Slideshow here. Suggested tune? Crosstown Traffic, Jimi Hendrix.
Every morning around 6am, the Voice of Vietnam blasts over Hanoi. Our tour leader told us that they broadcast local news, the lottery numbers, and a generous helping of propaganda. (I find it incongruous that a socialist nation has a lottery. Do they redistribute your winnings if you pick the right numbers?) The Voice of Vietnam is the first noise of the day, every day, and the sound spins up into a fevered pitch as the hours pass. The traffic picks up, people take to the streets to work and sell and go from place to place, and they honk and shout and chatter the entire time.
The sidewalks are mostly unusable. As soon as dawn breaks, the rogue restaurants appear, cooking soup and frying omelettes over tiny portable stoves. There’s always a scattering of plastic stools, low to the ground, right up to where the curb crumbles into the street. Where you think you should be able to walk, scooters are parked shoulder to shoulder while their drivers load and unload stunning quantities of goods. Every now and then there’s the frenzy of a sale, a pile of merchandise tossed on to the concrete. The sales are easily identified by the cloud of 20 something girls around the product and there is no passing them, you must step off the narrow goat trail of a path into the street.
Once you’re in the street, your life is in the hands of oncoming traffic. It does no good to look for oncoming traffic because it’s coming from everywhere, even from inside the shops and out of little alleys that seem almost too narrow to walk down.
Picking your way through the city is a daunting task because you have to watch where you put your feet so’s not to kick over a pot of boiling soup, watch for onward traffic because it comes from the wrong direction, watch your head because the network of tarps and hanging goods means you might clock yourself on who knows what or pour a stream of rainwater down the back of your neck, watch your belongings – not so much because of theft though that can be an issue – because your pack can catch on the handlebars of a passing scooter, and all this in the middle of an unstoppable freight train of noise.
Pictures of Hanoi do it little justice because it’s such a sensory assault. In order to experience Hanoi, you have to first surround yourself in the visual mess of telephone wires and merchandise and people in brightly colored helmets, but you have to put it all in motion, swirling 360 degrees around you, with not one still place to rest your eyes. Then, start the soundtrack, the honking, the chatter, the engines. Add to that the smell of food cooking, not always pleasant, of exhaust and dust and damp and sometimes of sewer, and cigarette smoke. Crush yourself into not enough personal space and then, move forward, as best you can. Even if you do all these things, if you haven’t been someplace like Hanoi, you still have no idea what Hanoi is like.
This makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy Hanoi. That’s not true. During our last breakfast in Bangkok, N asked if we’d do it again. Knowing what we know now, would we hit the reset button and do it again? J and I were in complete agreement: Absolutely. In spite of that fact that we were down with the ick (a cold/flu thing) in Hanoi and again, down with the ick in Bangkok (bad belly), we were ready to go. Again.
[tags]Hanoi, Vietnam[/tags]
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