Hanoi has some striking images—the traffic, Lake Hoan Kiem in the middle of the city, maybe the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, and certainly the preserved body of Ho Chi Minh himself, hands on hips, lying in spooky splendor. For us, though, Hanoi was much more about words than pictures.
I have no idea whether Hanoi ever deserved a reputation as a grim, grey communist capital but it definitely doesn’t deserve such a reputation now. Hanoi is by no means charming—too grand a scale, too much pollution—but it is endlessly busy, filled with lots of smiling, laughing people.
The traffic is frightening. It is not, in fact, chaotic. If you watch long enough, you can see an order, both empirical and normative. (We haven’t seen a single accident.) It just isn’t the order we’re used to. There are one way streets but the directional rule seems not to apply to motorbikes, which make up about 90% of the traffic. The amazing maneuver, at least to our eyes but performed absolutely routinely by cars, cabs, motorbikes, and bicycles, is the left turn into oncoming traffic. It’s the opposite of defensive driving which, I learned long ago in some traffic class I was required to take after doing something I wasn’t supposed to, involves driving so that you do not depend on how anyone else behaves. In Hanoi, when you drive or, for that matter, cross the street, you rely completely on the good intentions of others. There are a few spots with traffic lights and even a few with pedestrian lights. But a green light for pedestrians does not mean that cars or motorbikes stop, only those that are going straight. There are still plenty turning left or right into the intersection. Crossing a street means learning to wade into traffic and hoping that the cars, motorbikes, and bikes avoid you. Naomi thinks it’s important to avoid making eye contact with an oncoming driver because, if you do, then the expectation will shift to you to avoid the collision. It all feels a bit like the penultimate scene of Star Wars (the first one, the good one) where Luke Skywalker pretty much closes his eyes and lets the Force guide him through the Death Star or whatever it’s called. (Or was that in Lost Brigadoon?)
Lake Hoan Kiem, in the middle of the central city, pretty much captures what the whole feel. The lake is two blocks wide and about ten blocks long. To the south is the beginning of the French quarter, where we’re staying (The Metropole, two doors down from the Graham Greene suite). To the north is the old city. There’s a pagoda, reached by a bridge, at one end and the white thing I took a picture of in the middle. Along the edges are people of all ages doing tai chi and, in the evening, young couples necking (the old fashioned term is both intentional and appropriate). But an endless stream of motorbikes and cars circle the lake, noisy and smelly. I also have no idea how deep the lake is: the pollution is so intense that it’s impossible to see even a fraction of an inch below the surface. The lake is lovely but awful … unless it’s awful but lovely.
Hanoi is hard to figure out. It’s a poor city in a poor country. The sidewalks right outside our hotel, in what resembles a high rent district, are ripped up, almost as much dirt as brick and concrete. Even with the left overs from the 70 year French presence, wide boulevards and some colonial buildings, there is little evidence of much wealth. The streets are filled, but with motorbikes not cars and what cars there are tend to be low end Japanese and Korean models. There are few monuments (a statue of Len-in in addition to the HCM Mausoleum is about it), especially for a capital city. But there are plenty of public buildings, mostly museums, about which more later. There are also plenty of aggressive peddlers, offering motorbike rides, tee shirts, post cards, and a lot of other stuff, but virtually no beggars. In fact, we’ve seen fewer in five days in Hanoi than we see walking down the street in Northampton on a Thursday afternoon. There doesn’t seem to be any public drunkenness and we’ve seen no homeless people. It’s not Bangkok: There are plenty of people but they aren’t all cramming into malls, which barely seem to exist. There also aren’t older Western men with younger Asian women, something we saw a lot of in Thailand. Neither is it one of those Central American capitals I’ve seen: There don’t seem to be any gated or guarded communities for rich people and there don’t seem to be any really poor people—no favellas here—and there are public places. Maybe we don’t know how to look but what we are seeing is a different sort of city from any I’ve seen before.
We’ve been to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and the Ho Chi Minh house and the Ho Chi Minh museum. (By the way, Ho Chi Minh apparently requested that he be cremated on his death and had no intention that his body should be displayed year round, except for the two months every year when it’s sent to Moscow for repairs. Franklin Roosevelt apparently also left instructions for his own funeral that Eleanor ignored. If HCM and FDR couldn’t control what happened to their bodies after their death, there’s not much chance for the rest of us if somebody has different ideas.) We’ve also been to the “Hanoi Hilton” (the prison built by the French and later used for American pilots), the Army Museum, the Women’s Museum, and the Ethnology Museum.
Of the Army Museum, our guide book (Frommer’s) writes: “The museum presents the Vietnamese side of the country’s struggle against colonial powers.” Really? In a generally lousy guidebook, this is one of the sillier comments, not just for the obvious reasons but also because it doesn’t get at the real differences between American and Vietnamese museums. (Tours of Vietnam, a long diatribe against Lonely Planet —thanks to Dan for the reference to a book I actually read before we left—equally misses the point.) The Vietnamese museums do claim to tell the truth, but so, of course, do American museums, just in a different way. The Women’s Museum, closed except for an exhibit on street vendors, was much like an American museum, probably because it seems to have been put together by an economics professor from UConn. It had pictures of street vendors, women who come to Hanoi from the countryside and wander around selling their goods, and quotes from them alongside the pictures, the familiar American trope of allowing the poor and dispossessed to tell their own stories. At the end the exhibit had quotes from various experts, officials and regular Hanoians expressing varied views on a proposed ban on street vending. American style, we were invited to come to our own conclusion, to form our own opinions.
The other museums (partial exception of the Ethnology Museum) did not work that way. They had a story to tell and told it with unwavering certainty. The Hoa Lo prison was built and used by the French for the brutal repression of an anti-colonial movement. Despite their brutality, the French failed because of the heroic resistance of Vietnamese prisoners. In contrast, during the American War, the Vietnamese treated the American pilots held there (including John McCain) with great humanity, evidenced in the pictures of pilots playing basketball, celebrating Christmas, eating Thanksgiving dinner. The Army Museum and the HCM museum both told the story of the heroic triumph of the Vietnamese people over, first, the French and, second, the Americans. We watched a fifteen minute documentary of the Vietnamese victory (in our guidebook, the French defeat) at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and saw the twenty or thirty Vietnamese kids who made up the entire audience, beside ourselves, break into spontaneous applause as the French surrendered. The story lines—resistance, heroism, triumph, liberation, reunification--left no room for different opinions. (The picture of the sculpture made from downed US planes is from the Army Museum. The little kids were standing around after having visited the HCM Mausoleum, apparently unaffected by the sight of the preserved cadaver inside.)
Does this mean that the Vietnamese museums are more heavy handed than a typical American museum? Yes. Does it mean that that their story line is more heavily moralized? Yes. (Even the American museum at the Normandy beaches that we saw last summer avoided telling a full moral tale. There the story was about heroism and death, maybe about the contrast between the violence of D-Day and the natural, serene beauty of the setting. But Germans were barely present and there was no sense that the war might have has anything to do with democracy or Fascism.) But my point is not so much that the Vietnamese are telling a different story than Americans (although they do) or that the guidebooks are telling a different story than the Vietnamese (although they also do) so much as that they tell those stories differently.
At times, looking at pictures and watching movies of Americans bombing Hanoi and Haiphong got hard. The bombing was comprehensible: Unlike Laos, Hanoi and Haiphong do and did have sites of strategic importance. The bombings didn’t seem crazy (as the bombing of Laos does) but they still felt wrong and awful. The fairly frequent references, in words and pictures, to the American anti-war movement didn’t help. Quite the reverse, it made us feel worse, reminding us how little we had known, how far away and abstract Vietnam had seemed.

Nature

We got to Hanoi about a week ago. We made it to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, at least the outside, the Ho Chi Minh museum, and the “Hanoi Hilton,” the prison built by the French and later used to hold the American pilots shot down during the 1972 bombings. But it also rained for 48 hours straight so I’ll hold off writing anything about Hanoi until I’ve seen it dry.
Mostly, we’ve been doing nature stuff. Since I’ve never had much to say about nature—it’s pretty, it’s very pretty, it’s too cold, there are too many bugs—I’ll go light on the comments and just say what we’ve been up to.
After two days in Hanoi, we took the night train to Sapa, a nine hour ride north of Hanoi to Lao Cai, then another hour by van deeper into the mountains. We arrived about 7, had breakfast, looked around the market filled with Black Hmong and Green Hmong and Red Dao, and started off on the five hour “trek” we had arranged months earlier. I had figured “trek” meant a walk or maybe a hike, the way a “safari” means riding around in a jeep or “teaching” means standing in front of a class talking. As it turned out, in this case, the trek was at least a traipse and maybe even the real deal. As it turns out, Sapa is famous for its winter mist. There was no rain but everything was wet. Our guide led us down a dirt path that turned into a narrower dirt path that turned into the edge of a terrace in a rice paddy that turned into a stream. The paths, when there were paths, were all mud and, when there weren’t paths, they were also all mud. It was pretty. It was even very pretty. It was also fascinating to traipse through the Hmong villages. It wasn’t even cold but it was very wet. We did see a couple of 25 year olds, with a different guide, skipping along the same route we took. But we aren’t 25 year olds and, so far as I can remember, may never have been 25 years old. We finished the trek exhausted, covered in mud, soaking wet. My position, at least since we’ve both been employed, is that we have too much money to have real travel adventures. I may have to revise that position.
Topas Ecolodge, where we stayed, another 20 miles past Sapa, may have the most beautiful view in all of Viet Nam. That’s what the guidebooks say. I wouldn’t know. We could not see more than fifteen feet. We had an “easy trek”-how’s that for an oxymoron?—scheduled for the next day but cancelled it and spent the day in Sapa town getting laundry done. Sapa was also covered in mist—except for about five minutes when the mist suddenly disappeared to reveal a town, a lake, and a valley (just like in Lost Horizons, about the same ratio as the one day a century that Shangri-la appears). We took the overnight train back to Hanoi, arriving at 4:30 in the morning, hung out in a hotel lobby, ate breakfast and at eight were fitted with glass slippers and whisked off to Halong Bay.
Halong Bay is three hours east of Hanoi by van, in the general vicinity of Haiphong, the area most heavily bombed by the US from 1965 to 68 and again in 1972. The bay is filled with “karsts,” odd limestone formations, extending for miles, forming little coves (some with floating villages of fishers), sometimes housing caves, other times surrounding little lakes that we could reach through cave-like passages in the limestone. We had reserved a two day cruise with a company called Indochina Sails that runs four boats in the bay, three luxury boats with fifteen cabins, another ultra luxury boat with only five cabins. (The picture of our cabin is from their website.) We had reserved on one of the larger boats. A couple of days before we were set to leave, I got an e-mail from Indochina Sails, saying that a “government official” had requested the room we had reserved and offering, as compensation, a bump up to the “suite” on the small boat (plus a free bottle of wine). Now, “suite” may be another word like “safari” and “teach” but the cabin was 300 square feet, about 50% bigger than any other cabin in the Indochina Sails fleet, possibly the biggest cabin in any of the several hundred boats that float around the bay. It wasn’t quite so epic an upgrade as getting booted to first class for a flight from NYC to South Africa but it was very nice: good food, lots of hands reaching out to help us as we got in and out of the boat, the first decent bottle of wine we’ve had in South East Asia, and the pleasure of lying in bed floating past one of the world’s spectacular sights. It was pretty. It was very pretty. It wasn’t even cold and it didn’t rain and there were no bugs.

We have had a couple of bad meals in Vietnam but not many. The interesting thing, I think, is that unlike French and, even more, Italian food and, in a different way, good American food, all of which rely much more on the quality of ingredients than the quality of seasoning, Vietnamese food, probably like Chinese food, is driven much more by the combinations of seasonings than by the quality of ingredients. (For what it’s worth, the two French guys who were on the boat with us and own a traditional French restaurant in Auvergne not only agreed but seemed to think it was incredibly obvious.) I’ve known for a while that you can make anything taste good if you just use enough butter or sweetened condensed milk. I’m now adding lemongrass to the liat.

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One of the amazing things about this trip is that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts continues to deposit checks in our bank accounts every other Friday even as we float through Halong Bay. I have not done a great deal to earn that check but Naomi has been busy. If you're interested, check out Nancy Folbre's blog in the New York Times.

Toto, I think we're not in Thailand any more

Laos is different. Luang Prabang is different.
LP is one of the oldest cities in Thailand. It was the residence of the last kings, who reigned from 1904, as French dependents through 1975 as American dependents until the Pathet Lao victory in 1975. The oldest part of LP is a peninsula formed by the intersection of the Mekong and the much smaller Khan River (which join in view of our hotel window). The town is all of four blocks wide, one street on each river and two streets running down the middle. There are about a dozen Wats on the peninsula and another 20 or so nearby. What was once the Royal Palace and is now a museum is just big enough to entertain, just small enough so as not to oppress. The view from Phousi Hill, just across from the palace—there’s a picture up of the palace looking down from the hill—is spectacular. In the mornings, the roughly 250 monks who live in the various Wats form a processional, walking down one street, back another as locals, mostly women, and a few inappropriate tourists place rice and some other food in their baskets. (Becoming a Buddhist monk, it turns out, is not a permanent commitment, like becoming a priest. Rather, it’s something many boys do, starting as early as ten, for limited duration and as a way of getting an education. The monks are almost all kids, mostly teenagers, and the almsgiving seems as much a way of supporting education as a religious duty or, maybe, religious duty is supporting education.)
Other than the Wats, which aren’t that tall themselves, none of the buildings in town, not even the Royal Palace, is more than two stories high. The architecture, aside from the Wats, is French Colonial with some Lao twists. The riverside streets are lined with waterfront cafes. The two inner streets are lined with shops and restaurants, some pretty good, interspersed among the Wats. The food is not so spicy as Thai food but delicately seasoned and cheap. (Meals in two of the priciest restaurants in town ran, for the two of us, about $35 one night and $30 the next, although someone hell bent on spending more could run up the tab by ordering imported wine instead of drinking local beer and whiskey.) To top it off, the weather is perfect—in the 60s in the morning and at nights, in the 70s with crisp sunshine during the day.
One day we walked around town. Another day we took a van about 20 miles to the beautiful Kuang Si Falls—not only words but pictures fail me, although I’ve posted some—with a very depressing stop on the way back at a Hmong Village. Yesterday, we took a boat up the Mekong--just like in Apocalypse now but with nobody shooting at us—to the sacred Pak Ou caves. The caves were not particularly interesting but the ride was gorgeous. The pictures fail me again but I’ve posted them, anyway.
“CULTURES” AS TOURIST ATTRACTIONS
The tourists—and there are lots of them here, but in the hundreds not the thousands--turn out en masse for the monks’ processional at dawn. The monks do not seem to mind but there are various signs and brochures around town asking tourists to respect the ceremony, not to give alms if they are not themselves believers, asking photographers to keep a respectful distance. Most of the tourists are respectful but some are unpleasantly aggressive. I found it annoying but not horrifying and it certainly wasn’t horrifying enough to keep me from taking pictures of my own.
The Hmong Village was something else. The stop there, on the way back from the falls, was clearly a stop sanctioned by the authorities and apparently welcomed by the villagers. But it was very depressing. We got out of the van and followed a path past women and children selling trinkets, the wail “one dollar, one dollar” made even more plaintive by the tonal sounds of East Asian speech. At the top of the path was a sign to a Hmong Museum, which turned out to be a thatched hut with a dirt floor, apparently the same as every other structure in the village, and with a couple of primitive pieces of something decorative, three bamboo pipes, and what looked like a discarded mattress lying on the ground with some other junk. The village was, well, dirt poor. There was some electricity. But the thatched huts had no floors, no furniture that we could see, no running water. I did not take any pictures and I felt dirty—mentally and morally not physically—as we climbed back into the van. The Hmong, by the way, were the staunchest allies of the US during the war.
“WE’RE GOING TO BOMB THEM BACK TO THESTONE AGE” General Curtis LeMay
“From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of ordnance over Laos during 580,000 bombing missions - equal to a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years.”
By 1973, the US, in an effort to close down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, had dropped more bombs on Laos than had ever been dropped on any country before. It’s hard to imagine. The total population of Laos is 6 million and was probably about half that in 1970. Eighty percent of the population is agricultural and more than half of that involved in subsistence farming—all this after ten years of collectivization and twenty year of pro-market reform (which began earlier here than elsewhere in SE Asia.) There were French colonialists here for about 60 years but Laos was the backwater of the French Empire. (Indeed, Laos is the backwater of Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese, the Cambodians/Khmer, the Thai/Siamese, and the Burmese have all taken turns as the dominant power in SE Asia. Not the Lao, whose turn taking has consisted of becoming the colony or dependency of one or another of the dominant powers.) It’s not easy to figure out what Lao nationalism is, as nation seems to be both an ideological and administrative construct imposed by the French, but at least it’s imaginable. But in a country where there weren’t even many landless peasants or many big estates and where big business even now seems to consist of little more than opening a twenty room hotel, it’s hard even to imagine what either Communism or Capitalism could mean. In Luang Prabang, market reform seems to mean that Europeans have come back, to open what is still only a smattering of upscale hotels and restaurants. At our hotel, the Swedish owner hired a Swedish manager and has seventeen Lao, mostly graduates of one of the Wats, reporting to him. It is hard to imagine that market reforms have had much of an effect on the countryside, much as it’s hard to imagine that collectivization made much difference.
By most estimates, two hundred thousand Lao civilians died as a result of the American bombings. There are roughly 700,000 Lao émigrés in the US, Australia, and Europe.
I MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO DEFINE CHARM BUT I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT:
Luang Prabang is charming. Here’s why:
It’s small—four blocks wide, maybe 10-15 blocks long

The buildings are low, nothing more than two stories high

The buildings are small. Other than the wats, the hotels are probably the biggest buildings around but they’re more like guest houses than hotels and none have more than 20 rooms or so

The Motorbikes outnumber the cars and the pedestrians outnumber the motorbikes.

The ratio of sidewalk to street is pretty high. That’s not literally true but people walk in the street, which is pretty much the same thing.

There are no traffic lights. (For the sociologists, here’s Louis Wirth from “the City”: “The clock and the traffic signal are symbolic of the basis of our social order in the urban world, [a way of handling] frequent close physical contact, coupled with great social distance”)

The monks are scenic. It helps both that Buddhism is not a proselytizing religion, which would not be charming. And that the monks are young, which makes it easier to treat them as cute, or something like that, rather than sacred. It also helps that the monks were pretty chatty, since they wanted to practice English

Restaurants all had open air seating and, Naomi says, good lighting

Lots of cafes along the river

There’s a lot of wood in the buildings, not just concrete. The wood is particularly notable on second floor balconies, and balconies themselves are charming.

There are a lot of flowers.

Nobody seemed to mid in the least that tourists were wandering in and out of the Wats. Plus, there are so many Wats that they became part of the scenery, not destinations or “sites”

Nobody seemed to mind the tourists in general. There are a lot of tourists but only by the standards of a sleepy little town. Even the “throngs” at the processional numbered only about a hundred or so. Didn’t even outnumber the monks.

At our hotel (7 rooms), the owner hung out a lot. He gets around town on a no gear bike.

There’s a lot of water around but it doesn’t move fast.

So, what do I get from this. Charm operates on a small scale (town, building, streets). It “prefers’ nature to the human made but prefers its nature tamed (flowers by the river, open air cafes, wood in building). Charm is personal or at least appears to be personal (hotel owner hanging around, chatty monks, small hotels). It distrusts things mechanical and power driven (walking rather than driving, riding bikes rather than driving cars). It lives on the culturally distinct rather than the universal (monks in orange, even better if they’re carrying umbrellas, the Wats, those funny looking boats). And it requires invitation rather than coercion (no born agains, nobody seemingly much concerned with what anyone else is up to).

There’s much more to say but we’re now in Hanoi, which raises a whole lot of different issues—not least how anyone survives the traffic. We’re off for 5 days, first to the mountains (Sapa), then to Halong Bay. We’re likely to be without internet all or most of that time so it’s unlikely anyone will hear from us for at least a bit.