Hanoi Time

Few things are better than good weather, and fortunately, Hanoi has been providing for us in spades. During the last week we have been unleashed onto the cool streets of Hanoi, finding our freedom sparked by the motor of our bikes. The breezy days do little to wash away the pollution of a few million motorbikes, or the diesel and smog from dilapidated buses, but a little dirt in the face (and maybe some in the lungs) is small price to pay.

Since our move to Hanoi it has been a fresh start. With a new city to explore and new people to meet we have all been reinvigorated from our lethargy. The black hole of Saigon has supernova into the green of Hanoi. Gone are the bustling streets and silent desperation of Ho Chi Minh City's backpacker's district, replaced by the solitude of a college dorm and a city which closes its doors at midnight (at the very latest). If Saigon were America, Hanoi is Europe. Less ambitious, but more laid back, the city is pockmarked with parks and lakes, a testament to the lifestyle. In the early mornings, before the city is touched with light, a sprinkle of locals can be seen on the streets, jogging through the quiet darkness. Their breathing punctuates the air, and slowly opens the day. As their light footsteps tell, the city never roars to life, but rubs its eyes, takes a shower, and has a good breakfast first.

The air is cool, and a breeze whips through the streets. The sun rarely hides, and the blue of sky is actually visible here. The monsoon, that disastrously fickle fellow, has receded into memory. We enjoy our days around town, restrained only by the six hours of class we have each day. The Old Quarter, around Hoan Kiem Lake, serves as our rally point away from the dorm. The hive of streets, at all irregular angels, is nearly impossible to navigate. The little Vietnamese I have helps, but the Northern accent is hard. Almost daily we drive down to the Old Quarter for a meal, a walk, or just to get away from the university. Whether at Fanny's, Highland's, Little Hanoi or Gloria Jeans, there's no better place to whittle away an afternoon, coffee in one hand, laptop in the other, and the serenity of a verdant lake in the midst of a city before you. A little red bridge I have yet to cross spans a few dozen feet to an island in the lake. Perhaps I will go, one day soon.

Last Look at Laos

Danny, Jennie and I are set on renting some motorbikes. Nothing sounds better than to hit the open road and roar down the highways of Laos. We saw ourselves whipping through town after town, passing the chicken coop buses and broken down vans along the way on our purring Honda's. What a pipe dream.

We reach the motorbike shop. Danny and I try our hand at our newly acquired freedom. It's a manual bike, and the way we handle it, our freedom feels more like Gitmo. Unsteady and unconfident, we fail to pass the minimum standard, and the shop keep takes our bikes away from us. We walk away, heads bowed.

We settle on bikes and trek out to the local boonies. We greet temple after temple, enclaves of orange robed Buddhists monks. Passing by with a smile, we continue on our way. Penetrating deep into the rice fields, the breeze whips past our back and takes away our consciousness of time. Laotians are working the fields some fifty yards off, they glance at the tourists and continue their work. Pools of water are filled with murky water, supporting a smattering of lotus flowers. It is beautiful. We find our way through the fields, and Jennie soon finds her way into the muddy waters of a rice paddy. None the worse for wear, she handles her fall, an agonizingly slow tragedy, with the grace of a trooper. We peddle and peddle. Soon we come upon the most unusual of sights.

In the midst of all the fields and vegetation, through the denseness of the green lush, we spot a deserted driving range. Golf. Amazing.

We soon hit the main road again, and start to hand out some candy to the kids. They smile and wave. I am not sure whether it is an act of goodwill or just patronizing.

Lunch is on the Mekong, a few hundred miles up the same river we had been exploring not a week ago in southern Vietnam. I wonder what it would be like to take a boat from here to there. There certainly is a lot of change for one river to bear.

That night, we are looking for a place to eat near our hotel and we run into the most interesting character of the trip, Flaming Dealer. Flaming Dealer is the most flamboyant Laotian we have met. His personality, quality, and demeanor hints toward the notorious lady-boys of Thailand. He has a very, very nice Lexus and offers us a ride to the nearest ATM. We hop in, and test his English. To our satisfaction, it is fluent. Not wanting to beat around the bush, we ask him what he does for a living. The all too indistinct answer 'import-export' was his reply. We are sure he is the most flaming drug dealer we have ever met.

We buys some cheese and wine, finishing our night off right.

 

This is Lao. This is travelling.

The next morning we wake up to Jennie’s phone, and head on out. As usual, we board a decent looking bus which takes us north, up to Dong Ha. I immediately start hibernation and wake up an hour and a half later, being ushered out of the bus.

Barely conscious, I realize I am now inside a random building, looking out onto the familiar sight of a sudden downpour of Vietnamese rain. The overcast skies let loose, and the torrent begins. A tour operator looks at us, and asks ‘Lao?’. We nod along in consent, and he quickly pushes us into a van no larger than the one we took from the airport. This time, instead of Mockingbird’s careful construction, we have been thrown into a dilapidated vehicle straight from the 80’s. Perhaps Mr. Fox had accidentally taken this one back into the future, because it certainly looked like an experiment. We warily toss our bags into the back, and saddle up.

Not 20 meters later the van takes a hard right out onto highway 1. The poor Beast’s door violently flies open, and the nearest local scrambles to shut it before the rain soaks us all. We look at each other, half-amused and half-incredulous. The van continues to entertain. After a hiatus, the rain again begins in earnest. The roof of the vehicle, whether in an effort to provide us with an ‘authentic’ experience or from sheer laziness, leaks water into our cabin. The drip eventually becomes a steady flow, and I cannot imagine the audacity of someone to pass this thing off as a van, when it obviously was meant to be a convertible. I am saddened by our Beast’s unrealized dream, and return to my bootleg American Gangster DVD.

Sadly, before the movie finishes we reach the border. No less than 7 people must check our passports before we are allowed into Laos. Thankfully, there was neither rain nor corruption at this border crossing. Intriguingly, our Beast drives off as soon as we arrive on the Vietnamese side, on what I am sure would be his last journey. On the Laos side a Vietnamese woman tells us to take bikes to catch our bus to Savannakhet. I ask if she is going to pay for them, seeing as how it is part of the trip. She says no, and I immediately realize how much of a ride she is really taking us on.

We arrive at our bus, a large blue on white tin can which, amazingly, looked like it was born even before the Beast. The bare-bones bus was stuffed to its brim, and the additional luggage had to be stacked on top. The chicken coops, bags of rice, and boxes of guitars all piled upon each other in a disastrously-high fashion, seemingly defying even modern engineering achievements. We wait an hour before it decides to go. I hit the sleep button.

8 hours later, sore and uncomfortable I am fed up with infrastructure in Laos. Laotian urban planners must have taken their cue from the millions of bombs dropped on their country, because the road seemed to be pocketed with craters. I am amazed at either the indifference or the incompetence, but soon realize that all the complaining is just from my sore back and the vague grogginess of being comatose all day.

We reach the town of Savannakhet (finally). This little city has one main drag, and harkens a sort of Asian old-western feeling. The square in the middle of the city is deserted, with hardly anyone loitering about but one or two little kids trying to fly kites. I am sure though, that sooner or later, a shoot-out is bound to happen.

That night we decide to eat at the only place in town with tourists in it, an obnoxious red restaurant which plays Laotian Pop at ear-plugging decibels. The owner is an odd-looking Dutch fellow who ‘liked the peace of Laos’, but had no other reason to be there. I feel like one day not too long ago, he had a map, darts, too much LSD and a TV that would only play Iron Chef back in his ‘flat’ in Holland. Apparently, this leads to owning restaurants in out of the way Southeast Asian countries.

We finish our food and head to our hotel, Leena. Leena is in an alleyway not a block from the main thoroughfare. One of three respectable guesthouses we saw while we were there, it was cheap, if not lacking in beds. The three of us could hardly fit on the one full-sized mattress. I sleep on the floor.

This isn’t Lao? No, Hue!

Laos is a question mark of a country. With less people in the country than in the city of Saigon, Laos has become famous only for the amount of bombs dropped upon it (most ever in the history of the world) and its opium trade. Interestingly, both exploded during the Vietnam War.

For our extended weekend we decide to make our way up to Laos, without so much as a plan. We book a flight into and out of Hue, the closest large city to Laos, arriving Friday and leaving Wednesday. You would think this would give us plenty of time.

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The hour-long flight to Hue would prove to be short indeed, as my habit of sleeping the moment I sit in a moving vehicle allows a kind of warp-speed. Something only found in Sci-Fi novels and, perhaps, the odd Star Wars movie. Emerging from my cryogenic state upon touchdown, I headed outside to the tarmac only to be greeted by a miraculous turn in weather. Gone was the weight of Saigon smog and humidity.

We leave the airport and search in the darkness for a respectable taxi driver. They crowd around us, wolves to deer, on the hunt for the next dong. The pack shouts out prices for a ride into town, some quite unreasonable, until we bargain down to six dollars. On our way to the taxi, Danny unwittingly provides comic relief:

Danny: Wow look at that executive decision, straight to a cab. Now he’s probably going to rip us all off and take all our stuff.

Taxi Driver : I understand English!

Red in the face, we pile into the van, and escape the desperate hounds behind us.

Only to be confronted by a virtual mockingbird of chatter. Our taxi driver, another in a series of short, hardened Vietnamese men, refuses to let a moment of silence pass between us as soon as I let slip that I can understand Vietnamese. By ‘understand’ Vietnamese I meant that I could decipher basic conversation. Mockingbird launches into a 15-minute tirade, of which I could understand one out of five sentences. Like any good Vietnamese, though, he doesn’t notice. I retreat into the corners of my mind and take a look around the van which speeds us through the Vietnamese night. Between monosyllabic Vietnamese answers, I realize that this van has a pop-up TV, a pioneer deck, two different side mirrors, and one windshield wiper. I interrupt his rant to ask about the vehicle. Apparently, correct parts are hard to come by in Vietnam, because by now this hackneyed van has become a melting-pot of Asian steel. Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Thai parts have all been meticulously melded together under the care of Mockingbird. He shifts up and the van eases down a few thousand RPMs. Hey, if it works for him, it certainly works for me. Can’t say he isn’t resourceful.

Mockingbird, realizing we want to head to Laos, takes us to his own personal recommendation for a tourist agency, for which he probably receives kick-backs. We book our ticket to Laos on the earliest bus the next morning, a 10am affair through Dong Ha to Savannakhet. It costs us 25 dollars, but little do we know, included a few bus loads of agitation.

We end our day at a familiar spot in Hue, on the deck of a restaurant on the Perfume River. The beer sponsored neon signs across the Perfume blitz the night, crashing the glare of advertising onto the natural serenity of the river. The reflections on the water’s surface ensures that we double down on our neon exposure for the night. Despite the eye sore, we manage to enjoy dinner. Our day over, we head back to the hotel.

Laos!

We just came back from a trip to Laos. Luckily, I have come back with many great stories, and most importantly, my muse. I will be fleshing out the details soon, but we are also in the midst of packing for our move up to Hanoi.

No clothes, no problems

Happy Halloween everyone! For Halloween in Saigon we decided on a little party at the hotel, since there is no trick-or-treating here in Vietnam. Walk around in our costumes probably scared everyone enough anyway.

This year I went as the naked cowboy. It is not as freeing as you would think.

The election is coming up in a couple of days! I hope everyone will cast a vote and tune in. I know I'll be staying up all night for the results.