Impressions of Hanoi

It's a grey, cool, rainy day in Hanoi, continuing a trend of deteriorating weather since my arrival. I've just finished my third and final day in Hanoi, and an early-morning departure beckons tomorrow, east to Halong Bay.

I have really, really enjoyed touristing in Hanoi. I had been warned that Vietnam was one never-ending ripoff, but so far (fingers crossed) it has been nothing of the sort. The people I have dealt with have been unfailingly polite, pleasant and nice to me, especially when I've been lost in the far outskirts on my bicycle.

Hanoi is a city of motorcycles; they outnumber cars about 15 to 1 on the streets, filling the full width of the street; at a stoplight this morning, I counted 14 motorcycles abreast in a 4-lane street. The traffic is alarming at first, in that there appear to be no rules at all, but everything seems to flow at a leisurely pace, as everyone adjusts to other motorcycles to allow two or three separate traffic streams to pass right through each other at a large intersection. I think it's a system of genius, something that could be taken as a model for traffic in other countries stuck in gridlock.

I went to pay my respects to Ho Chi Minh, one of the Holy Trinity of communist mummies (along with Lenin and Mao). In comparison to the Maosoleum, where I was in December, the guards are far stricter, and the building itself is more austere, but there's the same religious atmosphere of a Catholic saint's tomb: the hushed awe, the dimmed lighting, the busts of Uncle Ho for sale outside.

I also dropped in on the "Hanoi Hilton", famous as the prison where captured US pilots such as John McCain and Pete Peterson (former US ambassador to Saigon) were held during the Vietnam War, but celebrated by the Vietnamese more as a place where the French locked up, tortured and guillotined Vietnamese nationalists during their colonial administration. I don't think I'd like to have been held there by either the French or the Vietnamese. I hope that someday places like Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib will be nothing more menacing than a museum.....

Lots of lovely stuff for tourists to buy here: lacquerware, silk, masks, jewellery and the like. Although I'm not much of a shopper, a day spent wandering the warren of streets in the Old Quarter, each block specializing in a different handicraft, is fun, rather like browsing through the bazaars in the Middle East, except with far more motorcycles.

Great food so far, quite cheap. The best culinary bargain, though, has to be the draft beer (bia hoi) for sale at 2000 dong a glass (about 13 US cents) at little sidewalk booths. One intersection in the Old Quarter has a bia hoi joint on each of the four corners and is packed with cheapskate tourists like yours truly every night.

So the plan is to ride to Halong Bay tomorrow, spend a few days poking around the karst islands of the area, then make a big arc towards the Chinese border, through the mountains and hill tribe villages and national parks of the North, to Dien Bien Phu before returning to the coast and trundling down to Saigon. Can't wait to hit the open road! I just hope that my tender knees will stand up to the climbing involved.

Peace and Tailwinds!!

Graydon