Hanoi poloi.

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Hanoi temple

(Dont forget the vidoes to the left)



I believe that it is of the utmost importance to holiday.
More so than ever after Vietnam.
One day I will travel around on 3 dollars a day, washing little and eating less, but for the time being it is an amazing thing to be able to visit a country with a reasonable budget and time in one place to soak up an atmosphere.
It is also more important to get the hell out of wherever you are and remember that the rest of the world does not tick to the same clock as you.
And especially not to the Japanese tanoy.

In this way, I believe one can stay level headed and keep life in perspective little more.

However, I also realized that to travel to a country in such short a time as 9 day is far beyond the reach of understanding, but at least I can take solace in the fact that I went rather than not.

Stick North. I again new nothing apart from what Prof. Hollywood had taught me about Vietnam to the extent that I wasn’t really sure where Ho Cho Minh or Hanoi city were when I booked my flight.

Ignorance is bliss, which now explains my next destination Myanmar (Burma), as this was the best blind choice to have made. I have never been a sun chaser but I am certainly a fan so when I found out that most people travel to the south of Vietnam and visit the many beautiful beach paradises, islands and the famous Mekong delta I thought I had rushed into things again, and that I was once again chasing the rainy season around Asia. After Malaysia at Christmas, rainy season、Vietnam, rainy season and returning to Japan for, yes again the rainy season, I was starting to feel like I was home in England again.

Anyway, shut up Nick, did you go to Vietnam or not!?!?!

Right so I just managed to get my 80 pound (!!) visa the day before I was to leave and arrived in the airport convinced that it must be false or something and was pleasantly surprised when I got in on time and managed to book a hotel at the airport and was there an hour later. Yes that’s right, a hotel, not hostels for me this time. A week is too short a time to worry about money in a country like this and it the only holiday ever where I have arrived with most of my money left over.

Hanoi, is sweaty, crowded and noisy and you really do feel like you are in East Asia when you walk around it. I loved it. It had all the charm of Malaysia but you felt even more so that there was a defining culture here. I could picture myself living in a city like Hanoi, and after meeting a lot people who did, I have seriously considered it.

Pavements are just more space to try and sell stuff and so every square inch seems to taken up with table and stools to eat off or crouched rice field hated women selling fruit. Everyone is selling something in fact, and a foreign tourist, people assume you are a buying everything. In fact I will get it out of the way first as I want to end on a good note about Vietnam because I really did have one of the best times ever there, but the country does have a lot of problems. I think tourism has hit Vietnam very hard and has on the surface not been such a great thing for it.
The boarders of Vietnam were flung open to tourism in ‘93 after a total foreign blockade and with a terrible economy (which is growing fast) meaning crazily cheap prices and a stunningly beautiful country and people to boot, it has been rammed busting at the seams with tourists ever since. With that type of money pouring in and the opportunities it presents, foreigners have become, or at least I felt like, a walking dollar sign. The constant incessant hampering and haranguing wears you down and if your not careful turn you into a very suspicious and paranoid person. However, in saying that one cannot blame people as if they manage to overcharge you on anything or you make one little mistake, then they can end up with the equivalent which might takt them days to make working elsewhere.
Once, the initial confusion with money and look of being complete baffledness leaves you find that people actually do stop harassing you and you can even strike a conversation with someone, as overall these are fantastic, friendly people and can’t be blamed for also be opportunistic in a tourist society. Overall, however, the amount of tourists and the frequency at which you are hawked at diminishes greatly away from the cities and it often means you get to talk to the locals a bit.
But I would say that, you should go to this country with an open mind, and a fair but firm manner you have to potentially too much money, for the average person to pass up selling you junk. The majority are just making a buck.
However, the only ones who really did get on my nerves were the taxi bike men who were mostly dicks. And were really offering you quite a crap, but necessary service. Nice hats though.

The lonely planet is a cursed but useful tool or in this case the rough guide from 4 years ago. It has a uncanny knack of luring all foreigners to the same place and thus kind of has a habit of having to been loved and hated on your journeys. However, it can also be seen as a trap that bottlenecks tourist to places which you can then avoid and in that sense it is a god send, as long as you never go to any of the places that are in the lonely planet. But, what if everyone else is thinking the same thing and by avoiding the places to avoid we all inadvertently end up in the same place.

That spiraling thought whirled around my head as I stared at the first offer of a “sight” the perfume pagoda and tried to decide if this was one of those places, or indeed if Ha Long Bay and Sa Pa were. This all seem to blow my mind a little and with the fact had only a 9 days in Vietnam I decided that I would book a tour.

I have never done tours before for the simple reason that they look crap, but I thought what the hey, and as I was Billy no mates on this holiday IO might meet some peeps.

Half an hour later and had somehow managed to book my entire holiday down to the hours in between that I would rest and what I would do.

This regrettably was not necessarily the best choice but it did take care of everything, but put into the hands of fate as to how it would all go.

Anyway

France. Those crazy French get everywhere, and no-more so than in North Vietnam. As with a lot of things though this has left a pretty cool, Parisian aire to this semi tropical city and although I much preferred the craziness of the Old quarter, the wide boulevards and French colonial housing of the French quarter was pretty damn cool. The most famous of these being the Hanoi Opera House. The scene of old Hanoi, and a few revolutions and bombings, this building, was about the only place I new about before I　came to Vietnam and I thought it would be a good place to get my bearings, after finding the supposed Huan Kiem Lakes tranquility, actually just a pick up ground for the “I think we have met somewhere before - i.e. that’s a nice camera” people, and crowds of people trying to sell me chewing gum for 5 dollars.
So I headed on past or rather through the hustle and bustle of the streets intot eh French quarter.

I say through as Vietnam has the kind of Italian system of crossing in that you just walk out in the street for lack of any traffic lights, and hope for the best. However, unlike Italy, the vehicles don’t stop and rather snake their way around you. Luckily in such a dangerously over congested country, you really cannot get over 30 mph anywhere so this isn’t as crazy as it sounds, built it does still shit you up at first and you have to place a certain amount of trust into the hand of these, constantly beeping, three to a bike, jugernaughts.

Give you a certain feel for the country straight away though. People here are certainly living life and it is everything that one would expect of Asia. Overcrowded, hot, sweaty, noisy, everyone trying to sell something and generally alive.

The Opera house was a beautiful building and I noting that it is rarely possible to get inside it other than at sporadic performances, I decided to get a ticket to one of the sporadic performances happening that evening.

So I rolled up a couple of hours later and got a look inside, feeling pretty James bond in the Opera house in Vietnam, with all the Commie flags everywhere and rich looking Vietnamese businessman. In fairness the ticket was pretty cheap - about 15 pounds but that is a hell of a lot of money over here.

I felt like a spy, and was contemplating diving through a window for no reason, when I suddenly realized half way throughout that I had got the picture. Its not that I don’t like that sort of music - in fact it was an amazing talented Vietnamese solo pianist who was pretty amazing - I just suddenly realized that I　had seen the building and had the experience and that uniformed men where not come to arrive to take me away for questioning so I leaped over the piano player kicked the steward down and barrel rolled out the fire exit and went to wet my whistle.

2 GREAT DRINKS OF VIETNAM

Bia Hoi, is very weak, very cheap, very refreshing, house brewed lager. I mean cheep like maybe 20p a class. It is a spatiality in N Vietnam and because it has a shelf life of 24hours you can often see men downing a few glasses before work in the morning when it is said to be at its best, before hopping on their motorbike taxis (!) possibly to their doom.
In that sort of climate, it’s the stuff of dreams.
Viet caffe. Once again the French must have had their influence here but I would say the that this is some of the best coffee I have ever drank. Its very thick and very black and sweeter than normal coffee and you have it with a dollop of condensed milk. Good power juice.

That night I tried a couple of both in the old quarter to wash down some pretty fine food.

The next day I thought that I would escape the madness of the old quarter and do the sightseeing bit.

Most of the famous sites to be seen are in one area to the north of Hanoi, in the government section.

This included Ho Chi Minhs Mausoleum and Museum, and Ho Chi Minh Square.

I got a motorbike tax out and decided to the Museum of war a miss. Ho Chi Minh Square is very big and very square - no lie! It is probably not that indifferent to Mao Su Dong square, or Tiananmen Square. There a lots of soldiers in white and they guard what is a pretty horrific looking block where you see the boss man if you get there earlier than the Nick rises.

It’s strange because he was quite a minimalist kind of guy I gather and built himself a small Bamboo house in the back of the palace in which to retire in. The black council estate looking building there now is not quite what you can envisage him wanting. Not to mention he asked not to be embalmed.

There were a few awaked moment here when I suddenly noted I was the only foreigner and the impact of where I was hit me, and I suddenly noticed that I mother was whispering into her children’s ears and pointing at me with a not so happy look in his eye.

However, at that moment a man approached me and asked if I would take a picture of him, and I did and he returned the favor. On asking where he was from he told me Ho Chi Minh in the south and we talked a while about random things, mostly English etc.

This came to be a common them and I found that I had rather a lot a meaningful encounters with people originally from the south. And possibly not so many from the North. Having not been to the south I cannot say but I think that, unfortunately foreigners don’t get such a great reception in the north.

This was later confirmed as I followed the book for want of trying Bit Tet and variation of Biftek which quite frankly I had never heard of but the idea of Vietnamese Beef being served up with French bread and pomme frites made my chops salivate like a sheepdog in a jeep in summer.

In short it was mighty fine and I was joined by a man who it turned out lived in the apartment upstairs and spoke very good English. I cannot not remember his name but I have his business card somewhere and one day will send him some of the pictures from our night.

For lack of any other seats we sat together and he had a rather large bottle of what looked like brandy but was actually Vietnamese sort of rum. After a while a couple of his chef friends from the restaurant sat down with us and we drank the night away. The Vietnamese, as every Asian, like to drink and can hold their booze pretty well I though as most of them drink this kind of horrific vodka that comes in mini bottle drunk straight.

After finishing off 2 bottles of this stuff and discussing what I should do when I go to he perfume pagoda (say Phat lots of times, which means god)he invited me up to his flat for so more drinks - I did my suspicious radar check and decided that he was basically a lonely guy who family all lived abroad.

What a house. The Vietnamese know what to do with a little space. This guy it turned out was quite well off, in manufacture, I forget now what, and his wife and daughters all lived in Moscow working for the government.

His wall was decorated with very old pictures including many of him during the war.
He fought on the side o f the American and it looked like he was a reasonably high up officer, which surprised me that he was living in the north. He also had a killer roof garden and amazing old dark wood Vietnamese furniture. It was pretty sweet, I hope to have a house like that one day.
After knocking back a few more and drunkenly tearing out some hundred year old Vietnamese classics, he sent more on my way although I could have happily stayed there and drank his Vietnamese Rum and plowed a few more versus of the Terminator them to him.

After that I felt that if nothing else I had really met a real Vietnamese person and shared a little bit of time into eh world. A true gent and now I think about it I should send him those pictures.

I also decided to take my first cyclo ride as it was chucking it down outside and it was, as expected crap.

I never like those things as they are basically like prams for adults. But the fact is most people who pick you up, don’t have clues where they are going. So after going at eh speed of a snail and asking every person on every corner where my hotel was, I decided to pay and walk. Daijoubs.

Right, so the perfume pagoda. It rained and it was the National holiday for winning the American war and really busy, but it was actually pretty good. The journey to the pagoda was the best bit. Being rowed down a river in silence for an hour in truly stunning green mountain scenery by a 12year old was great. Not that she was 12.

The pagoda itself is the sort of Mecca for the Buddhist North of Vietnam, and because of Labor Day and the winning of the war day coinciding it meant that every government employee and policeman etc was trekking their way up the mountain to touch the stone and pray.

I took the cable. Ha-ha.


Well, who cares anyway, I am not Buddhist and I do my fair share of mountain climbing anyway. At the top was not what I called a pagoda but a cave, which became the theme of pagodas as we went on.

It was pretty amazing though but it was so crowded it was hard to take it all in.

Having a tour guide also means that you get given a time limit, which mean your kind of racing around to get a look. The guide was a cool guy though. The picture as more that I can anyway. It was cool.

The next day, I left early in mini bus to go to Ha Long bay. This is the place that everyone banged on about and I was looking g forward to 2 days sailing and hiking through the jungle.

However, as is often he case with these things, that was clearly too idyllic to be true and we happened to have a real eejet of a tour guide.

This was probably the only place I could not have got to on my own as it was madness when we arrived at the port to get the boat and I cannot picture how I would of achieved this without being torn to shreds by tour guides and touts.

The boat was in fact pretty nice and we got to sail around the bay which was beautiful and ended up in a cave and doing all that kayaking bit. The next day the 2 of us were dropped off at Cat Ba Island for a brief but probably adequate trek on this national park island.
As with all of this experiences, it was the people I met who made the experience, I ended up hanging out with this Dutch girl who was exploring SE Asia and a French guy who was studying at Hanoi University. There were lots of other cool peeps on the boat but the Dutch girl and me split off form them for the second day on Cat Ba Island.

Unfortunately, with the ridiculous tour guide who’s name was Zung, who spent most of the time talking about how cheap the girls were in Vietnam and disappearing of to the toilet and coming back very hyper and even more annoying.

After taking us to an extremely expensive, but very good, floating sea restaurant, we decieded to ditch him and head out to the nightlife of Cat Ba.

In fact, this is the first time I had been to a since I had left London and I was suddenly very up for the idea, and it turned out be an interesting experience.
Still being a communist country and this being ever present, the grip on the average person life from corruption, to taxes, to bribery and propaganda, is very visible. No more so than in a little club called the salty blue tuna or something like that to do with the sea. I guess for North Vietnam only just catching up with the rest of the world, the idea of a dance club must still scare the crap out of the authorities.
In this massive club there were only about 20 people in a venue made for about 3-400, all concentrated in the centre dancing to pretty old Euro dance crap, and you suddenly noticed that surrounding the 20 were four uniform policemen, batons in hand.
Whenever the men and women got to the kind of grinding stage, these very tall guys would break up the short lived affair by pressing them apart giving them a stern talk and return to looming over us.
It sobered me up. I lost my urge to dance and began sinking into my Bia Ha Noi. However, it dawned on me I was witnessing a small a rebellion, and it comforted me to see these people having a good time and the look of the young policemen who clearly wanted to be drinking with these people and intercepting dance inappropriate dance moves.
I left there feeling I understood the north a little better, as I could not imagine this was the case in the south somehow, and I felt a slight connection with these people. We were all young and just wanted to have a good time.

And the lord said “let there be rain” and there was, lots and lots of it. However, it was a sticking kind of heat that needed to be freshened up so it felt good. Back in Hanoi, I had only a few hours before I was back on a bike heading for the train station.

I like trains. It IS the best way of getting from A to B, and I don’t care what you say. I also like the idea of getting night trains and the ride to Sa Pa was done in true North by North West style.

It was a nice little old school dark wood train with old Vietnamese music playing in the background, and I shared a cabin with 2 Germans and an Irish guy called Rory who was a great laugh. All seemed to be suffering, greatly in Vietnam and after traveling around SE Asia were looking forward to leaving. In fact the general impression that I got was that from people coming to Vietnam which was a shame as I had such a great time there, but each to their own as they say, and it didn’t stop us from having an amusing train journey.

Automatically the collecting was messed up by my hotel at the station and so I jumped into a spare minibus us the mountains to the town of Sa Pa with a crowd of local farmers. The road up was beautiful and the mist rolling in off the mountains would occasionally reveal a group of the many local ethnic minority groups making the way up and down the hills with ploughs and baskets.

Now let’s clear this up. I didn’t exactly jump at he idea of a “Visit to an ethnic minority village” as I have never been down with the human zoo thing. I envisaged many awkward moments and embarrassing bartering for penny whilst kids covered in mud looked on. I have always thought of myself in bed on a Sunday morning slightly hung over and a group of Japanese tourists coming in to my room, cameras blazing, and the rage that would set in, and I have acquainted this to human tourism.
But it did seem to be the one place that was a bit more out of the way and the chance to do a bit of trekking up in the highlands of Vietnam on the border of China was just what I needed. Mainly because I had lugged my boots around everywhere and wanted to use them.

Anyway I thought that maybe it would be a good experience and I gain something from it. Either way it was included in every tour and you seemed to have not much choice.


I met my guide who, Cahn, who used to be a teacher but had given up the job so as to improve his teaching by touring people around town. It looked just as easy to ask the local indigenous people but I was already signed up with him. Off we went.
I would exactly call it trekking but it was an interesting day. The actual villages were just next to the small town of Sa Pa and by walking 20 minutes down the road you would suddenly by in the muddy hillside life of the Hmong people.
Here a town seemed to made up of about 1000 people, although where they all were I do not know unless they were all living 100 to a house. A possibility.

The area is known as on of he poorest in Vietnam and this was very evident and I saw my first real signs of poverty.

Mostly pigs, ducks and chickens were being raised alongside rice and corn. The men supposedly were all out in the field and were almost non existent. The women, however, were heavily on the cases of the tourist trying to sell the beautiful hand made and hand died clothes.
Most of which were pretty good quality but a lot were not. All of the Hmong people dressed the same and the outfits were beautiful to see amongst this mud and greenery.
They also had acquired a rather astounding level of English with which to try and flog you their merchandise, and particularly in the younger children I though of my own student back in Japan and wondered if they could hold a conversation half as fluent as this. Money is a great motivator, maybe I’ll just agree to split part of paycheck with my students.
Along the way it had been arranged that we would drop in at a primary school at lunch.

I really enjoyed this as I suddenly realized that I in fact worked in a primary school, and my god, we have something in common! Lets talk!!!
The two teachers (yes I have forgotten their names) were very nice and seemed generally excited when I said I worked in a primary school and we talked for a long time about the differences between the two countries, and England for that matter. However, when the conversation drifted towards salaries I noticed the time and left before it got awkward. I met some of the kids outside who were also all wearing unilever rucksacks over their traditional hand made garments. The school it turns out we sponsored by Unilever, who in exchange for a few adverts on some very photographed children had helped build and maintain the school.
Hmm…

No comment.

Next we took lunch off the side of a ravine and attracted the interest of some Dzao people who are more amazingly dressed in all red with shaved heads and eyebrows. They seemed less interested in selling us things and were enjoying just standing around talking about us.
Next on to a home visit which I freezed up at the mention. But off we went.
I reality, the modernization and war that persisted into this area up until the late 80s with the invasion by China, has left this people very poor and very open to loosing their culture altogether.
During the war and after the Vietnam War Ho Chi Minh granted these people the right to govern them selves and they thus were spared the collectivization and forced integration such as in China and Cambodia. However, with very little money the appeal abandoning the traditional life has been saved a little in part by tourism.

This, of course is a double-edged sword, but I do not think that many Hmong people would be rocking around in their garb farming the land and making attractive belts if there were no tourist coming. So, with a feeling that the ball had begun rolling, I decided that I would just have a look and see and if it were a disaster I would have learnt a lesson.

It was in fact with very welcoming smiles that we were brought into eh house and although at the end there was a token buying of various bags and trinkets that I will never use, I found that it was a positive experience. We had a cup of tea, were shown around the barn like house that was home to about 20 people! And then went on our way. The trinkets were of course ludicrously cheap and I felt that it was a fiar exchange. Whether I would do it again, I probably wouldn’t but I felt that I hadn't committed some horrific act of unethical tourism.

The greatest thing was that you could actually speak to the people and although we were intruding on their lives they seemed very excited about us being there. I wont say we were doing them a great favor but there was a small but reasonable exchange that kept them putting dinner on the table and made tourist have something that they b¥maybe found incredibly difficult, talking to indigenous people.

Either way, as I was heading back I felt ok and that I had seen a beautiful bit of the countryside and some beautiful people in it. Nice.

Rain. Ha. I bought a full piece loser waterproof set that near about saved the next day, as it didn’t really stop raining all day. We set of again, this time with a Swiss woman and a guy from, that’s right, Essex. Gosh! I've forgotten his name but he was a real decent bloke, but the lady didn’t stop complaining about how much of a shame it was that it was raining and how much it spolit the view.

I of course was laughing all the way in my bin bag. And enjoyed this day even more.
We took a much more trekked route this day and were instantly seized upon by hoards of Hmong people trying to sell us my trinkets. It seemed that their logic was to walk with you all the way and then hope that they would buy something form you at the end of the trek.
I kind of guessed this at the beginning but still bought some stuff off them. However, I gave all of these things away as gifts when I returned and it they were so cheap it didn’t seem to matter.

The rout took us winding through a river valley to a larger village. Here walked through and saw a much more run down school and housing consisting of nothing more than planks and corrugated roofs.

Again the day panned out much the same as although you were constantly being hounded by the girls to but from them it meant that you ended up having long conversations with them as they were all “fascinated” to know your age and if you were married etc. I found it all quite amusing I guess and I didn’t t get worked up like other people. I mostly wound them up and we ended up laughing about it as they saw that I wasn’t going to buy their stuff.
In the end I bought a few things in exchange for a photo of them which was one of the best I got that in Vietnam.

I finished the back on the orient express style train and with a family from Ho Chi Minh who stayed up late chatting to me about studying in Britain as their daughter - who English again was fantastic - wanted to move abroad. We would have been up all night if I hadn’t said that I really was tired and had been on my feet all day.

Good people.



I spent the day wandering around Hanoi trying to get everything together to make sure I didn’t go home seeing things and saying “I crap I could have bought that in Vietnam for $1!!” and then sat drinking more Vietnamese coffees and my last Bia Hoi before heading back east

….to the island.

Vietnam made a great impression on me.
Much more so than Malaysia did.
Whether this is because I traveled alone and met so many great people, or maybe it is because I had many first time experiences there, or simply because this is a truly unique country, I do not know.

It doesn’t matter anyway - it enough to make me want to go back. One day I will and head South.

Most importantly, the thing to do is to go places, go often, and go with an open mind.

If I do this I will continue to be pleasantly surprised.

Home is where the heart is, but away is where fire is light.

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Photos

Colourful girls.
Mong and Chia - Hmong people, Lao Chai, Sa
Pa.

The Hanoi Opera House
Symbol of Hanoi and its past.

Hoan Kiem Lake -Tortoise.
Den Ngoc Son - the err, other symbol of hanoi.

Hmong girls.
Ta Vahn village.

Life on the ocean waves.
Ha Long bay floating houses.

Lassis?
Not lassie. Although he was on the menu too. These are like big rats - nice. Think I have spelt it wrong though.

Ninja turtle.
Base of the Perfume Pagoda.

Grotto.
If nothing else I learnt that a grotto is not an imaginary place of elves and imps but a big cave where people dwell. Ha Long Bay.

Mini mountain view.
Ca Ba National Park.

Almost deserted beach.
Cat Ba Island.

There we go!
The classic photo op.

Floating restaurants
Cat Ba Island

Dinner
Ah the guilt, but his tastiness outwayed his personality.

Las vegas of the east.
Cat Ba at night.

Almost the orient express
Night train to Sa Pa.

What you call intensive farming.
Ta Vanh village - Sa Pa

Cahn
Our guide. Nice guy.

bye bye Hanoi.
You will be missed...