
• A fishing village where everything was afloat- the houses, the post office, the school;
• Floating acres of rubbish. Unfortunately this tended to accumulate where the current was slow (such as the protected marine lakes); and
• A tiny cave, which we followed up to a freshwater lake inside one of the island.

Both nights our junk moored with about 20 others in a bay set aside for that purpose (essentially a floating backpackers’ ghetto). Our crew busted out the karaoke (fortunately for all aboard I didn’t succumb) but we could tell we weren’t on the real party boat. Looking out across the bay we could see a junk that was completely dark except for an industrial strength green strobe light. Straining our ears we could just make out the oonst-oonst of hard trance pounding.

All in all Vietnam thus far has been great although a bit of a change of pace from laid-back Laos.

Note: Sorry about the delay in this post.  I’ve certainly had my anxious public in mind:

I had hoped to finish it about a week ago but I’ve been quite ill with rampaging bronchitis and a 40 degree fever for the last few days. I’m just back onto solid foods and am feeling much better now although still a bit weak. Unfortunately it’s delayed our travel to Cambodia and we will likely have to skip Phnom Penh.

Ka kite,

Jeff and Sara

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