Wonder x Jungle: Hanoi, Vietnam (Part 1 of 2)

How does one say “concrete jungle” in Vietnamese?

After uneventful flights — first from PUS to TPE and then from TPE to HAN — we were greeted after baggage claim by a complete stranger who was holding a piece of paper printed with N.’s name. I’m often baffled by these situations: we meet a complete stranger in a completely new country where we don’t speak the local language, get into his car willingly, and trust that he will take us where we want to go and not to some dark alley where organs will be removed. I realize that this scenario is more a reflection of my head-space than of reality, but still, on a certain level, it feels absolutely insane.

It was upon leaving the vicinity of the airport — as usual with airports, in fairly open spaces without tall buildings — and entering the outskirts of Hanoi that reality did indeed become insane: yes, there was what one expects is the usual afternoon traffic of cars and trucks during rush hour. The shock came in the form of motorbikes and motorbikes and motorbikes — with single riders, couples, and even families of four (dad, mom and kids sandwiched in between); some teetering with bags and packets twice as tall as the bikes themselves, all close enough that I could have rolled down the window of our taxi and easily tapped them on the shoulder to ask about the weather. All managed somehow to maneuver around others without incident.

By the time we arrived in our hotel in the Old Quarter of Hanoi, I felt so stressed out that despite the dinner hour I refused to leave my room. All I wanted to do is close my eyes and find a delete button for my brain.

***

The next morning, without fully recovering from Motorcycle Madness, we ventured outside.

We figured we should first pay our respects to Mr. Ho Chi Minh who was talking an eternal nap nearby — although if it were me, I would have been annoyed to have my nap observed by a constant stream of visitors. On the way, we encountered Mr. Ho’s comrade, Mr. Lenin, by whose statue on this day were a group of high schoolers practicing a dance routine in their school uniforms, families taking pictures with the communist leader, and toddlers on little battery-powdered go-karts having a blast on the smooth marble grounds.

As we got closer to the Mausoleum, the dens of tightly packed skinny buildings suddenly evaporated and there materialized wide expanses of manicured lawns. Where was the entrance? At one point, I stopped by a group of security guards, obviously on their break — they were sprawled on scooters, checking their phones — and pointed at the mausoleum building, and one of the guards pantomimed, “Go that way, around the block.”

We eventually found an opening in the low fence line — barely one meter tall — and saw a guard standing, well, guard. N. and I tried to look friendly as we followed the other visitors in, but the guard made a face, pointed to our legs and shook his head in disapproval: we were denied entry because of our scandalously exposed knees.

Which was fine — we understood the concept of requiring respectful attire to visit the most revered leader of Vietnam whose face was in every single money denomination of the Vietnamese Dong — but we were miffed to see, as we walked away, that a couple of other tourists who had on shorts just as short as ours were waved in. Chalk it up to another example of the capricious exercise of petty bureaucratic power. Well, Mr. Ho would — and had no choice, really, but to — wait.

***

While waiting for our daughter to join us in our hotel — we were in Vietnam after all to meet her — we struck a conversation with a Finnish businessman who could not stop rhapsodizing about Vietnam — how the food was great, the people friendly, the future prospects of the country exciting. And the old saying about familiarity breeding contempt was true: when I mentioned that we would love to travel to Finland one day, he wrinkled his nose and complained about the long and depressing winters.

We wandered around the streets of Hanoi’s Old Quarter and had our first pho bo in a restaurant that looked more like someone’s home than a proper restaurant: our party of four was shown the back room, where a couple of families with small kids had been already seated around two low tables. There was spirited discussion between the server and one of the moms, and one did not have to have CSI skills to figure out that they were arguing back-and-forth about not wanting to move seats. Our party of four squeezed in, and we tried to send them good vibes and gratitude telephatically, since their English was minimal and our Vietnamese was nonexistent. I found myself sitting awkwardly between two Vietnamese gentlemen, one with a poker face and the other more friendly.

When our bowls of beef noodle soup arrived, we discovered what Vietnamese pho — at least as it was served in Hanoi — was like. In the US, we were used to very large bowls of thick broth with thin rice noodles and mounds of thinly sliced meat; with big bunches of Thai basil, bean sprouts, slices of jalapenos; squirts of Sriracha and sweet peanut sauce. (As I was writing the previous sentence, I realized that the ingredients don’t sound completely Vietnamese…)

Our bowls of pho at the house/restaurant were half the size of their American cousins, with very light but fragrant broth, broad rice noodles that looked like fettuccini, a few slices of beef added almost like an afterthought, with a few sprigs of cilantro; the only condiments offered were wedges of limes and slivers of spicy red peppers — no Sriracha, no peanut sauce, no bean sprouts. Definitely no jalapeños (what were Mexican peppers doing in Vietnamese soup anyway?) Interestingly, offered for free was a plate of fried dough sticks — basically unsweet donut fingers — which, we learned, were to be dipped into the broth, making the dish more filling. It was food not for lingering, but for slurping and nourishing quickly, for those with things to do and places to go.

After thanking the families for sharing the room with us, we wandered — willingly! — around Hanoi’s Old Quarter, where young people claimed the streets on this Saturday night: couples in their private worlds, large groups of boisterous friends, families with young children, tourists from all over the world. Close by was a night market with stands of clothes, accessories, souvenirs, along with food vendors hawking cut-up fruit — a big thing on the streets of Vietnam — meat on sticks, variations on fried dough.

We ended the night with a few beers on — what else? — Hanoi Beer Street, where the streets were almost impossible to navigate because of the gazillion plastic tables and stools strewn about, where locals and tourists sat for drinks and food, where a random guy was dragging around a karaoke machine and giving it his all, where vendors were doing their best to spread love with pink and white balloons, even though Valentine’s Day was still far away.

***

The day began with a herding of the tourists.

By the time the van with a guide arrived in our hotel, a couple of different families were already comfortable, some even asleep. We were again able to admire the superpowers of drivers here in Hanoi: it was a small passenger van — slightly larger than our own van-life van — and yet it deftly maneuvered around the old narrow streets of the old historical quarter of Hanoi — around the cars and motorbikes, around the people darting in-and-out of every corner, around the wandering fruit sellers, around the general chaos in the air. I kept half expecting people to jump into the air, perhaps because a car or motorbike might just get close enough to people to ride over their toes. Surprisingly, the chaos began to ease as we drove away from the city center, until we got onto the highway and began to see farmland.

It was then that we noticed that the Curse Of Uncontrolled Guttural Hacking — COUGH for short — struck again: for the 2.5 hours of the bus ride to the town of Tuan Chau, a couple in the back proceeded to unleash the power of their own phlegm factory to spew forth — literally and figuratively — their germs to one and all. I insisted to N. that he keep his mask on, too, and I proceeded to wince every time I heard the couple cough, sometimes in stereo surround sound.

We arrived at the marina where our guide Lucy surprised us with the loudness of her voice, disproportional to her small frame. Soon enough, we were on the boat and it was time for lunch.

Considering we have eaten in hole-in-the-wall places in Hanoi that would have no chance to pass American sanitation laws but that offered the most delicious meals, the buffet lunch on the boat unfortunately matched expectations for what those outfits usually offer: bland, greasy food that required a few beer to mask the taste.

The haze and smog that had covered the skyline in the morning had burned off enough for us to marvel at the scenery. Chunks of land of different shapes and sizes dotted the waters off the coast. Some were isolated isles by themselves; others seemed as if they sought strength in numbers, bunching themselves up for form small chains of tree-covered rocks. Most of these formations in Ha Long Bay did not have any beaches, making for dramatic pictures of isles jutting straight up from the sea.

Our first stop: Surprising Cave, which according to Lucy, was so named because the first two chambers were small, which made visitors “surprised” that the inner third chamber was so large. She also warned us that the pathway through the cave was one-way only.

We had been to the Luray Caverns in Virginia and to the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, so we understood enough to appreciate the specialness of cave chambers in the middle of an island formation. The first two chambers offered the usual stalactite and stalagmite formations although most of these appeared dry. The third chamber had a couple of small ponds, evidence of water channels within the formation; it also included a rock formation that the locals likened to a turtle, a lucky symbol in Vietnamese culture. The most unusual and special quality of the cave, for me anyway, though, was the ceiling: it looked like as if someone had made a plaster cast of the surface of the sea on a semi-calm day, when small waves were bobbing easily enough to lull seagulls to sleep: the ceiling was covered in what looked like gentle peaks of beaten egg whites.

Unfortunately, the cave was not deep enough to shelter its visitors from a thick layer of heavy humidity that made every pore in one’s body perspire. On the way out, we were walking behind a man dressed in a white shirt, who looked as if he had just walked through a storm. He must have guessed that we had been complaining about the heat too, because he looked back at us and smiled sheepishly and made waving gestures pointing to his drenched shirt.

I forget what Lucy called the second cave, but it was not technically a cave, since we got dropped off in a pier where our choices were to kayak or to hop on a small boat. Given the heat, N. and I opted for the boat. We hopped along a flat bottomed vessel, along with 12 others, maneuvered by a lady covered in a long sleeved uniform, a pointy rice-paddy hat and mask — so for all I know she could have been a celebrity pretending to be a boat driver for the day — who guided the boat with a couple of very long oars. Because we were sitting on the last back row closest to her, N. kept stirring her annoyance by standing up constantly to take pictures; she kept waving him to sit down because he apparently was getting in the way of her maneuvering her oars. The Oar Lady steered us to a crack in one rock formation that allowed for an opening for us to get to a “lake” formed inside a circle of isles. Soon enough, we were being oared back to the pier and back to our boat. Total time of our visit: 20 minutes.

Last stop: Ti Top Island, where a small battalion of tourists had been brought by myriad boats. As a matter of course — we were here, weren’t we? — we joined the other visitors on the short hike up the steps to the viewpoint above, all the while hearing German, French, Hindu, Korean, Spanish. The top offered a 360-degree view of yet more rocky formations in the bay; the crush of international bodies led us to an overwhelming desire to come down the mountain and rest by the beach. Between the many bodies and boats, it took willpower and focus to relax — ironic — but the heat and humidity was such that many opted at least for quick dips in the water to cool down.

We were treated to beautiful sunset on the way back to Tuan Chau… along with the COUGH couple coughing all the way back to Hanoi. (Also relevant because there were quite a few guilty members in our bus party: I’m a firm believer that there must be a special circle in purgatory for people who watch YouTube and Tiktok videos without headphones.)

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that this trip was a treat from our daughter who joined us to mark N.’s special birthday.

***

We met Trang “Tracy” by the shores of Hoan Kiem Lake for a walking tour Hanoi on Day 5 of our stay in the city.

We entered through gates guarded by the four sacred animals of Vietnamese folk religion: dragon, unicorn, turtle and phoenix. (Interestingly, although the real gatekeepers — the ticket-charging authorities — did not seem to care about shorts here, Tracy along with other women were given loose thin robes to cover their scandalously exposed shoulders.) Somehow Tracy’s discussion of the four animals — loosely so, since only one of those listed is an actual animal — veered into Vietnamese students’ superstitions about things to do before taking important tests: students never wash their hair to prevent washing away knowledge.

We crossed the very red Huc Bridge and entered a small room where a couple of massive turtles, former inhabitants of Hoan Kiem Lake and associated with the legends of a battle-winning general, had been preserved and displayed in temperature- and humidity-controlled glass cases. Next door to the turtle building was a temple for venerated general — perhaps the same associated with the turtles? — who people seemed to believe enjoyed offerings of incense, fruit, and Ritz crackers.

Leaving the Hoan Kiem Lake, we wondered the streets of Old Hanoi.

An alley with food stands specialized in whole chickens used for holiday celebrations and weddings. We also stopped by the largest wholesale market in north Vietnam where a dizzying variety of products — fabric, watches, bags, cutlery, pottery, hair accessories — was being bought and sold and packed for transport to small villages near and far.

It was by the one existing gate — the East Gate — that Tracy pointed to the Vietnamese flag and mentioned that the red color signified the blood and sacrifice of the Vietnamese people; that the yellow color signified the skin of the Vietnamese (really?!?); that the five points of the star symbolized five classes of people: intellectuals, peasants, workers, traders and soldiers.

We stopped by an old rusted iron bridge built, according to the plaque, by the French firm of “Dayde & Pille (1899-1902)”.

Beer Street looked completely different in the light of day, ordinary and civilized.

We ended the tour at a coffee shop where the guys — including N. — needed cold beers to beat the humidity of the day and where we traded stories with fellow travelers from Ireland, Germany and Australia.