Cruising the Red River

This is my 50th blog and it's about the river that carries my name. In 1954 my father, who was a teenager from southern Vietnam, traveled on a Polish ship to Hanoi for training, hoping 2 years later he would go back home as a cadre. The American war started and the country was divided into north and south for 21 years. He met my mother, a Hanoian woman, in the early 1970s. They married and settled down in Hanoi, before he had a chance to return home to see his parents in 1975, when the country was reunited. My parents gave me the name “Red River” in memory of Hanoi, where they met and had decided to live together for the rest of their lives, while my sister was given the name of his home town in southern Vietnam.

The river which originates in Yunnan province of China comes into Vietnam at Lào Cai province and runs through northern Vietnam (including Hanoi). It’s called “Red River” which is the chief river of northern Vietnam (1,175 km long). The river has red water due to alluvium (silt). It also forms a great delta, before entering the Gulf of Tonkin at Nam Định province.

When I was a little girl, my family lived near the river outside the dike system. We experienced many floods over the years, especially during the high water season from July to September. I still remember the day when we woke up to find all pots/basins floating around our beds and we had to walk around in the water. Power was cut off on those days and we had to move to our grandparents house or my father’s office for a few days. Nowadays, there are rarely flooding on the river, thanks to Hoà Bình hydropower plant built in the upstream.

My father worked as a water engineer. His work related to the protection of the dike system in Hanoi and the northern provinces. I remember seeing pictures of termites on many books my father had in our house. The dike system is now built with concrete, but back then it was mainly built with soil and covered with grass. During floods, many large sand bags as well as concrete blocks were placed at the gates of the dike system to prevent flooding in the city. My father said there were 3 levels of flood warning. There are some neighboring provinces near Hanoi that would be drained flood in emergency cases, if the flood threatened to endanger Hanoi city and the dike that protected the city. Fortunately, this case has never happened.

The photos in this blog were taken on Sunday 27 July 2008, when I took a one day Red River cruise. The boat left the wharf at 7:30am and we were back at 5:30pm. We visited Dầm temple and Đại Lộ temple in Hà Tây province, Chử Đồng Tử temple in Hưng Yên province and on the way back to Hanoi, the boat stopped at Bát Tràng ceramic village. A ticket for the boat trip costs VND 210,000 (approx US$13), including lunch and folk song performance. There were 2 singers from Bắc Ninh province who performed folk songs “Quan họ” and “Dân ca” of northern Vietnam. One of the girls wore traditional dress of Bắc Ninh province and the other one wore traditional dress of northern women in the old days, as you can see in my photos. I wore an Áo Dài (Vietnamese traditional dress), but this dress is a modern design which has front and back panels, but no traditional collar and sleeve. It’s suitable to wear during the summer time.

The highlights on my trip were cruising along the Red River in the sun, hearing the traditional songs, walking around the villages on the way to the temples, watching the sand barges and sand exploitation areas along the river, roots of banana trees under the water, floating houses, boats full of ceramic products and a great view of the sandy beach in front of Chử Đồng Tử temple.

I started this blog with a story about my father and the river that carries my name. Now I would like to end this blog with a message from Mr. Thành, an overseas Vietnamese, whom I considered my uncle. Both of us were members of the Thorn Tree travel forum - Lonely Planet website. Mr. Thành used to work as a journalist during the American war. He is a great mixture of 3 regions of Vietnam, born in Huế, lived in Sài Gòn but speaks Vietnamese with northern accent. Now he lives in Houston, USA. On one of my threads in the Thorn Tree travel forum, Mr. Thành wrote these touching words to my father: “To a gentleman in Hanoi, who was one of the men who left Vệ River in Quảng Ngãi half a century ago to regroup in the North, temporarily adopting the Red River as his loved ones he thought for only 2 years. History verifies that he was wrong: under the country’s circumstance, all of them got trapped here for the rest of life...”

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