More Backtracking

I didn't know what to expect from Hanoi (see pictures above) but what I got came as a surprise. The gods of capital certainly appear to be alive and well there despite the communist packaging. At times it seemed a bit like Bangkok, at times like Jakarta, at times like the low-rise areas of Kuala Lumpur, though I felt a greater underlying sense of order than in any of those cities. Not many apartment blocks but lots of tall (five or six storeys), thin, sometimes pointed, sometimes pagoda-ed buildings. Generally these were colorfully painted or decorated, but if the money had run out this might be simply the front with the sides &rear in bare concrete. I saw no beggars, though some of the street peddlers were a touch aggressive, and some slightly desperate. The businesses in the Old Quarter looked like they were making money for their owners though the staff occasionally gave the sense of being a bit tired of it all. One shopping centre to which our tour guide took us, Trang Tien Plaza, was as up-market and expensive as any of the malls in Singapore - a sign of things to come? The humorless security guard (plenty of those around) objected to anyone sitting on the steps on the way in.

Oddly enough, fridge magnets were hard to come by. A shortage of fridges in Vietnam?

We visited a pottery village called Bat Trang. It looks as if the Vietnamese are keen on grouping similar types of business in particular locations. The shops there seemed pretty similar though and you tended to see the same kind of pottery designs all over the place. It was all a bit bland, though the little art galleries around Hanoi did offer something like variety.

We also spent a surrealist morning filing past the waxy corpse of Ho Chi Minh, poor chap. (By all accounts he wanted to be cremated so I don't know what he would have made of his last resting place.) He is housed in a suitably gloomy mausoleum, surrounded by appropriately annoyed military types. They don't like you to put your hands in your pockets, talk, smile or generally act normally as you pay your respects to 'Uncle Ho'. I suppose some kind of personality cult is inevitable in this kind of society and this one was reasonably harmless. Once you leave the confines of the mausoleum there are some fairly cheerful gardens to visit with a rather fine presidential palace (French style, in yellow like so many of the bigger buildings in the city) and a couple of smaller houses in which the late president spent time during the wars against France & America. The souvenir stalls are a replica of those anywhere else in the world - except for the lack of fridge magnets, and the plethora of images of Uncle Ho.

In contrast to the silliness above, the War Museum achieved a real sense of dignity. I think I expected to see some marks of destruction on the city that Nixon threatened to bomb back to the stone age in my teenage years, but the museum was the only place I saw in which there was any kind of acknowledgement of that insanity. All things American appeared to be in high regard, though it was rather jolly to be in an Asian city with not a single MacDonald's in sight. The Vietnamese, I was told several times, have decided to put the past behind them. Sometimes you see signs of hope for our benighted species, and it generally comes from the least likely places.

The city, by the way, has the nickname City of Motorcycles. I suppose this sounds better in Vietnamese. Helmets are mandatory so nobody wears them. The casualty rate on the roads is frighteningly high. Mike, one of the guys on the EcoBoat, told me that it's not actually an offence to knock someone down when you're drunk as the fact you are drunk means you couldn't help it. The noise from car & motorcycle horns is intense, constant, unremitting, unavoidable: nightmusic of a kind.