Impressions of Vietnam (Part 1)

I've been meaning to do a holiday summary post, from my recent short trip to Hanoi (and some surrounding areas in late February.  Let's go.

My overall summary of Hanoi, and the bit of Vietnam around it:   there's a lot going on.   If you look at Youtube travel videos, no one ever says a bad word about the place, and is usually overwhelmed by Hanoi's Old Quarter, with its narrow, crowded, somewhat frenetic streets, French design influence, and overall liveliness.  It's hard to imagine how badly the Covid must have hurt the place.   Yet, despite the obvious importance of tourism, the Old Quarter is still a part of the city used by locals - I mean, this is the (very nice) hotel we stayed at:

..and metres down that road there were sidewalk shops selling un-refrigerated meat and lots of fruit and vegetables. 

Oddly, despite the huge number of scooters, I never noticed exhaust fumes, and it's true:  to cross the street, you just have to be brave and walk in straight lines and at a steady pace, so they can (more or less) flow around you.   The biggest worry was watching my wife looking at Google maps too closely and losing situational awareness, so to speak.

I did see one accident, but it was on the day trip to Ninh Binh, when an old guy on a scooter ran into a guy in my group, knocking him over from behind, in a temple area and on a wide thoroughfare that I wouldn't even call a normal street.   You can see for yourself:

 

The old guy wanted compensation for some broken pots, but the tour guide and some local official defended the young-ish Malaysian tourist (in fact, the guide told him not to offer compensation).   It had the feeling of a possible scam, although the driver was pretty old (I would guess his 70's?) and I am inclined to put it down to his feeble driving skills, as I doubt he was into deliberately taking a fall off his scooter.

Funnily enough, when I took street photos in Hanoi, they never really seemed to convey adequately the actual busy-ness of the roads:

 

 

OK, I guess the last pic looks a bit busy - but it's worse in real life.  (Too many tourists walk around doing selfie videos, and I didn't want to join that set.) 

As for general liveliness:  there was some good quality music played on the street near the hotel on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night:

And we could hear it pretty clearly from our room:

but it ended at 10pm sharp each night, so it was fine.

We were near Hoan Kiem lake:

 

 

 

 

 

 

and the wide road to the side of it was closed to traffic on weekends, and flooded with families.   

These kids carts were very popular, and even the tiniest child can go for a ride, as they can be remote controlled by the parent!:

The Monkey King is popular, too, as are balloon vendors:

 

 

 

 

 

One thing that's hard to understand about the place:  how do dogs learn to just calmly watch traffic and people and not end up having very short lives at the wheels of scooters?

Anyhow, as for the general vibe, it feels a little odd to be in an ostensibly communist country that seems so intensely capitalistic.   I kept thinking that it's "Marx meets Ayn Rand", and wondered if it would cause some sort of ideological crisis for Sinclair Davidson if he visited.   It's a little bit scam/tout prone - some apparent taxis are not to be trusted, although even then, the "triple the normal price" is still likely to be substantially cheaper than what you would pay in Australia.  

The touts are not too persistent.  A simple "no thanks" is enough.  My favourite scammer was the guy on the footpath outside the entry to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum who assured me I needed to buy a face mask off him or I would not be allowed entry.  (I could see plainly by turning my head that this was not true.)  I was a little surprised to find that there were so many touts for "massage" if I was out walking by myself - including men, or in one case, a woman, who would pull up beside me on their scooter, flash a pic of a scantily clad woman on their phone while offering to take me there.  It felt a bit more like Thailand in that respect than I expected.

Of course, the food is cheap and (usually) very good.  We just had one egg coffee (where the coffee is topped by heavily whipped whole egg - sounds dubious but it's very nice, as a sort of sweetish treat), but I wish we had more.

The best single higher class restaurant we ate at was one my wife found on Facebook, of all places.  It's called Sente, and has a menu based on emphasising everything lotus.   Every course was great, and it was a quiet and pleasant setting.  The total cost for everything (several courses, a few beers and coffee) was still around $60 AUD.

One final thing about the country:   I know that all warmer Asian countries have a way of conducting their commerce on the street.   But I kept feeling while in Hanoi that the Vietnamese really do seem to conduct their entire life (outside of the bedroom) in public, so to speak.   Even when not selling their wares on the footpath, or washing dishes there, or repairing or making stuff right in the doorway to their little shop, the Vietnam seem particularly keen on socialising and eating together, in the open.   Maybe coffee culture accounts for part of it, too?  For an Australian, it looks like a kind of social connectedness to be somewhat admired, although I guess that could come with its own stresses, too.

Anyway, it's a ridiculously photogenic country in terms of landscapes, and I'll make a separate post about the trips to Ha Long Bay and Ninh Binh.