Last Stop: Hanoi

Back to busyness. Our first day in Hanoi we spent checking out several major points of interest, then the last day, the day after our boat trip, we zigzagged the streets of the Old Market, soaking it all in and picking up a few souvenirs before heading to the airport.

The Temple of Literature, which was founded as a Confucian temple and then became Vietnam's first university, was swarmed with elementary kids on a school trip.Some of them were listening to their teacher...We detoured through Lenin Park, then walked down an embassy-lined, security-monitored boulevard, which opened into to Ba Dinh Square, where Ho Chi Minh first read Vietnam's Declaration of Independence in 1945. The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum now looms over the square, Ho's body preserved in a glass case inside, despite his wishes to be cremated and have his ashes scattered.The park surrounding the One-Pillar Pagoda was a good spot to rest a bit while waiting for the Ho Chi Minh Museum to open. Displayed inside were hundreds of Ho's letters, proclamations, journal entries, and personal effects, alongside conceptual art installations meant to symbolize various aspects of the revolution and war.

Then we saw a train pass, which actually amounts to a bit of excitement! First, some bells begin to chime. Then—and I don’t know how this works, but it happened every time we saw a train pass through a crossing—people from houses along the tracks come outside and pull wheeled, red-and-white metal gates out to block the crossing. Traffic stops, and then everyone waits…and waits some more, as the Reunification Express trains chug through town slightly faster than walking speed. The trains, which provide service from Hanoi to Saigon with numerous stops along the way, travel an average of 32 mph.

The tradition of water puppetry began in Hanoi, and the evening we returned from Halong Bay, we went to the Thang Long Water Puppet Theater. The puppeteers are hidden below the temple structure on stage, and accompanied by live music and voice actors, the puppeteers use long bamboo poles to make the wooden puppets dance on the surface of the pool. The elaborate synchronized puppet-dance routines were pretty cool.We walked around Hoan Kiem Lake that night, then returned in the morning to take the bridge out to the island pagoda. Then we spent the rest of the day walking the Old Market area near the lake; there was a district for everything: a couple blocks of shoe stores, then a section of hardware and home supplies, a block of woven mats/curtains/etc., and a strip of stores selling every party supply imaginable. We walked through a few food markets and saw some dog (at least I didn't take photos from the side with their faces).Then enjoyed a final round of spring rolls and fried noodles before we had to go.Hanoi had some great cafes. We ate at a few places—KOTO, the Tamarind Café, and Sozo (though that was in Saigon)—that not only had amazing food (The KOTO falafel wrap!), but also were run by organizations with the goal of getting young people off the street and training them in the hospitality trade. But we definitely supported a number of locally-owned holes-in-the-wall as well. I feel like we did a decent job of eating our way through the country...but unfortunately I ended up paying for that with a trip to the doctor after being back in Japan for over a week with a continued stomachache (which had started soon after we’d arrived in Vietnam) along with a few other lovely symptoms. Luckily, it was only gastroenteritis and with a 5-day course of antibiotics I was absolutely fine!

During our trip I was reading Catfish and Mandala, a book about a Vietnamese-American man’s experience returning to the country his family had fled when he was a child, to bicycle the length of it and search for resolution between his jumbled Vietnamese and Americanized selves. His experiences colored the places I traveled—from his story of being taken by some cousins to a bar in Saigon where each man drank a glass of vodka with a beating snake heart tossed inside to ensure virility; to his description of horns in heavy traffic sounding like a constant demand of “Me, me, me, me!” after he’d been asked so many times for money, help getting into the U.S., and more; to his conversation with a Vietnamese tour guide who struggled to enjoy his profession when all the tourists he hauled around to the country’s greatest treasures came from countries whose treasures were far bigger and more impressive. The author shared some far more positive experiences as well, and I can’t blame him much for the negative ones when he was bicycling hills in 90-degree heat, suffering from dysentery, and traveling with almost no money. We had a rather posh adventure compared to his, and I hope the photos say a bit about what a frenetic-yet-beautiful place Vietnam is in my mind.