From the Modern to the Ancient Capital

A Day Trip to Hanoi

Tiem, our first guide, had to abandonus, because a relative of his died, and he had to bring his fatherback to his home village, so another young man, Ha, replaced us. Tiem seemed to feel genuine affection for us, and we were sorry topart with him. We met at eight and drove south through intnse,congested traffic until we reached the main national highway, whichsoon turned into a rough, half-constructed road.

This was our first venture out of thehistorical center of Hanoi, and our impression of the city was of akind of uniformity – the way physicists assume that the universe ispretty much the same everywhere. The city remained intenselycrowded, full of small businesses, with hundreds of motorcycles andmotor-scooters, bicycles, pedestrians, cars, buses, and trucks alltrying to make their way down the same inadequate roads. Our driver,a phlegmatic older man, made left turns into oncoming traffic withoutflinching.

Hanoi is an unpredictable mixture ofcharming residential streets (rare), visible from the main road,surrounded by industrial and commercial buildings, and the mainstreets are lined with extremely narrow five story buildings. Haexplained that the government used to levy a real estate tax based onthe width of a building's facade. Now, he said, people built narrowhouses because land is very expensive. He also explained that manyof the buildings are inhabited by several generations of the samepatrilineal family. The urban landscape seems unplanned, chaotic,messy, and extremely vital.

After a while the city gives way torice paddies, huge stretches of flooded fields, shallow, muddy water. In this season the farmers are preparing the paddies for planting,and some plots are already planted. Behind the fields were villages,with urban-style buildings jumbled together. As we proceededsouthward on the rough road, we passed by towns, extended along thehighway, and they were depressingly unfinished, rough, ugly. Thecloudy weather didn't improve the impression made by the towns.

Many of the tall, narrow buildingsproudly bore dates: 2003, 2007, 2009. Clearly a burst of prosperityenabled a few people to build houses for themselves, but theprosperity didn't extend to the community.

After a while, nearly obscured by fog,we began to see jagged hills piercing the flat paddy land. Fortunately, as we proceeded, the fog began to lift, and we got aclearer view of the jagged hills. I would love a geologicalexplanation of what we saw: sharp peaks jutting out of very flatfields. Ha reported that the villagers graze goats on those steeplimestone hills, and that goat meat was a local delicacy. We passedup that opportunity.

I would also love to know more aboutthe cultivation of rice. However, our hotel's Internet connection iscapricious, so I'll have to wait – and chances are by then I'llhave become curious about something else.

We were headed for Hoa Lu, the firstcapital of Vietnam, established about a thousand years ago, when onewarlord emerged victorious over eleven rivals, and built a citadeland forbidden city there. Not too much is left, but the landscape isunusual. The site gave Ha an opportunity to present his version, theofficial version, taught at the university in the tourism program, ofVietnamese history, constant pressure from China ultimately overcome,the gradual spread of the Viet people (he called Kinh, something elseI want to clear up) from the north southward until they became themajority ethnic group in all of Vietnam.

There are still temples on the site,dedicated to those early rulers, but not much of the ancient splendoris left.

After lunch in an almost eleganttourist restaurant, we took a two hour boat ride down a river at TamCoc, through three caves. Our boat was rowed by a slight young womanin her twenties, probably. A lot of the rowers were young women,some were young men, and there were also a couple of rather elderlypeople propelling tourists down the stream. Many of them rowed withtheir feet, a technique I'd never seen. I found myself wonderingwhether the rowers were permanently employed, whether this was aseasonal, pickup job, or what. Most of them seemed pretty happy,bantering with other oarspeople, not laboring like galley slaves. Iassume that some of the old people behind the oars have been doing itall their lives, although, since there was little or no tourism inVietnam before 1995, the whole business probably didn't exist.

So many puzzles.

The scenery was radically unfamiliar:untamed, steep, jagged hills jutting out of rice fields that probablyhave been cultivated for a couple of thousand years.

Hanoi: First Exposure

An Intense Day – and Just theFirst One

Before I can describe anything, I'lljust list the places we went.

After breakfast we walked around thelake near our hotel, the Hoan Kiem Lake in the old center of thecity.

Then our guide took us to the Ho ChiMinh mausoleum, to the area dedicated to his memory, to a pagodanearby,

to the Temple of Literature,

to lunch,

to the Ethnographic Museum,

to a shop where they manufacturelacquer ware,

to a shop that benefits the disabledchildren of Vietnamese soldiers who were exposed to Agent Orange,

to a performance of the water puppets(something you can't imagine until you see it),

and for an hour's rickshaw ride aroundthe old city. We skipped (to his evident disappointment) the prisonwhere US pilots who were shot down were kept, and to see the B52bomber that was shot down.

I would have skipped the Ho Chi Minhmausoleum, but we quickly realized that it's obligatory, like YadVashem. Our guide clearly worships the memory of Ho Chi Minh, andthere's no way for him to imagine that back in the sixties we(Americans at the time) regarded him as an arch-enemy. The visit tothe mausoleum has a surreal atmosphere. About thirty soldiers inimmaculate white uniforms were guarding the approach to the site aswell as the site itself, and we were required to pass through it intotal silence, hatless, with our hands pressed to our sides. Ho ChiMinh is lying in a glass case, very waxen looking, and ratherindifferent to the crowds.

The Vietnamese seem to be very proudthat there are 54 ethnic groups in the country, and most of them,aside from the majority Viets, are quite exotic. In other words, ifVietnam in general is, for us, exotic, the ethnic groups are exoticsquared. The museum is excellent by world standards, informative andrespectful of the people whose lives it is depicting. The textiles,basketry, and other artifacts are sophisticated and beautiful. Outside the museum they have rebuilt typical houses from thevillages.

The water puppets are a crazy idea:large wooden puppets, operated from behind a screen, in waist-deepwater, accompanied by live Vietnamese music.

The rickshaw ride scared the daylightsout of me. I was in the front rickshaw, and the driver used me toforce our way through cars and motorcycles (of which there arehundreds of thousands, whizzing recklessly around, sometimes againsttraffic), and I couldn't believe that I was going to survive it –though apparently the fatality rate among rickshaw passengers is verylow. On the up side, it was fascinating. We pedaled through streetafter street of small stores, restaurants, people busy buying andselling: life. Before the trip, when I was thinking about Vietnam, Ididn't imagine how crowded Hanoi would be, and how intense thetraffic would be.

As I was pedaled along, I felt like aprivileged colonial, which made me terribly uncomfortable, though Icould console myself by saying that at least I was helping myrickshaw driver to make a living of some kind. The people in thestreets look energetic and vital, but many of the ones you can seeare working at low-paying jobs, selling cheap things in small shops. People can evidently save enough money to buy a motor scooter, theyare dressed adequately, the food seems abundant, and we can't tellvery much about their housing. But here's an indication: on our wayto the water puppets, we drove down a street full of stores sellingbirdcages and birds to put in them. I asked Tiem whether he has abird. No, he answered, my house isn't big enough. Think about that:a house too small to keep a birdcage in!

Halfway to Vietnam

Bangkok Airport

How could it be that some 250 people want to fly fromTel Aviv to Bangkok on a Sunday night in February?

Modern international airports don'tdiffer from one another all that much – but you definitely realizethat you're in Asia here. Suddenly we meaty Caucasians are in aminority. And we hear all kinds of Asian languages that we can'trecognize.

I guess I could just stay in theairport for a week and then go home, because the main reason why I'minterested in being in Vietnam is to be in a place that's differentfrom what I'm used to. I'm sure that the people who work in theairport can look at the passengers drifting through the variouslounges and tell immediately: this one is Vietnamese, this one isBurmese, this one is Chinese, etc. - but for us, while the peopledon't look the same, we don't know the meaning of the differences inappearance.

The departures display at the airporthad the names of dozens of places we have never heard of. But theairport is kind of a halfway house, still a largely familiarterritory. Once we have arrived in Hanoi, another two hour flightfrom here, and stepped out into that environment, we'll be on totallyunfamiliar ground.

Before air travel was so common, it tookdays and days to get from one place to another, but once you werethere, you were in places that were radically different. There's acinematic cliché, the hero's arrival in an Asian port, let's say. Today the arrival of a Western traveler even in a rather restrictiveplace like Vietnam is an ordinary occurrence. They're used to it. But we aren't.

The Flight

I almost never talk to the people nextto me on a plane, but I discovered that the young Asian woman next tome spoke English very well – because she spoke to the stewardess inEnglish, not in Vietnamese – and I ended up finding out a lot abouther: a Thai woman who works for an NGO that combats HIV in Asia (theCIA web site said there was almost no HIV in Vietnam, but she said itwas definitely a problem), who studied in California for a few years,married a Danish man there, and was leaving their six month olddaughter for a few days while she came to Hanoi on work.

It is characteristic of today's worldthat Asian people meet and speak to each other in English. I askedher, how would a Thai person have spoken to a Vietnamese person ahundred years ago? They would have needed an interpreter, of course,she said (she didn't say “of course”).

I think I'll have to ask peopleimpolite questions, as gently as possible, to learn interestingthings about them.

The Drive from the Airport

Heavy traffic, night, non-descripturban sprawl, Tiem, the guide supplying information to us, in Englishthat it's going to take us some time to get used to.

The Hanoi Imperial Hotel

As they say in Hebrew, as its name sois it. Okay, not quite “imperial,” but well above the averagestandard of living in the world.

The weather is cloudy and cool.

I took some pictures from the balconyof our hotel room.

I like to document the presence of theplace that way, though it's cloudy, and there's not much to see. Lots of small buildings jumbled together here, and on every balconyand patio, potted plants.

At breakfast, on the 8^thfloor of the hotel, in addition to bread, cheese, and ordinaryEuropean foods (like ham), we could have eaten shrimps, pork friedrice, and other things that we don't eat – the steamed vegetableswere delicious, and they had beautiful fruit. A cook made me a nice vegetable omelet. The waitress in thebreakfast room was friendly and smiley when I asked which directionthe lake is. You couldn't see it from the restaurant windows.

In a moment we're heading off for ashort walk before meeting our guide at nine.

On our Way Eastward

If it was up to me, I probably wouldn't go anywhere.  I tend to get involved in what I'm doing, where I'm doing it, and my life is pretty full of activity, most of which I enjoy or am committed to.  But my wife loves to travel, and she drags me along, for which I am grateful, because once I'm on my way, I'm happy.
Tonight we're leaving Israel for two weeks in Vietnam, the place, as I have joked when telling my friends about our planned trip, where I wanted least in the world to go back in the late sixties, when I was in my early twenties - and the US government was willing to send me there for free!
I've never been in the Far East.  Judith was once invited to a women's conference in Manilla, and on the way back she made a trip to Thailand.  That was quite a while ago.  Since then we have been in Central Asia, which is pretty adventurous, and in Peru, and, of course, we live in the Middle East, far from where we were born and expected to live out our lives when we were young.
I've only done a little reading about the country, and we saw a couple of DVDs about it, but I expect to be surprised.
I just looked at the CIA World Factbook  on Vietnam and was astonished to see that it's the 14th most populous country in the world, between Ethiopia and Egypt, with more than ninety million inhabitants.  If you had asked me to guess, I would have put the population about 1/3 of that, so great is my ignorance.  That was already one surprise, and I haven't left home yet.
We're going to be traveling like wealthy Westerners, with a guide, and, where needed, a car, but we didn't think we could manage using local transportation and finding our way on our own.