After retrieving our Permethrin-"impegnated" clothing from the balcony rail (and checking out the amazing view of the city from said balcony), putting it all on, and covering ourselves in sunblock and bug replellant, we stepped into the now sunlit Hanoi. Our no-longer-dark alley had been become a bright, busy gauntlet of tiny food stalls, whose face-stuffing patrons spilled out into the narrow street, seated at what looked like little children's plastic picnic furniture, only smaller. We tiptoed through this strange smorgasmord and hit the main strip, intriguingly named Hang Bong; this seemed, at first, to be like any trendy tourist-centric shopping strip - then we noticed the traffic. Think of it this way: Hanoi is basically like one big motorcycle rally, but instead of burly, bearded Hell's Angels-types in black leather and denim, it's all little Asian people and their families (kids, grandparents) in their street clothes (flip-flops, high-heels, mini-skirts, etc.) roaring around like daredevils with a death wish on their bikes and scooters. Almost no one wears a helmet - a few people wear hard-shell safari hats - but more than a few wear these awesome designer respiratory masks - in colorful prints and/or with cute animal shapes stitched on them - over their noses and mouths. (Maya and I agreed immediately that we had to find out where we could buy such things.) If we thought crossing the street in China was a life-risking adventure, crossing the street in Hanoi literally involves overcoming the most basic animal instinct of self-preservation and stepping into a nearly continuous wave of honking and rumbling motorbikes, then stopping in the middle of the street, hoping that the vehicles speeding straight at you will veer around you, then taking another step, and again throwing that same prayer to the heavens, repeating this process until you reach the other side of the road. One time as we stood paralyzed with fear at a particularly insane block, a random older Vietnamese woman stepped up, took Maya by the hand, and led her/us through the torrent of motorbikes without a word, depositing us at the other curb with a quick grin before continuing on her way.
But motorcycles and scooters aren't the only things to dodge in Hanoi; we would also get to dodge swarms of women in conical straw peasant hats, carrying two baskets hung from a pole over their shoulders, and aggressively hawking bananas, pineapples, and papaya. And then there are the dudes who pop up out of nowhere with a bag full of books that they are determined to add to your personal library - most of the books are travel guidebooks to various Southeast Asia destinations, the rest seems to be war-themed literature like Catch 22, and according to our guidebook, they are all photocopied-and-hand-stitched-together bootlegs (in fact, just today we found out that the reference copy of Lonely Planet: Vietnam sitting in the lobby of our hotel is just such a bootleg. It would be totally usable, except that it's missing pages and the photocopied maps are unreadable).
After breakfast at a lakeside cafe comfortably tucked away from all the madness of Hanoi, we scurried over to the Kangaroo Cafe, the only westerner-run tourist cafe in the city, which had been recommended to us by our friends Sarah and Alex. (Taking bootlegging to new heights/lows, there are two fake Kangaroo Cafes run by Vietnamese.) There we booked the trip to Ha Long Bay that we just returned from. Maya, still jittery from last night's misadventures and from today's street-crossings and vendor-harassment, was eager to talk to the cafe's Australian owner, Max, and get the straight dope from him on just how wary we should be of Hanoi's scam artists, outright thieves, and, of course, those damn "Mozzies," which is how Aussies apparently refer to the blood-sucking bugs. Max, it turns out, is quite the character. An orphan raised by a Jewish and Irish couple and turned ex-pat in Vietnam (where he has starred in more than a few movies and is referred to in some guidebooks as "Vietnam's Tom Selleck" - probably because of his 'stache more than anything else), Max is maybe even chattier than Maya and full of opinions - mostly good-humoredly negative - of other ex-pats, of tourists, and most of all, of his homeland. He alleviated the majority of our fears, and, much to Maya's and my surprise, he invited us out to drinks after he closed the cafe that night: "Just meet me outside the shop around 9:30," he said, "we'll hop on my bike and go somewhere nice."
We passed the day rather (happily) eventlessly, walking through the city, taking out some money (3,000,000 Dong! the exchange rate is about 16,000 Dong to 1 dollar), and buying soft-sleeper train tickets to Sapa for later in the week. After dinner, we walk through a massive night market where we stumbled on a woman selling huge piles of those designer respiratory mask we'd seen on many of the Hanoian bikers; Maya bought a particularly cute one with a little cat's head cut-out sewed to its left side for $1 (the woman was insistent on receiving U.S. currency). Here's Maya posing later with her mask:
The traffic around the lake area was absolutely insane. It was Saturday night, which apparently meant that all the young people would go out biking and drive faster, louder, and more recklessly than ever. The headlights of their vehicles shining in the dark as they sped around the lake traced out what could easily have been a massive nighttime race track.
At 9:30 we meet up with Max, who is just closing up the cafe along with his all Vietnamese staff. They invite us in behind the closed doors, and we all talk and laugh. Then he takes us back out front, and we all get on his scooter - Maya sandwiched between Max, driving, and me, hanging on for dear life to the back - and launch into the frenetic Saturday traffic. We're just going a short way to Max's place to drop off the bike, then we're planning to walk to an unnamed drinking spot of Max's choosing, but even that short, maybe 5-minute ride, we almost get in an accident, as another bike tried to sneak at high speed around our right side, nearly clipping us. Then, as we ride down the tight alley running back behind the majestic St. Joseph's cathedral and down to Max's home, we discover that a food stall has set up one of those kindergarten tables full of customers right in front of his door. He slows down, berates the people there in Vietnamese, and then, when they don't move out of the way, he rides right through their table, knocking plastic seats and food all over the place. Maya and I hop off, fully expecting the situation to explode into a full-on brawl, but the older woman running the food stall runs over and moves the customers (who simply look stunned), apologizing the whole time. Max doesn't seem too perturbed by the whole thing; "They do this all the time," he says, resigned to having to drive through people's dinner to go home at night.
After dropping the scooter off at - or rather inside - Max's pad, which proves to be quite swanky, we walk a few blocks through barely lit Hanoi, past more busy food stalls, as well as stinking piles of garbage and over a open gutter full of god knows what. Next thing we know Max has led us through a doorway and into what seems like a completely different universe: It's the opening of a new nightclub/ restaurant in Hanoi - Max knows the owners - and the place is fancy as all hell, pumping with too-loud house music, and looks like it could honestly have been transplanted from Soho or Chelsea! It's packed with young and obviously swinging white ex-pats, including one couple dressed as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. Max clearly feels almost more out-of-place than Maya and I (he claims to be the most unpopular person in the Hanoi ex-pat community and says that he fully expected to get into an argument with someone as soon as he came in), but the three of us are more than willing to enjoy the free food and drink and shoot the shit in the corner - where, in a rather grimly humorous reminder of the real world outside and, perhaps, of the future of the club, Max and I spot a mouse scurrying down the wall.
When I tell Max that I had been working as an editor of a rock magazine in the States up until embarking on this trip, he gets rather excited: He's a big music fan, plays guitar and sings himself, and is good friends with the guys from the Aussie band Midnight Oil. He recommends that we skip this joint and check out a venue he knows that sometimes features live music. So we follow him out and down a few blocks to what proves to be a hopping dance club packed with drunken Vietnamese men and women. There's American pop music - Britney Spears and such - blasting from the speakers and everyone (besides the three of us, of course) is singing along. Max points out the stage, which honestly looks more like a stripclub catwalk than anywhere a band would play, but he says that the platform rotates and moves up and down and that there are mini-elevators on the side, which sounds like a performance there would be pretty cool to see. But, unfortunately, there's no live music tonight, and in fact, the club closes at midnight, as does pretty much the rest of the city. So we down our drinks, head out, and decide to call it a day. As we approach Max's corner, he points us in the direction of our street, and then, almost mid-sentence, bids us a quick farewell and vanishes like a ghost into the night. A fitting end to a surreal day.
1 comment:
whoa! I actually said "Oh my god!" out loud when I read the part about you all driving through the people eating!
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