Into Hanoi

A quick flight from Bangkok took us to a rather modern airport that services the capital of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Hanoi is all activity. Crowded shops specializing in every imaginable ware overflow onto narrow sidewalks. Wherever you look, people are in motion. Nowhere is this more apparent that in the roads themselves, where honking taxis compete for space with honking scooters, bell-ringing bicycles and cyclo-rickshaws. It’s shoulder-to-shoulder driving, with no one owning the right of way, least of all pedestrians. With few traffic lights and fewer crosswalks, one traverses a busy thoroughfare by simply charging forward, making no eye contact with those in motorized vehicles. Traffic flows around you as if you were a moving island. Somehow pedestrians seem to make it to the other side relatively unscathed. On our trip from the airport to our hotel, the van arrived at a roundabout fed by traffic from four directions. Suddenly, everything froze. Since no one owns the right of way, no driver would yield. People actually left their suddenly “parked” cars to debate the best resolution, while hundreds of cars and scooters continued to form long lines of gridlock down each of the four avenues. Eventually, a policeman arrived, exerted some communist authority, and we were on our way, shaking heads in amazement.

A RICKSHAW TO HO
No elephants to be had here, but a cyclo-rickshaw was my means of conveyance to tour the French Quarter of Hanoi. These are solo-occupancy vehicles, propelled by a friendly peddler with strong leg muscles. No problem navigating the miasma of traffic, but after an hour of inhaling exhaust fumes, I was ready to wend my way forward on foot. We found our path to Ho Chi Minh Square, where the towering mausoleum to Vietnam’s late president resides. It looks exactly like Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square and Mao’s mausoleum in Beijing. It is said that one additional monumental communist leader will have a copycat structure in Havana, when his time comes.


WET PUPPETS
Last night we partook in a traditional Vietnamese art form, Water Puppet Theater. Colorful marionettes cavorting in a water tank, and controlled from behind an upstage curtain by puppeteers in waist-high water, depict all the action. On one side of the stage is a live combo of various drums, string instruments and vocalists. Of course, it was all Greek to me, but each vignette told its own special story, to the delight of the audience. You kind of had to be there and, like Kabuki, one hour was sufficient.

LAKE MCCAIN AND THE HANOI HILTON
An interesting concrete monument commemorates the site where John McCain’s broken body was fished from a downtown lake the natives call Lake McCain. The monument, about 30 years old, mentions McCain by name, albeit in Vietnamese, and cites the heroism of those who saved the life of this enemy aggressor. (McCain was famous at the time of his capture because his father was then chief of naval operations for the war.) The Vietnam War is known here as The American War, for obvious reasons, and historical perspectives are similarly skewed. A visit to the Hanoi Hilton, the Hoa Lo prison complex where McCain and many other American flyers were incarcerated and tortured, was sobering. I can’t imagine how any of those brave individuals survived their ordeal, injuries notwithstanding.

SHOP TILL YOU DROP
Today, three of us decided to forego a scheduled tour into the countryside, and explore Hanoi on our own. We walked (and walked) for about six miles through the circuitous, heavily commercialized and oddly labeled streets of the Old Quarter and ended up at the Dong Xuan Market, the oldest and largest covered market in this part of the country. Vending stalls go on as far as the nearsighted can perceive, selling everything from meat and fish to household goods and an enormous array of clothing. Bargaining for a final price can be fun, particularly when you realize that 50,000 Vietnamese Dong computes to about $3. So spending hundreds of thousands of a currency can inflate one’s shopping ego, until you compute the real damage, which is like Monopoly money. I can easily afford a hotel on Park Place and a few houses on Boardwalk. Several times during this trip, both here and in Thailand, vendors would ask from whence I originate, and when learning of my nationality, raise a thumbs-up sign and shout “O-bam-AH!” Gotta love the enthusiasm. We lunched at a Vietnamese/French restaurant that was outstanding; I enjoyed tiger prawns in a pineapple sauce and sliced pork under a five-spice concoction. (Vietnam is Traif-Central.) I’ve really had a good time with the food thus far. Everything is fresh and savory. Tonight we all dine at private Vietnamese homes. I look forward to the cuisine and the political conversation by our communist hosts.