Good Evening Vietnam
I’m sitting in our hotel in Tam Coc, about 2 hours drive south of Hanoi on our 4th day in Vietnam. It’s been filled with lots of honking, crazy driving, good street food and floating around in our own giant boat.
Maybe I’ve been watching too many episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s show where he proclaims his absolute love for this country, or maybe it’s the fabulous feedback I’ve heard from multiple friends who’ve been to Vietnam over the past few years, but I’ve been really looking forward to visiting Vietnam, meeting its people and eating everything I can possibly eat…except for the friendly Labrador retriever on that restaurant sign.
Vietnam has not disappointed me yet.
We started our trip in Hanoi, where crossing the street can be best described as a giant game of Frogger; I think my first 10 minutes outside of our hotel can be best described as heart-attack inducing. When I was a student at U of T, my friend Nigel used to make me jaywalk across Bloor street in Toronto, and sometimes we would end up standing for a brief time in the middle of the street with cars whizzing past us at a crazy 10 kms an hour. I used to think he was nuts. Now I know that that was child’s play. A woman from the travel agency came to pick us up at the hotel so we could meet the owner of our travel agency (after much debate, we are travelling with a tour company – I think that deserves a post on it’s own, but in short, I am happy we made the decision), and the woman spoke no English or French and just smiled and motioned for us to follow her – the owner had told us that the agency was about a 10 minute walk from the hotel; easy peasy I thought. Until she started walking. Now, I had heard about how crazy crossing the street is here, but there’s theory and then there’s practice. First of all, your first challenge is walking on the street. Sidewalks here are actually motorbike parking lots, so you’re relegated to walking on the side of the street. Second of all, there are EIGHT MILLION motorbikes and scooters each carrying multiple humans, massive packs of rice noodles, boxes of toilet paper and the odd slaughtered pig driving towards you and sharing the road with cars, trucks and other motor vehicles. Thirdly, they are all honking. ALL THE TIME. And there are no traffic lights. So to cross the street, you basically look for the briefest sign of traffic letting up (so instead of eight million motorbikes, maybe there are 7.5 million motorbikes aiming for you) and then hold your breath, say a small prayer to whomever you wish, and cross in a predictable pathway (i.e. straight and don’t stop unexpectedly). Somebody FedEx me some Norvasc. Seriously though, once you get used to it, it actually isn’t that bad. Even though traffic seems chaotic here, everyone is patient, the honking is out of courtesy rather than anger, and the motorbikes and cars know to avoid the scared looking tourist crossing the street. At least I hope so.
We spent a day and a bit in Hanoi exploring the old quarter, a local market and a few requisite-tourist-attraction-musuems. Hanoi is celebrating it’s 1000 year of being a city (take that, Quebec City), and Vietnam has a very rich history, so it was appropriate that before we explored the country, we learned a bit about the country and its ethnology. Vietnam has 54 (*note that I originally posted 46. Oops) ethnic minority groups that live all around the country with linguistic influences from China, the Malaysian/Indonesian type Bahasa languages, and Thai and Laos. (For the Putonghua readers of BOSF, it’s interesting to see some Chinese words show up in Vietnamese like Hai Quan…) It also used Chinese characters as its official written language until the early 20th century when the French ruled that it must be changed to the roman script we know today. And for those of you who thought speaking Chinese was difficult, the Vietnamese language has 6 tones rather than the 4 that confuse us (at least me) in Chinese. We also learned about Vietnam’s history through Chinese, Portugese and French rule, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnam war, and the current communist government. It’s worth reading about.
After a day and a bit in Hanoi, we drove out to Halong Bay, a UNESCO world heritage site that is essentially a bay filled with huge limestone cliffs. It’s amazing. Also amazing is that we had an entire junk boat to ourselves. It’s hard to explain the beauty of the place, other than to compare it to the cliffs in Guilin, China, and to have you look at the photos G took. We woke up this morning and kayaked around the bay. Breathtaking. (Before the family starts to worry, yes, I wore a life jacket).
Okay – time to go to bed – I have lots more to write about, but we have a busy day ahead of us tomorrow. Remind me that I have to tell you about factories and weird restaurant signs, and tell you about the amazing food we’ve had so far.
Tomorrow we hike and bike around the rice fields and, amongst other things, try our hand at making some Vietnamese spring rolls.
Chúc ngủ ngon.
PS – for those of you counting, the number of pigs we saw being transported on the back of scooters today is 7.
Melissa- Canada
Source: http://www.bewareofspikeyfruit.ca/2010/03/good-evening-vietnam/