I had a hotel room waiting for me once I exited the airport just past midnight Bangkok time, and after not nearly enough hours of fitful sleep I got back onto another airplane for the final leg to Hanoi. This one was mercifully short, only an hour and a half long. So now I’m here, in the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.
Welcome Capitalist Dog!
You’d think it would be some sort of minor ordeal to get into a totalitarian state. But the customs agent at the airport barely glanced at my passport before letting me through. Didn’t even check to see if I had a visa or anything. The customs form was a little more particular, though. Along with the usual prohibitions against bringing in drugs, pornography or weapons, there was this item: Children’s toys having negative effects on personality development, social order and security. Wow, that pretty much includes all American toys, doesn’t it?
You can tell a lot about a country in the developing world from the ride into town from the airport. My guess is that they want to make a good first impression. So the airport road is often the best road in the country. And it’s a sobering sight in some countries. But since I plan on spending plenty of time on the roads in this country, I was quite interested in, and well pleased with what I saw.
It was wide and well maintained with clearly marked lanes (that everyone ignored) and smooth shoulders, and it sped my taxi and about 3 million motorcyclists right over the long Long Bien bridge across the Red River and straight into the historic Old Quarter of Hanoi, where my hotel sits.
Hoa Linh Hotel in Hanoi's Old Quarter
It’s Tet here, the lunar New Year festival. Everything is closed. Everyone is visiting relatives and partying. Every ten seconds firecrackers go off somewhere nearby. Everybody’s happy.
I spent most of the first afternoon wandering in and around the old quarter, trying to shake off the cobwebs from my brain and doing my best not to get lost. The quarter is a maze of narrow streets just north of Hoan Kiem Lake, around which all of Hanoi was strolling. Each street here is named for the merchant guild that “owned” it. There’s Hang Gai, Silk Street, and Hang Non, Hat Street, and so on. 36 different Hangs. My hotel is on Hang Bo, Basket Street. Some of the streets still have vendors selling each guild’s specialty, lots of silk vendors on Hang Gai for instance. But I found no basket makers on Hang Bo. Some of the vehicles parked on it are basket cases, but no baskets anywhere in sight.
The street vendors were out in force at Hoan Kiem. When I sat on a bench to rest my legs under a shade tree next to the lake they descended on me like mosquitoes, plying me with postcards, street maps, and various other things I had no desire to buy. This allowed me to triple my Vietnamese vocabulary in one day. In addition to Thank You (Cam On), I have now become quite comfortable with the words for Sorry (Xin Loi) and No (Khong). As street vendors go, though, these weren’t anywhere near as persistent as some I’ve run into on other trips, so I probably won’t have to learn the Vietnamese for “Will you bugger off before I shove those postcards up your nose?”
I didn’t just attract the attention of street vendors, though. Three young guys sat down on the bench next to me and introduced themselves. They told me that they had come into town from the countryside, and were visiting relatives in the big city. The two younger ones had been studying English in school and seemed eager to try it out on me. Their vocabulary was limited, though not nearly as limited as my Vietnamese. Still, we managed to spend a good half hour chatting about this and that. They insisted that I take a picture with each of them so that the folks back home could see that they had spoken with an actual foreign devil. It seemed to make their day.
Hoan Kiem Lake
This morning I set off to run some errands and to take some pictures of the old quarter. Across the wide boulevard from Hoan Kiem Lake I was taking some shots of the motorcycle traffic when a barefoot woman walked by in front of me, wrapped in a Vietnamese flag (and apparently nothing else). She had a strange dignity about her as she began slowly crossing the road, looking neither right nor left. And that dignity lasted right up to the moment she was nearly mowed down by a speeding motorcyclist. But it was only a brief interruption, and she continued on toward the lake, where she doffed the flag and, naked except for some dark blue panties, waded into the water and started swimming toward a little island in the center of the lake.
A crowd had gathered by this time, gawking at the spectacle, talking excitedly and laughing. Some policemen gathered as well, looking stern and ineffectual. Traffic on the boulevard almost came to a halt. The flagless lady climbed out of the water and began slowly walking around the island, pausing only to strike poses and then toss some objects I couldn’t discern into the water. The policemen looked sterner and even more ineffectual. The rest of us were mesmerized.
This performance art lasted about fifteen minutes until she walked back into the water and swam toward the far shore where, upon exiting the lake, she was predictably arrested and taken away.
Allow me to say here that this is not the sort of thing I expected to encounter in Hanoi. Isn’t travel broadening?
Sadly, I doubt I’ll hear any news about this event, as Vietnam seems to suffer from an appalling shortage of tabloid news. And in any case, my guess is that the flag lady is going to be unable to tell her story for some time.
But what do I know?