Good morning Vietnam!
If KL really is crazy, Hanoi is insane. The minute we got off our very nice and efficient Air Asia flight, we embarked on the most nail biting drive of my life. Witnessing the road traffic here is worth the visit to Vietnam alone. Mopeds rule the roads here, weaving in and out of each other, dodging cars and trucks, carrying the most ridiculous loads: trays of eggs, hens strapped down on to a pile of straw, crates and crates of beer carefully balanced – all travelling on the highway.
It was a hazy, polluted filled blue-orange sky that greeted us to Hanoi. Since then we’ve seen nothing but cloud and rain so perhaps we should have appreciated it more. From the airport to Hanoi, today’s Vietnam was summed up: water buffalo and rice paddies between Canon and Panasonic factories. The architecture of the city is totally different to any other place I’ve visited in Asia. Five to six storey, very thin, perhaps 8-10 ft in width buildings are packed in together with barely any patches of greenery in the actual city (the surrounding areas very quickly become fields of some sort). Most of the buildings are very long to compensate for lack of width, to keep the dwelling cooler.
Our first venture outside Anh Hotel, a lovely little place, did not see us going far mainly because we lacked the ability to cross a road and had absolutely no idea of direction! We witnessed the end of the school day, watching kids pile on to mopeds driven by their parents – one kid on the front, one on the back, neither wearing helmets, chuckling away. After looking like bunnies in headlights, we returned to the hotel, eager to meet our tour group and guide and work out just how the chicken crosses the road.
Hanoi is an organised chaos, probably why I loved it. It’s a true hive of constant activity. Everyone is busy doing something from early in the morning to late at night, seven days a week. There doesn’t seem to be any demarcation between work life and social life: everything is mixed together. People are asleep in their shops, moped drivers are constantly dropping by for a chat, some sort of meal is being eaten. People’s homes are turned into make-shift grocery stores and coffee bars, with their laundry hanging up to dry and a TV blearing in the background. We went to one little coffee shop and after serving us, the whole family upped and left on a moped leaving us baffled as to who we were to pay as the chickens hopped around our feet.
The stereotypical image of a Vietnamese lady in a conical hat carrying two baskets adjoined by a wooden pole placed on her shoulder is reality. Such an efficient way of carrying produce but, having later tried one out, it must lead to some serious back problems. Add to this image all the zooming mopeds, wandering dogs, food cooking away on every street corner, constant stream of people buying and selling and tapping away on mobile phones and you’ve got Hanoi.
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