This Ain't Your Daddy's Vietnam

Monday in Nanning went as planned--I arrived at the Vietnamese consulate when it opened and received my visa within a matter of hours.

Early Tuesday morning, I boarded a bus bound for Hanoi. I made three friends at the bus station before we took off: Steven, a Taiwanese computer consultant who lives in Danang and makes back-and-forth trips between China and Vietnam fairly frequently, and Tim and Anya, a couple from London. Steven was especially helpful with navigating customs and border protocol: The Chinese bus dropped us off at the Chinese border, we took a mini-bus through No Man's Land to the border patrol building, and got approval to leave China. Then, we took another mini-bus to the Vietnam border patrol building to have our visas checked, got approval to enter Vietnam, and finally boarded a Vietnamese bus that took us to Hanoi. Total trip time, including customs, rest stops and lunch: 8 hours, 30 minutes.

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I did a bit of walking around Hanoi yesterday, but was too beat to do much beyond circling the neighborhood and grabbing dinner.

Today, on the other hand, has been great, and has more than made up for the drudgery of the past four days. I "hired" a guy on a motorcycle to taxi me around to various spots around Hanoi, including: Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum and adjacent museum; the Vietnam Temple of Literature; the Museum of Vietnamese Ethnology; the Hoa Lo prison (aka "Hanoi Hilton"); the Dong Xuan market (an enormous warehouse that sells any piece of junk you can imagine--if you've ever wondered where all of the knock-off purses, watches, etc. come from, this is probably the place); the Hanoi cathedral (where I furtively snapped a photo of a wedding taking place--shame on me); and a couple of Buddhist temples.

I put "hired" in quotes above because Dong, my driver, refused to negotiate a price until he dropped me back off at my hotel, at which point he began to bargain heavily. (I thought we were friends). I ended up giving him about $25 for five hours of work, in a combo of USD and Vietnamese dong, which turned out to be not far from his original ask. He won that battle, but I suspect I could get him for a better rate next time.

Separately, in the most random encounter of a friendly face I've ever experienced, I ran into a former colleague from my RBC days who now lives in Saigon (in Southern Vietnam--nowhere close to Hanoi). I'm having dinner with him and his father in a couple of hours.

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I'll close this post with a few more thoughts on Hanoi: It's a filthy place, but in the process of modernizing. There is an enormous amount of construction going on, especially on the outskirts of town. Decades behind China, in any case.

Motorcycles are everywhere. It is safer to ride a motorcycle, it seems, than to walk. Quoting from Lonely Planet, "Might makes right (of way)." Buses, trucks, and cycles use their horns as a defensive driving tool, and you must get out of their way as they pass, else you're toast.

Pollution is a real problem, and I can actually feel my throat and lungs burning after consuming exhaust fumes all day. Once in a while you'll see people wearing face masks, though those are still pretty rare. This can't be good for life expectancy rates.

On the other hand, the food is the best I've had in any country I've visited to date and, incidentally, the cheapest. Vietnamese is generally my favorite Asian food anyway, ahead of (in order) Indian, Japanese (sushi), and Chinese. The pho (pronounced "fur," by the way, not "fo," "feu," "po," or any other butchered variation I recall hearing) is fresh and practically greaseless. The nem (spring rolls) are sizzling hot (I've only had the fried ones so far), crispy on the outside, and chewy in the middle. And the coffee is orders of magnitude better and stronger than anything I found in China--especially iced coffee, which the Vietnamese prepare with a scoop of sweetened condensed milk at the bottom of the glass before pouring the coffee on top. Delicious.

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I entered North Vietnam much more easily than did my forebears. I am happy and thankful to be able to write that.