good morning, vietnam (part 1)

Let me preface this story by saying that we are alive and well and Vietnam has turned out to be very cool. (Please keep this in mind as you read this entry). But like China, where our first day had us wishing we'd never had the mad idea of taking this trip and had just stayed home, living safe, if mundane lives, our first night in Vietnam made us "want our mommies."

We arrived in 'Nam around 10:30pm Friday night, an hour late, which was no real surprise considering what a bureaucratic nightmare the whole flight from China had been - a "special gate" where we couldn't check in until 45 minutes before take-off, a long transfer in Ghuangzou from and then back to the the same plane, etc. Maya and I had been pessimistically predicting all ride-long that our checked-in luggage would be lost and/or the car that our hotel was supposed to send to pick us up from the Hanoi airport would be M.I.A. , so we were very pleasantly surprised when we arrived at the luggage carousel and found our bags just making the circuit, and then lumbered exhautedly out of the terminal exit to find a dude with a sign that said "Maya Geist" waiting.

The guy seemed nice enough and his English was good though very heavily accented. We jumped into his extremely new minivan and headed off towards Hanoi. The driver made some small talk while we eyed the dark landscape passing outside the windows: a wide, shimmering river, some crazy-looking tall and gaunt French Colonial buildings, shanty-town shacks full of workers busy through the night, a massive flower market bustling with activity... At some point Maya asked the dude "Is your hotel far away?" and he responded that it was only about 40 minutes from the airport, but then he added something which we couldn't quite catch due to his accent, but which we both thought sounded like, "But I am not going to the hotel, I am taking you to my friends," followed by a laugh that in context sounded rather menacing. Maya and I exchanged perturbed glances, then I thought about his statement a bit and figured that what he must have said - better have said - was something to the effect of, "But it is not my hotel, it's my friends'." Either way, between the strange nighttime world we were passing outside and the mysterious conversation of our driver, Maya and I started to feel slightly on edge.

Then we wound through the tight, serpentine, and, though it was barely 11pm, almost completely abandoned streets of Old Quarter Hanoi (the tourist center), and pulled up to an almost pitch-black little alley. The driver made a call on his cellphone, then said that we should get out and that people from the hotel would meet us there. We did so rather hesitantly, and a few people did walk out from the dark alley, including two giggling young Vietnamese women strolling arm in arm, who we would never have guessed were from the hotel but they seemed to know the driver, and he, them, and they came over to us, began reaching down for our bags. "Uh, that's OK, I'll take them," I said, grabbing my heavy-as-fuck bag in one hand and tucking Maya's only slighty less heay-as-fuck bag under my arm. The girls didn't seem to speak much English, but they gestured for us to follow them down the dark alley, which we did, their incessant giggling and arm-in-arm strolling making them seem like a pair out of a horror movie. The alley only got darker the deeper into it we got, and then it hit a blind corner, around which Maya and I were both convinced we were gonna get mugged.

We didn't. Around the corner lay our hotel, which had a beautiful, cozy lobby. One of the girls checked us in and led us up four flights of spiral staircase (the building is one of those same tall, narrow French Colonial structures we'd noticed on the ride over) to our room - which looked perfectly comfortable, until Maya noticed that the door to the balcony was wide open. Now, as I've mentioned in a few of my very first posts, this year Southeast Asia has experienced its worst outbreak of the mosquito-spread Dengue Fever in 10 years. And that isn't the only mosquito-born terror to plague the region: there's malaria and Japanese enchephalitis, among other lesser-known but just as fucked-up diseases. Maya quickly closed the door, but we both could see the the seal was far from bug-proof, and when she pointed this out to the girl, the young woman only pulled a curtain, which was clearly even less bug-proof, over the doorway. "No problem, OK?" "No, not OK" Maya said and tried to communicate the issue to the girl, who only stared back with a blank smile and nodded, "Yes. Yes," clearly understanding nothing. After she left the room, Maya and I just looked at each other. It was too late to try and find another hotel, especially since, judging from the disquieting quiet outside, Hanoi was already well past its bedtime, so we decided to slather ourselves in bug-repellant cream and forge through the night.

We also decided that while we had a balcony, we should put it to use. You see, in preparation for the trip and the mosquito-spread infections that we knew we would be dodging throughout Southeast Asia, we had brought with us a few cans of this Permethrin shit, which is basically this bug-killing toxin that you're supposed to spray all over your clothes; thing is, the shit is so poisonous, you have to do the spraying outside, then you have to let your clothes dry for at least two hours before you wear them, and if you get any of the stuff into you eyes, mouth, or even onto your skin or the clothes you are wearing at the time, the warning label on the cans tell you to seek out immediate medical attention. Needless to say, we were almost more afraid of the Permethrin than of the mosquitos.

So Maya and I put on the medical respiratory masks and the rubber gloves (that we brought along for this exact purpose) and headed out onto the tiny balcony to spray our clothes. What followed was a comedy of errors, except that we - and especially Maya - were deathly afraid of the shit so it wasn't funny at all at the time. We could barely spread out our clothes without them dangling dangerously over the railing; it took me forever to figure out the damn spraying function of the Permethrin cans - turns out you have to pump the top of a can 5-to-10 times before the damn thing can spray, and the litany of progressively more terrifying health warnings; and there was a swirling breeze which would periodically hit us, turning any directed spray of the insecticide into a cloud of noxious fumes seemingly eager to consume Maya's and my heads. By the time we had finally finished "impregnating" our clothes (the rather disturbing term that the cans' labels use to describe the process), we were both dead tired and we flopped onto our bed, convinced that if the mosquito didn't kill us overnight, the poison we had just sprayed all over ourselves certainly would. (To be continued...though we're off to Halong Bay tomorrow so it might be a few days before the next installment. Remember, patience is a virtue.)