Indo China 3

Vietnam 1

From the outset Vietnam was a country I was really looking forward to visiting and that anticipation pushed to the back of my mind the talk, from the scaremongerers in the group, about the shocking statistics for air safety that Laos Airlines has, the chosen carrier to take us into Hanoi

Having done the trip without incident, I must say the aircraft was spacious, clean and newer than some I have used, the staff terrific and I would certainly have no issues using them again, but don’t try and book them in or out of the UK, as they have consistently, failed to attain the safety standards required  to acquire an operating licence!!

I noticed immediately, travelling into town from the airport, the architecture. Many of the buildings/houses were tall but also narrow. Apparently the French, the former colonial governors of Vietnam, imposed punitive taxation on property based on its footprint and so the locals made their buildings narrow but tall in an attempt to circumvent their tax liability, and the style caught on.

I know I have banged on a bit about transport, but Hanoi really does take ‘bonkers’ to another level when it comes to traffic, there are more motorbikes here than insects and they swarm around the city, funnelling from the main roads into the side streets like grains of sand flowing through an egg timer.

Unlike  Sri Lanka, people rarely sound their horn and a strange ordered chaos, occasioned by common sense and courtesy, prevails. It is amazing to watch but a real bugger if you want to cross a road. The secret is (and this applies in all of the Asian countries I have visited) ‘just walk’. As silly as it sounds, it is true, and the only way. If you just walk and don’t stop, don’t alter course or speed, they will work around it. Stop, and you may end up as a traffic island forever, change speed or dither and you will almost certainly cause an accident, that will almost inevitably involve you!

We stayed in the old quarter, the original heart of the city that was based around just  36 streets  each, supposedly, representing a different trade. It now teems with hotels, restaurants, bars, cafes alongside shops, laundries and frontages for one of the great things here, a shop that provides nearly every service you could imagine. You can book a holiday, have a massage, arrange a funeral, get a tattoo, learn English and do the weekly shop all at the same venue.
Also a great institution in Hanoi is their incredible telecom system, look up and admire the wiring!!

The place is permanently bustling, motor bikes block every pavement, street vendors approach you every couple of metres, but are polite and usually take a shake of the head as an indication that you don t want a $5 pair of 'genuine' Raybans, a wooden frog or Manchester United woven bracelet, but more than anything else there are backpackers everywhere. There cannot be any German youth left in Germany, they are all in Asia, and frankly, despite my fondness for their homeland, who can blame them, its terrific fun.

Another thing to mention about Vietnam that you need to deal with from arrival, is their currency, the Dong. A trip to the cashpoint to get a few drinking vouchers, ended with me becoming a cash multi-millionaire for the first, and probably last time, in my life, I withdrew 3 million dong, but I didn t even have £100.

Talking about drinking, I forgot to record last time how good Beer Laos is. I understand it is being shipped to UK and is well worth sourcing, it remained the beer of choice for myself and my German drinking partner, Udo, for the whole tour and was certainly the better option than the, still perfectly acceptable, Hanoi Beer in North Vietnam.
 

The weather in Hanoi was HOT, reaching 42 degrees one day and as soon as you left the air conditioned lobby of the hotel and merely walked to the pavement you were sweating, by the end of the road you were soaking, but everyone was the same and you just got on with it, occasionally ducking into a doorway of a bank or larger store for a blast of cool air. With this in mind I decided to take a cyclo, pedal powered rickshaw, from my hotel to the local theatre, where we had tickets to see the famous Hanoi water puppets.

 My 8 stone driver nodded enthusiastically when I had told him where I was going and I had allowed 45 mins to take, what I had anticipated to be a 20 minute journey,  but ........ half an hour after we set off we seemed to be nowhere near where I thought we should be. Pointing at my watch I urged him to get me there and he nodded, grinned through the sweat and put on a spurt. Five minutes later he exhaustedly announced our arrival  .........  back at my hotel!!!

I made it clear that I was not happy and that I had wanted to go to the theatre, and that I was now late and went to get out. He apologised for his misunderstanding, gestured furiously, as if he now knew what I wanted and we set off again.

It was no good. We were still not on the same hymn sheet, I needed help. By the time I saw someone that looked like they could speak a few words of English, to help me,  the show had already started.

By the time the driver got me to the theatre there was only 20 mins left of the show.

By the time I finished arguing with him, and a couple of his mates that joined in, about paying, or should I say not paying, for his epic workout, had got into the theatre and persuaded security that I was with with the party inside and got to my seat, there was less than 10 mins left of the 45min show.

Due to my tardiness I glanced around, embarrassed, towards my group and the look on the faces of my fellow travellers said it all ...... it was terrible. The puppets consisted of crappy wooden figures on sticks, badly painted and at best having a very limited amount of movement in a single limb, that were held out to 'perform' over an 8 foot square paddling pool, whilst the puppeteers stood behind a canvas screen.

I am sure it might have been both amazing and entertaining during the middle ages and probably has some deep cultural relevance, but for me it made the WoodenTops look like a multimillion dollar Spielberg production and the final straw was that it was accompanied by 3, stern and a bit scary, Vietnamese women, belting out some medieval chants accompanying themselves on discordant instruments that all appeared to have, and certainly sounded as if they had, bits missing. Not recommended!

As it happened my driver had inadvertently done me a huge favour and I even felt a bit guilty about not paying him especially as he had probably burned more calories than the average Tour de France competitor, whilst ferrying me around town.


The next morning, in massive heat, we braved the traffic, and walked across town to visit the number one attraction in North Vietnam, the former home and eventual resting place of, probably the most famous Vietnamese man, former PresidentHo Chi Minh, (which if you want to pronounce correctly insofar as ‘the party’ is concerned, requires you to exhale 99% of your breath and with the remaining 1% force out his name in three successive explosive bursts :  Ho / Chee / Minh). Despite being the leader of a party that were responsible for untold amounts of pain, suffering, intimidation, mutilation and murder of tens of thousands of his own people, he was still revered as almost a god. His face appears on all of the banknotes his pictures and busts are everywhere and bus loads of kids are ferried to his tomb everyday with  clearly no understanding but it starts them off the 'right' ( or more to the point LEFT) way

It seems really weird to me, that such a guy, whose dying wish was to be cremated and his ashes split and distributed equally in the north, middle and south of his beloved country, should, instead, be ‘stuffed’ and put on permanent  display in a huge concrete monolith of a mausoleum in Hanoi, but hey that’s symbolic communism for you.

A game of ‘make the soldier laugh’ here can end up with you being hung upside down by your unmentionables for the rest of your days, but a straight face is a small price to pay in order to spend 8 minutes inching past Mr Minh, in the best air conditioned building in the country, especially after having queued for half an hour in the baking sun.

A couple more temples, a few hours in the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ -




the former hell hole French run prison that symbolised the oppression exerted against the indigenous population, - several great meals and a few late nights in the local bars and it was time to get out of Hanoi, with some regret, and head to Halong Bay, 5 hours to the west, for some nautical activity.

We all boarded a small ferry/taxi  at the port side that took us out to our boat, which was quite a swanky vessel



 and we then set sail towards the hundreds of small islands and limestone rocks in the bay.


It stretched the imagination a little to try and match the enthusiasm of our guide and see some of the rocks as ‘the two chickens’ etc., but immediately prompted a series of slightly silly suggestions for future renaming, I was quite fond of ‘Hitler’s moustache’, ‘skateboarding badger’ and ‘melted brie’.

We passed the scene of the Top Gear ‘build a boat out of your car’ episode and eventually anchored in a cove, a couple of hundred yards off shore from quite a big island. The small ferry then took us ashore and we climbed 70 or 80 steps up to a cave overlooking the cove. This was just a taster, over the next 45mins we went deeper into the rock into three progressively more impressive caves the final enormous cavern was easily the biggest I have ever seen and was frankly awesome


 

And then.....just as everything was going so well.......my biggest nightmare, I had been nursing a small blister underneath my big toe, unfortunately  I picked up a small stone or something similar that got into my sandal in the cold and wet cave and ripped the blister to shreds and punctured my toe.

I had had a similar injury before I left UK and that had taken months to heel as it requires, ideally, complete rest as everytime you stand on your toe, stretch your toe ie walk or climb, it opens the wound.

Previously it had required two courses of antibiotics and dozens of dressings for it to clear. With the schedule I had, rest was not an option as I would miss out on so much but against this was the risk of further complications. With the climate, early healing was unlikely, the drugs and dressings I thought I could get, but my main paranoia centred around avoiding picking up an infection, especially something waterborn, which could essentially put pay to the whole trip.....................oh bugger!

 

A great sunset, a good meal on board ship, a morning climb up 275 steps to a temple, (needless to say I passed on this) a demonstration of how to make a fishing net out of a carrot –
for food presentation purposes -  4 changes of dressings, a 6 hour bus trip back to Hanoi – due to several cloudbursts – a quick bite to eat and a well earned beer and then it was off to the station for a super duper 13 hour train journey to our next destination, Hue (pronounced H-way).










Vietnam was living up to expectations