Hanoi In Black & White
Photos courtesy of Andrew, a teacher friend in Bangkok.
Hanoi
Hanoi Visa Run
Having flown into Thailand without getting a visa beforehand, I only had a 30 day tourist visa. So I flew to Hanoi using the convenient online Viet Nam visa application and stayed at the Paradise Boutique Hotel in the Old Quarter for a week. For $40 for a visa stamp they met me at the airport and scooted me through immigration. For an extra fee they even met me at baggage claim and took me to my hotel in a van. So different than the old days!
My old haunt, the Classic Street Guesthouse nearby had tripled in price since I stayed there last. And the Tamarind Cafe is no longer there…replaced by another. To my surprise I found a new Mexican Coffee Shop and Cafe…the name of the shop is Xupito! Pretty close to chupa pito!!…!!!!! (which means suck dick!) Jajaja…really…change the Xu to sh/chup pito. Or Xupito could just be referring to a drunkard who drinks a lot.
Paul, a former couchsurfer in Oaxaca, is in Hanoi where he started The Bamboo School to teach music to young kids in the countryside and is playing gigs with his sax and electronic boards around the city. This is the second time we’ve run into each other in SE Asia…the other time on the street in Bangkok. I love it!
The streets are much busier than before…especially in the Old Quarter where sidewalks are taken up by people selling and cooking and eating where there aren’t parked motorcycles so that you have to walk in the congested street.
Look What I found!
Busy Street
Paul..Former Couchsurfer in Oaxaca
The Germans in Hanoi
Mad Cow Disease Or…?
The demonstrators are still at it in South Korea, I see on CNN tonight.
When I was in Hanoi this month I was sitting on the front steps of my guesthouse waiting for a van to take me on a day trip when all of a sudden a tall, young good looking guy appeared at my side. He was obviously Asian, but never knowing if you are talking to an American, or an Asian from some other country, I asked where he was from. South Korea he said. Then we traded travel stories. He is traveling long-term. He has excellent English and is obviously well-educated. Hmmm, well-to-do, I thought. He wissoft-spoken…not anything like his older countrymen that I have come across. I said that I had noticed that a lot of South Koreans weren’t happy these days. He laughed. Oh, yeah, he said, we don’t like your country selling your beef to us. But, I said, we aren’t getting sick from Mad Cow Disease. Then we get down to it.
South Korea has a strong long-held tradition of dissent. My son’s best friend, Mike, who lived in Seoul for 10 years teaching English told me once that many young demonstrators are paid by in-country interest groups, like the many unions, to demonstrate. Every week almost, there is a demonstration against something…they’ve got it down to an art, he said once.
However, in this case South Koreans are not so much unhappy with the U.S. as they are with their own new President. He has disappointed them. He is not conforming to the will of the people on many issues, my friend in Hanoi said. Like why do we have to buy beef from the U.S. which competes with our own farmers. And your beef is more expensive than ours. Why does our president have to do everything the U.S. wants? Seems his new president is a little too chummy with us. You wouldn’t know this from listening to the media reports in the U.S. But, he said, we have a soft spot in our hearts for you Americans because you defended us in the Korean War. Then we talked about how the U.S. wants a lot of things from many countries. Then his van arrived. I have to go, he said, as we shook hands and said goodbye. As he darted for his ride, he looked back and said, “I don’t want to leave you!” Of course I loved that conversation! This is one of the great moments when traveling.
Hanoi Not Burma
Well, I gave up on getting a visa to Burma. “You retired? What was your last job? What organization did you work for?” And he didn’t like my passport. Too many stamps from too many countries. Maybe I am a journalist? “We’ll call you,” he said. Never got a call. So I went back yesterday. “We’ll call you,” he said.
My Thai friend and I are scheduled to fly on the 29th so yesterday, she sweet-talked Air Asia into letting us change our route from Bangkok to Hanoi. That’s the only way to do it in Asia, she says. “I need very much a favor from you,” she said to the customer service rep.
So we have reservations for the 29th through June 1 at the Classic Street Hotel in the Old Quarter Hanoi…my third visit there and very much looking forward to it.
Jazz In Familiar Old Quarter Hanoi
I had to check out of Thailand…thought my visa was 90 days that I got in Kunming in December but it was only 60 days. So at the end of March I had to pay a hefty fine at the airport to get out of the country…almost 10 a day!
I hopped a flight to Hanoi and stayed at the Classic Street Hotel again…this time thoroughly enjoying the Old Quarter with a minimum of running around.
Found a jazz club and while enjoying the free WiFi on my laptop had a great conversation with an American woman who, having been out-stationed in Hanoi for several years with Ford Motor Company, met and married the sax player and owner of the club. Even bought a T-shirt with an orange sax and name of the club that I have now forgotten!
At the end of a month at the Classic Street Hotel I flew back to Bangkok.
‘Peaceful Evolution’
In Viet Nam, the enemies of the Communist Party, in the absence of conflict, has become the democracy and human rights promoted by the forces of ‘peaceful evolution.’ Enemy jets unload tourist dollars and foreign investment rather than bombs. Robert Templer, in Shadows and Wind explains: “Local news publications have become a master at inventing new enemies to excite its military readership. In 1996 it located a hidden menace ‘sleeping under trees around Hoan Kiem Lake’ in Hanoi. This undercover force spoke the language and ate Vietnamese food. They were up to no good riding around in cyclos, dressed in shorts and T shirts. Vietnam could no longer ignore the threat they posed. It was ‘too easy in this age of information flow to mistake enemies for friends’, the newspaper told its readers. The country, the army daily warned, was under siege from young foreign backpackers! Doubtless the Vietnamese breathed a little easier knowing who was the enemy in their midst. But the Lonely Planet Legions were not the only security threat. Executives from overseas, the newspapers said accusingly, were attending business seminars because of their interest in information that helps them work out their investments, calculate prices and put pressure on their Vietnamese partners.” Indeed, a BP Oil executive from the UK that I met in a restaurant in Hanoi said that the BP holdings in Vietnam were larger than Vietnam’s national budget.
Getting Blessed
Getting into Hanoi late on the train after visiting Sapa, I walked into a hotel down the street from the train station because I was going to leave again the next afternoon on the train for Dang Ha in Central Vietnam. The hotel workers were all sitting around a table in the foyer about to have their dinner of soup and rice and vegetables. They were accompanied by a Buddhist monk who spoke excellent English.
The next day the hotel management kindly allowed me to stay in my room for a nap while I waited for my 3:30 pm train when I heard a knock on my door. The monk joined me in my little room and said he wanted to talk to me. He was in Hanoi, he said, to work on his doctorate in education…his thesis was on an idea he had about how to work with the street kids in Saigon. What is your job he asked. I got goose bumps as I told him that my major was education and my last job was developing an alternative education program for Latino street kids in the US. Yes, he said, as if he knew it all along, and then asked if he could bless me. He took out his little brass buddah and as he screwed off the head showed me what was supposedly tiny pieces of Buddah relic. Then he put the Buddah image on top of my head as he blessed me. We talked some more, exchanged email and mail addresses and then he left.
My god, I thought, I was in my hotel room in Hanoi Vietnam with my door closed-alone with this man who I did not doubt for one second was a very good person.
Hanoi City Tour
Wasn’t excited by the city bus tours so spent an entire day riding behind a motorcycle taxi guy to visit the One Pillar Pagoda, Temple of Literature and the Martyrs Monument erected to those who died fighting for Viet Nam’s independence. The Ho Chi Minh Museum, and History Museum was full of propaganda but contained interesting artefacts from Vietnam’s hundreds of years of feudal and modern wars against the Chinese, the Khmers, the French and finally the Americans. Could have spent a half a day in the excellent new Museum of Ethnology.
Visited the Fine Arts Museum and loved the compelling feudal statuary with robes flowing…the folds of the bottom hems rhythmically rising into the air. A statue commemorating the victory over the French at Diem Bien Phu in 1954 is not unlike our statue in Washington DC of the men pushing the flag aloft during World War II except that this memorial was of three people including a woman and a child. There were pictures of demonstrations of Buddhist monks who demonstrated against the South Vietnamese Thieu administration…and pictures of the conflagration of the two monks who set themselves afire in the middle of a Saigon street in front of a pagoda…
The Women’s Museum was arresting..and illuminating. Inside the front door you are met by a 15 foot high Vietnamese mother in overlit blinding gold leaf. It is designed to depict the mother of past, present and future…very feminine and elegant…representing the combination of traditional and modern beauty…strong…her right hand wide open and palm down signifying all that is difficult in her life and a child on her shoulder representing the responsibility and happiness of the mother toward the family and her people…the child with arms raised in the air representing the future generation and a prosperous future. A huge piece of glass stood behind the statue…etched with mountains showing the strength of the father and a stream of water flowing down from the mountains showing the source of the mother’s strength…have to admit I had to swallow a catch in my throat…
After this wonderful introduction to the museum, however, you then walk upstairs to the first floor where you see grizzly pictures of women’s contributions to the war effort against the Americans where they fought equally in all capacities alongside the men…heart rending pictures… one of a nurse who saved a child’s life by nursing it when it’s mother was killed by a US bomb. (I thought to myself, yes, this is what the Communist Party want us American tourists to see.)
Another picture was of an agonized mother hugging her son who had spent 10 years in the South Vietnamese Con Dao Prison. She had just heard he was sentenced to death by the enemy in 1975 after the fall of Saigon because of his rebel activities. There were pictures of Vietnamese film star Tra Giang and “Hanoi Jane” Fonda taken together during the American actress’ visit in 1972…pictures of women lying torqued on the floor with this caption: “The barbarous tortures women had to suffer when imprisoned by US aggressors and their lackeys.”
Another picture showed a militia woman escorting William Robinson, an American Prisoner of War and another of a female artillery unit firing on American warships in 1968-9. More pictures of female guerrilla groups…their faces hard. I felt sick to my stomach as I stumbled out of the building and entered the street full of light and the living Most people in Viet Nam were born after the war…not giving the past a thought as they were now concentrating on making the market economy work in their country. Somehow I am not surprised that the people here seem “harder” than the people in Thailand.
The Ho Chi Minh Museum was the most facinating…post modern design where you start in the “Past” and walk clockwise through the “Future” to view displays with a message…peace, happiness, freedom…the 1958 Ford Edsel bursting through the wall apparently symbolising the US commercial and military failure knocks your socks off. I skipped viewing Uncle Ho’s shriveled body at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum next door.
That evening I treated myself at a lovely outdoor garden restaurant where my waiter (who was a university student by day) described the effects of an American bomb that fell on a Hanoi city street… and where the memory of the people killed are still celebrated each September. “I am afraid of war,” he said, but what put the goose bumps on me was his curled lip. Then, I thought he was going to cry as he said “why can’t they sit down and discuss?” But then, apparently feeling bold by my eagerness to hear what he had to say, he said “Mr. Bush lies…Hussein is a good man”…at which point I lost my composure. Don’t know which made me sicker…his statement or the white haired man in his 80’s fondling the legs of the 15 year old Vietnamese hooker sitting at his table. I asked the waiter how he knew this. “But I read in the paper…” I even don’t believe everything I read in the paper here or at home…I replied in muted desperation. Bush may be lying but Hussein certainly isn’t a good man either.
Hanoi
September 24 2002
Bob left Hanoi right away on the train for Sapa near the Chinese border to do some trekking among the colorful minority villages and then to spend three days in Halang Bay learning to kayak. We are traveling separately until we join a friend in Hong Kong on November 20 when the three of us will spend two months in China before going back to the US after the first of the year. Bob is presently somewhere between Hanoi and Saigon and I will meet him in Saigon on Monday for a flight to Phnom Penh Cambodia.
Flying into Hanoi felt very strange after watching years of television during the “Vietnam” War in the 6.s and 70.s. (The “Vietnam War” is called the “American War” here.) The first night in Hanoi I ate a dinner of pork with pepper sauce and french fries, a wonderful break from the Burmese and Thai food, on the deck of a popular cafe while watching the lights reflect off Hoan Kiem Lake near the Old Quarter.
I stayed at a small charming hotel called the “Classic Street Hotel” in the Old Quarter which is full of narrow winding streets with tunnel or tube houses so called because their small frontages hide very long rooms that were developed in feudal times to avoid taxes based on the width of the frontage onto the street. At the time they were only two stories high but over the years stories have been added so the buildings are now very narrow and very tall.
My cozy little room had a little veranda where I could stand and watch the busy street scene below.
I loved my little neighborhood for the five days I was there…early mornings the same ladies in the same clothes and cone hats came to sit on the street below me with their big shallow baskets to sell small silvery fish and vegetables…one morning a young woman at a street stall angrily chewed the heck out of one of the women for some reason and chased her away…every day in the early afternoon I ate a huge bowl of duck noodle soup for about 30 cents at a food stall down the street….sitting on a little plastic stool at a two foot high wooden table with my knees under my chin……the same old man and his wife with kind faces welcoming me like old friends each day.
Across the street was the A to Z Queen Cafe which was a kick-back comfortable budget backpacker hotel with dorm beds for $2.50 a night and free internet if you bought something at the bar…otherwise you donated a few dong via honor code in the little plastic boxes sitting on top of each terminal. Every night the guest house showed a war movie to the mostly young males from around the world, many of whom are Israeli by the way. An Israeli guy told me that every young man has to spend three years in the military…and then they take off to travel to clear their heads.
Nearby was a street market where the women did all the selling and the men sat on the sidewalks drinking whisky and playing board games. As I walked by, the women laughed when I gestured and said to them…look…you work…they play…
Down the narrow street and around the corner the local street kids pestered you to buy postcards…just buy from me today…I am lucky you are my first sale today so I can buy some food…old ladies glided along in slippered feet carrying two fruit-filled baskets one on each side of them that was balanced like a pair of scales across their backs with a long flexible blade of bamboo who wanted to sell you exotic fruit…pumalos that have to be picked a few days before it is eaten so it has time to “forget the tree,” custard apples, durian so stinky it is forbidden in the hotels, green dragon fruit, guavas, jackfruit, longan, lychees, mango-steen, rambutan, starfruit and juicy persimmons.
Then you could escape all this by ducking into the Tamarind Cafe & Fruit Juice Bar where the Handspan Adventure Travel Company sold tickets to Halong Bay and Sapa in the back. Bob took a three day excursion to incredible Halong Bay and claims it is one of the very best experiences of all time. Here you were sure to find fellow foreign travelers to trade stories with…not just a few of whom…to my amazement…or maybe just never noticed before…were women traveling alone. In happy solidarity I invariably urged them on…
Laughingnomad 