Hanoi In Black & White
Photos courtesy of Andrew, a teacher friend in Bangkok.
Viet Nam
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.
Saigon Could Be Mexico
Or one of many other countries I have been in!
How to be a Taxi Driver in Saigon – Vietnam, Asia
By: Graham Price
http://www.bootsnall.com
Positions Available: Applicants Sought
Job Title: Taxi Driver
Location: Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)
Qualifications Required: Driving license or some previous experience of having driven a car preferred, but not essential.
Skills Required
1. Excellent Spatial Awareness – you must be able to know exactly where your vehicle begins and ends. This will become apparent when you draw to a halt (from speed) precisely one millimeter away from the scooter in front, or when driving (at speed) through a red light that requires a death-defying manoeuvre between traffic coming from either side.
2. A Strong Right Thumb – this is a must for successful horn operation. The horn has many uses; the following list is by no means exhaustive. Creativity and resourcefulness in this area are particularly welcome. The horn should be sounded when you wish to:
– Hurry vehicles in front along
– Bully smaller vehicles into the slow lane [or onto the shoulder]
– Warn any bikes in the right-hand lane of your intention to turn right from the left-hand lane
– Warn other users of your presence (especially when overtaking on a busy street, driving the wrong way down a one way street, running a red light, or taking a corner on the wrong side of the road.)
– Scare pedestrians who have become stranded in the middle of the road (purely entertainment value)
– Inform drivers ahead that the traffic lights have changed. In this instance, the horn should be sounded precisely half a nanosecond after amber turns to green.
– Apologise to someone whom you have cut-up whilst changing lanes
– Show your distress and distaste if any other road user should be inconsiderate enough to run red lights, drive on the wrong side of the road, etc.
3. The ability to “read” your passenger’s “type” – Passengers tend to fall into one of four main groups:
Read More
Dual Pricing
Found a hilarious travel article on Bootnall today about the luxury tax…or dual pricing for foreigners as it is called:
The Luxury Tax – Asia, Europe, South America
By: Adam Jeffries Schwartz
The following is a guide to how the luxury tax is levied, worldwide.
ASIA
China has the highest tax in the region! Charging a hundred times the regular price is typical. If you negotiate at all, they will stand two inches in front of your face, and scream You PAY, you PAY NOW.
Note: Exactly!!!
Read More
A Field Guide To Getting Lost
My son, Josh, the little weasel, asked me what it felt like to be living alone in Oaxaca. It got me to thinking. Then I picked up a book at Sharon’s apartment entitled “A field Guide To Getting Lost,” a book written by a woman in San Francisco. It reminded me of a blog entry I wrote one thoughtful day in Bangkok. Here it is for those of you who missed it.
June 12 2005
Perfect Memories
“What A Perfect Day…It’s Such A Perfect Day…And Then We Go Home.”
Have been re-reading a book that I have been dragging around with me for the last year. Pico Iyer can set my imagination afire like no other travel writer. One of his pieces reminds me of the fall of 2003 when I was traveling alone down the coast of Viet Nam. Imagine all the people sharing all the world: I was riding behind Mr. Binh, my kind motorcycle taxi driver, and after three days on the bike my rear-end was numb. He takes me to a small food stall by the side of the road leading out of a little town on the South China Sea, where we wave down a local kamazake minibus that will careen down Highway 1 to Hue. The bus is crammed full of Vietnamese one on top of the other so I sit on some rice sacks until someone gets off and I, the older one, am graciously allowed to have the emptied seat. A couple of giggling girls offer to share a small sweet tangerine with me.
The driver had very long hair-possibly in his 50’s-with a pocked and scarred face…signs of a life lived on the edge. This guy is feeling powerful and narrowly misses oncoming overloaded trucks leaning at odd angles. He is having a great time and I am breathless waiting for my life to end. Suddenly when he throws a dirty towel to the back of the van and it lands in my face he looks back with a grin to see if I am alright. Gasping, I return his thumbs up with a laugh.
“Travel the World and the Seven Seas…Everybody’s Looking For Something. Some of them want to use you�some of them want to abuse you.” For Pico, the best kind of traveling is when you are searching for something you never find. “The physical aspect of travel is for me,” he says “the least interesting…what really draws me is the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don’t know and may never will. We travel, some of us, to slip through the curtain of the ordinary, and into the presence of whatever lies just outside our apprehension…” he goes on to say. “I fall through the gratings of the conscious mind and into a place that observes a different kind of logic.” Transcendence… and pure Pico.
“Nobody told me there would be days like these! Strange Days Indeed.”
A Harley in Viet Nam
June 10, 2004
While I was in Bangkok Bob flew to Vietnam. He wrote to say he had difficulties accessing the web today and spent most of the day traveling.
His emails:
Now in Da lat in the mountains about 300-400 km north of Saigon. It is at a 5000 foot elevation so cool–in fact feels cold. Probably about 55 degrees right now–everybody in a jacket. Feels like central Oregon and after the heat/humidity combo in Hanoi it is quite refreshing. I am at an internet cafe surrounded by adolescents screaming at success/failure with video games. Tiz too much–later.
B
June 11
good morning:
have been roaming around Dalat—much embroidery art done here–quite nice but also can have a hefty price–saw several landscapes that I liked–might pick up a small piece–just to have a representative sample. Bought several pieces in Hanoi–I really like their style of art.
Approached by a fellow this morning–call themselves “Easy Riders”–have big bikes and arrange trips off the beaten track–tempted to have him take me to Saigon via the Cambodian border and the Ho Chi Minh trail–he can also extend things to the delta (and probably to So. America for that matter)–he is 45-50 in age and has been doing this awhile. Am tempted as it would take me to areas I would not otherwise see and I am tired of the usual tourist routes. It would mean 300-400 km on the road and the limiting factor would be the ability of my butt to withstand several days in the saddle..
June 12
Another nice day in Dalat. It is a major tourist destination for Vietnamese—with it being a weekend the place is packed—had to inquire at three hotels before finding a vacancy…in evenings they close off the downtown streets to vehicles and streets/plazas are packed with people just walking and people watching. Not much to buy re handicrafts etc. but wonderful produce — however do not see it offered in restaurants. Am tired of Vietnamese cuisine and am overdosed on French bread.
NOTE: Next few days Bob spent in bed with some kind of virus….Bob worried about influenza-like syndrome and me thinking it was probably Dengue Fever as this is the season for it.
Sat June 18
hello–
Was going to leave Dalat today by bus for Saigon. This a.m. had second thoughts and decided would be much more fun and interesting and educational to do the bike thing. Tried to find my rider (named Budda–because his stomach and somatotype is identical to the icon) but could not arouse him by phone–he probably ditched me for other customers so went down to the local easy rider hangout cafe and there were at least a half dozen of the “boys” there. They start out by being very cool but then the pitch begins . I had experienced it twice before so he (Thui) was surprised when I cut to the chase, “How much for 3 days?”. So to see whether I would be able to tolerate we agreed on a sampler package of a day trip around Dalat. It worked out well–he is safe… informed, understandable (re accent), non-invasive and 48 yr/o–but looks 55 to 60.
Weather turned inclimant and last hour on the bike was wet. Purchased a plastic pancho but was totally saturated at the end of the trip. Was informed that my previous illness was do to too sudden climate changes, that there was no possibility that it could be bird flu because that entity does not exist in Vietnam! I was instructed that on return to hotel that I must wash my hair to get all the rainwater out so that I do not come down with any other ailment(s).
Tomorrow leave for 3 day trip to the coast just East of Saigon–he does not want to get closer because of increasing traffic and I appreciate his concerns. I will travel remainder of distance to Saigon by bus. So depart 8 a.m. tomorrow–I look like a Harley biker going down the freeway. Not sure how we’re going to get all my luggage on the bike but he says, “no problem’. Will not see internet again until Saigon.
NOTE: my daughter-in-law, Luk, a Thai, has also warned me to wash my hair after a rain. She said when it first rains there are bad chemicals in the rain that can hurt you. She could be referring to Acid Rain?
Eunice
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.
The Communist Party
People everywhere in Viet Nam confided in me, as a foreigner who would not know who to tell anyway, that they hated the corrupt officials in the Communist Party that are entangled in a growing web of organised crime. They hate the police. The Party has a smug stranglehold on the poorest of the people, especially the Catholics in South Vietnam who find it almost impossible to find a job even if they can scrape up the money to “buy” it as do most people. (This is why you see so many jobless men sleeping during the day in their cyclos or on their moto taxis.)
Those in the Party get the best jobs…those who work for the government get 10 times the salary of ordinary Vietnamese. Doi Moi, which translates as ‘renovation’ similar to the Soviet ‘glastnost’ or openness, does not reach the lives of these people. But as Templer puts it at the very end of his book “The Communist Party has been coerced to relax economic restrictions but it has not liked some of the results. Unable to regain the control or respect it once commanded, its response has been to clench and release its grip on the economy and society in an increasingly desperate manner as its power slips slowly away.”
I told Mr. Binh in Lang Co that this could not last forever as more and more of Vietnam’s youth, like Mr. Binh’s son, become educated and empowered to act. Ten years…he said as he put his finger to his lips. When I left him as I got on the bus, promising to write to him from America, he said “ten years, our secret, ten years.” I made the tears stay inside my eyes until I could find my way inside the bus.
Laughingnomad 