The landscape is flatter than a chessboard. Hemmed in by cracked concrete dikes, the muddy brown Red River and its little children wind their way through an endless series of neon-green rice paddies on their way to join the Thái Binh River and satisfy the Gulf of Tonkin's endless thirst.
Amid this sea of green are odd sights: clumps of areca palm and banana trees, their broad leaves flapping in the breeze like drowsy birds' wings; French colonial manor houses, their yellow ochre walls and white columns clashing incongruously with the overflowing verdure of the surrounding countryside; and fat water buffalo—their legs, bellies, backs and snouts coated with a slimy veneer of mud, snot, and saliva—wallowing indolently in ponds or slogging through soggy fields.
Running like a seam through this idyllic scene is a broad, straight expanse of ancient asphalt. Trucks, cars, buses, and an overwhelming plethora of scooters—some crammed with as many as five passengers, including unrestrained infants—zip to and fro along this highway. This, then, was the 34-kilometer stretch of the Bac Thăng Long - Noi Bai expressway between Noi Bai Airport and Hanoi's Old Quarter, which I traveled late in the afternoon on July 13th.
I got off the plane and made it through immigration. As I'd predicted, I was immediately accosted by a taxi driver. He was a skinny man of unimpressive height and unassuming appearance, with manic eyes and an energetic demeanor, clad in a light blue short-sleeved work shirt, slacks, and sandals with black socks. He called himself Mr. Anh. He quoted me a price of $20 American for a cab ride to the Hanoi Asia Star Hotel in the Old Quarter. I demurred. I was determined not to be suckered during this trip, as I had on so many others. I sat and tried fruitlessly to get the Noi Bai Airport wifi to work on Miss H's iPad while Mr. Anh sat next to me and fidgeted. Eventually he agreed to drop the price to $18. I computed the exchange rate and figured that was about as good as I was going to get. The triumphant Anh and I left the terminal building and weaved our way through the throng of less courageous taxi drivers to Anh's hot-pink conveyance. We got in, and Mr. Anh swung the car onto an unpaved dirt road which led out of the airport and onto the expressway.
Dirt roads? I wondered silently.
Anh was a great one for conversation. At first I had difficulty discerning that I was indeed not in Korea. I was asked all the usual questions: where was I from, where I was going, how long would I be in Vietnam, and all that sort of thing. Wherever I roam I'm always delighted by how curious the Asian people are about foreigners, no matter what their governments say about us. I'm afraid I wasn't much of a conversationalist, though. I was too busy fretting that I'd paid too much for the ride, feeling sleepy after my horrendous transfer fiasco in China, and trying to soak up the amazing scenes outside the window.
After 40 minutes we rolled into the northern outskirts of Hanoi. The rice paddies gave way to crumbling, weather-stained concrete buildings—or the skeletons of buildings—into which people had crammed the meager implements of their lives: steel bowls, wicker baskets, rusty bicycles, plastic chairs and stools, laundry on lines, flowerbeds under windows. Heaps of gravel and piles of rubbish adorned the narrow, dark alleys and uneven gutters. Lean-ribbed stray dogs sniffed among them for sustenance. Shirtless, bony, olive-skinned men lounged in doorways and smoked, while their women washed or cooked or arranged goods in shop windows. Boys—their hair uniformly buzz-cut—ran around kicking beanbags or roughhousing. Wheezing, droning scooters ran hither and thither without rhyme or reason. What few four-wheeled vehicles there were looked swamped and half-drowned, like buffalo in a rain-swollen river.
Anh—who by this time had learned to keep his mouth shut—turned off the freeway and directed his tiny pink cab into the madness of the Old Quarter. I'd thought some of the older Korean neighborhoods could be narrow and dark, but I hadn't seen anything like this place. The streets were just wide enough for a compact car. People walked in the gutters because the sidewalks were choked with heaps of garbage, shopkeepers' wares, and clumps of parked scooters. Shabby convenience stores, scooter garages, souvenir shops, cafés, and greasy spoons jockeyed for position in each tiny alley, all of which seemed to connect as though this neighborhood had been planned and built by a legion of sentient spiders. They'd trapped a lot of flies, that's for sure: I saw foreigners everywhere. Tall, svelte, blonde-haired European university students (and their dumpy, frumpy parents), tattooed American hipsters, suntanned Australian youths, oily backpackers, fresh-faced and hairless urban adventurers. It made me sick just to look at them.
I actually only had 15 American dollars. I gave them to Mr. Anh and paid him the rest in Vietnamese dong. Making some later calculations in my room, I discovered that I'd given him approximately $5 US in dong, rounding out his asked-for price of $20 after all. Oh well. He was a nice guy and didn't take any detours.
I kicked the door to the cab open, slung my ten-ton backpack over my shoulder, and entered the lobby of the Hanoi Asia Star. It amazes me how Asian entrepreneurs manage to cram their sundry shopfronts and boutiques and businesses onto a lot the average American would consider fit for a victory garden. The hotel had about ten or twelve rooms, each of which was about 344 square feet. Nothing too small, but when you consider that they'd stuck the whole place onto a lot that couldn't have been much more than 900 feet square, it becomes quite a feat.
I got checked in and collapsed in my room. I'd had about a 90 minutes of sleep in the last 36 hours. Darkness was falling fast and I was hungry. To allay both these problems I changed clothes and, despite heat and humidity that resembled a giant warm-blooded amoeba trying to absorb and digest me Blob-style, I strode a few hundred meters west to the night market.
I was bitterly disappointed. Once again I felt like I was back in Korea. I saw nothing but cheap knock-offs of Western products, poorly-made souvenirs, gaudy baubles, hackneyed gift ideas, and fashion disasters. The food pickings were likewise pretty slim. Unlike Korea, however, the hawkers didn't just stand behind their stalls and call out to you: they hired underage boys to jump into your path and shove a laminated menu under your nose. This happened to me twice: prepubescent, crop-haired youths in jeans and tennis shoes leaped out of nowhere with English menus in their hands, flicking them with their fingers in precisely the same way that a fleshmonger on Las Vegas Boulevard would do with his smutty business cards. Free-market capitalism, even with reminders of the country's nominal political stance in the background:
After a bit of wandering I located a street-corner restaurant. I don't know how else to describe it. A wispy shrimp of a woman, her skin brown and covered with a shiny film of sweat and cooking grease, stood at an open-air kitchen, surrounded by billowing steam and the entrancing smell of charcoal. Short metal tables (only two feet off the ground) and the omnipresent blue plastic stools were arranged under an awning up against the wall of an adjoining building, and here were seated a bewildering array of locals and foreigners. Teenage boys flitted among them, delivering giant bottles of Bia Ha Noi and plates of steaming food. The smells—and, I'll confess, the sight of other foreigners—drew me in. I found an empty stool next to an attractive and well-dressed young Vietnamese couple and sat there in the sweltering heat, my linen shirt stuck to my back and the blue bandanna on my forehead dripping sweat into my eyes. I ordered the pigeon-heart-and-gizzard pho and an oozing bottle of Bia Ha Noi.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, I crave your attention. For here, after sweating my balls off all evening and stepping over heaps of garbage and refuse on the way...this was the point at which I started falling in love with Vietnam.
I got an enormous plate of delicious pigeon-heart-and-gizzard pho with noodles, a mint salad, and a 450-ml bottle of Bia Ha Noi...for less than five dollars. Stuffing yourself with delicious food for next to nothing, ladies and gentlemen, is happiness. I didn't take any pictures...sorry. I set out on this journey with a set of ironclad rules which gradually got looser and looser as the miles went by. One of these rules was "absolutely NO food selfies." I'll tell you the others later.
As I was waiting for dinner to arrive, the cute Vietnamese couple next to me started talking to me. The young lady introduced herself as Jenny. She was from Ho Chi Minh City, and her boyfriend was from some remote province in the south. They were both up in Hanoi on holiday, sampling the local cuisine. Jenny asked me the same questions Mr. Anh had: name, rank, posting. I, in turn, asked how they'd met and what jobs they did. The boyfriend didn't speak much English, so Jenny did all the talking. She worked in an office and made good money, and her boyfriend was trying to get a job in the city so he could move away from his crappy job in the sticks and they could save up enough to get married. They'd managed to scrape together enough for this trip, though. They were mostly here for the food, for (as I was to be reminded many times during this journey) the culinary differences between North and South Vietnam are many and variegated.
The pivotal moment came when I asked Jenny what advice she might have for me, a wet-behind-the-ears tourist who'd never been to Vietnam before. She gave me a mile-wide grin and said "Get out of Hanoi!"
No problem, I thought. I have a train to catch at 11:00 p.m. tomorrow night.
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