I realize I haven’t written much about Vietnam, so I must write a report before I cross borders to another world.
Yet again, I find myself in a café in Hanoi with wiFi- somehow justifies dragging my laptop around and besides I need my monthly latte!
Back from the Mekong Delta, I had an uneventful and low-key stay in Ho Chi Minh before I spent two consecutive nights on sleeper buses (see below) to get to Hoi An.
Hoi An- a quaint little town with cobbled streets, aging, yellow colonial buildings, women with conical hats and custom-made surgical masks cruising on bicycles/motorbikes holding umbrellas, cell phones or babies, and vendors with baskets of guavas and pomellos casually balanced on their shoulders..
I wander these foreign lands on disused roads, passing by nameless faces, toothy smiles of old women, who hold my hand and nudge me to get a $1 pedicure. I pinch my nose as I walk through a market, trying to avoid the nauseating smell of dying fish, and a minute later, breathing in deeply as I go by freshly cut jasmine and lotus.
Every night, the riverside becomes alive with Chinese lanterns swaying gently in the summer breeze- soft music from faraway carried by it, tourists sipping on French wine in restaurants that spring up in narrow alleys, while that wooden dragon in the water looks on and yearns for life.
Hoi An is a magical land with vestiges of Chinese culture- carefully decorated pagodas and assembly halls, quiet ancient houses with ivy/moss-covered ying-yang roof.
The other side of Hoi An is another kind of magic, there are innumerable shops for making clothes- cashmere, Italian wool, satin, silk– they have everything. A custom made wool suit costs $50-$150 and is ready in about 5 hours!
Catalogs from all over overwhelm you the moment you enter any one of these shops. A Nordstrom suit replica costs about a third of the original cost, and it’s YOUR size, not the size it comes in! Needless to say, I spend time (and dongs) on this side of town, too.
and then, I make a hasty escape to Hanoi, via Hue- another evening on a sleeper bus.
There are a few hours to be spent at Hue- a quiet, little-big town with a lofty citadel. As every other Vietnamese town, it is progressive in its own right. After a brief visit to the citadel on a motorbike, I am hustled on to the sleeper bus for Hanoi.
Hanoi is my favorite city in Vietnam after Hoi An. The streets are small and crowded, I get lost every day and discover new parts of old town, I even have a little pet puppy at the guest house I am staying at.
The first day, I run into a friend I made in Ho Chi Minh. We end up at a tailor’s and then a cloth market, much to the amusement of all the napping vendors there. And we thought we had escaped Hoi An!
(On a separate note, I am ashamed to admit I don’t even know my numbers in Vietnamese.)
It rains and pours the first two days I’m here, we visit some museums and, in spite of my reservations with organized tours, book ourselves on a 2 day- 1 night trip to Halong Bay- the only way it can be visited.
The tour is a must do for its spectacular scenery and it sure is relaxing to be on a boat. I do tend to catch up on my sleep on buses and boats, so I doze through most of the tour.
Back in Hanoi, I pay a humble visit to Uncle Ho- his mausoleum is spotless- a long line snakes towards him efficiently to get a peek. He rests peacefully and seems almost surreal with his intact wrinkles and wispy white hair.
Next on my list was Sapa- the mountainous northwest. A typhoon gets there before I did. Some backpackers I met were stuck in the flooded area for three days and were rescued in a boat by the military. So I am off to China sooner than I expected.
And today is a Hanoi day- I have spent a good part of my afternoon in a bookshop selecting four non-controversial books, which would not be confiscated at the Chinese border tomorrow. LP China is controversial, so I will be leaving without one! (Apparently you can get it in China without references to Tibet and Dalai Lama.)
On my last day in Vietnam, I take time out to look back at my time here.
Last month, as we got closer to Vietnam, we met more and more people recounting horror stories of Vietnam- bags slashed, ripped off by tour agencies, money stolen etc. Ruth turns to me, “We will hold hands when we enter Vietnam”. And we did, while crossing roads, and, as we discovered, we didn’t have to, otherwise.
Apart from an occasional abrasive behavior from some individuals, my experiences in Vietnam with the people have been generally very pleasant. I suppose, when you are prepared for the worst, anything turns out to be better than expected.
The most exciting thing here has been crossing the road, aptly put by a fellow San Franciscan I met a couple days ago. It is certainly more exciting than India, and that says a lot.
The only grievance I have had in Vietnam is that tourists and locals are really segregated when it comes to transportation.
In other countries, you lose time (but never money) on local transport but get a hint of reality as it exists for locals. However, in Vietnam, it is a lot cheaper and more convenient to take tourist buses than go to a local bus station miles away and board a local bus.
Losing both money and time forces most tourists to always be tourists- never travelers.
I have a sneaking suspicion I will be desperately wishing for this kind of segregation in the next month when I get into buses which fail my tests.
off to practise my mandarin and dumb charades..
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment