Hanoi's Old Quarter

Before I begin, here are the rules which governed—or initially governed—my trip through Southeast Asia. 

1. No food selfies
2. No foreign food (meaning Western or American)
3. No getting suckered—bargain for everything
4. Wherever possible, travel by train

As a result, I didn't take photos of any of the foods I ate in Hanoi, more's the pity. I'll just have to make do with other people's, I guess. Thank Gawd for the Internet. 

I had a lovely, full sleep the night of July 13th, after catching barely ninety minutes in 36 hours. I awoke at mid-morning, "had a good gap and a stretch," and peered out the window:

Anvil clouds were already piling up in every quarter of the bright blue sky. I made a mental note to buy an umbrella. The Hanoi Asia Star provided a free breakfast, so I sat in the tiny two-table dining room and had an omelet with a buff, broad-shouldered Singaporean fellow named Dylan. He and his sister were visiting Hanoi for a day before haring off to Ha Long Bay. As soon as I budged outside the air-conditioned oasis of my room I'd begun to sweat, but Dylan was dry as a bone. Upon hearing of my own travel plans, he cautioned me that Singapore would likely be even hotter and wetter than Hanoi, to which I reacted with some dismay. 

I went back up to my room, e-mailed my parents to let me know I'd arrived safely, updated my journals, and slathered on sunscreen. For some inexplicable reason, I decided not to pocket my rain poncho—figuring, perhaps, that it would be easy to find and buy a cheap bumbershoot at a convenience store somewhere.

I stopped in at the first store I saw to buy 1.5 liters of water. It cost 12,000 VND—about 75 cents at the time. No umbrellas though.

Next stop was Hoan Kiem Lake:

  

I wasn't hurrying. I was strolling. Even so, I was drenched. Great wet spots appeared on my linen shirt, the bandanna I'd stuck under my hat was already soaked through, and my thighs were as wet and squeaky as trained dolphins. My sweaty fingers smudged the postcards I bought and addressed and sent at the moldy, water-stained French colonial post office.

My luck ran out during the long walk from the post office to the Maison Centrale—better known as the "Hanoi Hilton." The skies broke. The clouds weltered up and burst. There was nothing gradual about this kind of rain: full in the grip of monsoon season, the Vietnamese skies vomited all their contents upon me with wanton abandon. One minute it was dry; the next minute the air was filled with drops of water that would have done that godawful third Matrix movie proud. I thought I'd been sopping with sweat earlier. Now I was truly soaked. Unwilling to appear unprepared or chagrined, I stood defiantly out in the open for a few moments; then I slunk under the eaves of a nearby government building with a few other feckless souls. We stood there for some 20 minutes, trying to wait the damn storm out. It was too wet to light up a smoke. None of us would meet each others' eyes. All of us felt the caustic shame of being caught without an umbrella or poncho during monsoon season. 

Presently, there was the wet slapping sound of flip-flops on rainy pavement. A pack of dripping young English and Irish women, their tank tops and shorts plastered enticingly to their bodies by the fruits of the monsoon, sprinted up to our hiding-place. They inquired of everyone present whether the Hanoi Hilton was nearby. Your humble correspondent, having faithfully memorized the route before leaving his hotel room, pointed these women in the right direction. Together we strode soggily around the corner to the Maison Centrale.

The original door—the one John McCain probably walked through, the putz.

 

This place was yet another letdown. Ninety-five percent of it was devoted to the cruel oppression of the French during the colonial era, and the bitter tortures and deprivations the noble Vietnamese resistance fighters endured at their captors' hands. One small room was devoted to the American fighter pilots who were incarcerated here during the Vietnam War, and even that was decorated with propaganda: staged photographs showing American P.O.W.s raising chickens, decorating Christmas trees, attending church services, and holding chess tournaments. The entire upper level of one building was devoted to giant, tacky brass plaques memorializing the glorious names of the Vietnamese heroes held by the French (second-to-last picture above). I was put off by the whole thing, frankly. I couldn't wait to get back outside into the sunny, drying streets and make my way to the Temple of Literature. 

Now, here's the funny part: remember way back in 2013 when I went to Japan, and I saw the famous Zōjō-ji temple in Tokyo? And I got the prayer etiquette all wrong? And all during my train trip through Japan I kept getting it wrong such that, if any Shinto deities actually heard my prayers, they'd have either laughed them off or put an eternal curse on me?

I kept up my streak at the Temple of Literature, a Confucian school to which the Lý dynasty sent their best and brightest youths. I forgot to take off my hat while donating a few dong and saying a brief prayer. May I be damned to ignorance forevermore.  

Does your washroom look this cool?

These four pillars carried an inscription in Chinese admonishing horsemen to dismount already, gosh dang it to heck. 

I caught a cab back to the hotel, hung up my wet things, and walked back to a likely neighborhood I'd seen north of Hoan Kiem Lake, which was packed with eateries. I found a tiny shop the precise size and shape of a scooter garage that sold bun cha, fried pork slices in broth with vermicelli, with as much minced garlic and sliced pepper as you'd care to add (and the omnipresent complimentary mint salad).

from Wikimedia Commons

I bolted the lot down, walked another block and stopped in at a foreigner's bar for some nem (Vietnamese sausage wrapped in rice paper) and two more 450-ml bottles of Bia Ha Noi. 

from Wikimedia Commons

Okay, I'm stopping there. I'll tell you about the rest of this evening, and boarding the express train to Saigon, in the next entry. 

first night in Hanoi

Picture, if you will, a pale blue sky crowded with wispy, windblown cumulonimbus clouds, through which the brassy sun glitters down upon the late-afternoon haze below. 

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.