South East Asia on a Hamstring – February 26

Hanoi, Vietnam – February 26, 2000

Breakfast at the Viet My was included, but unfortunately consisted of a baguette, jam, and a very greasy fried egg. This wasn’t so bad on the first day. Repetition is always my problem with food.

I started the Wendy-tip envelope rolling – it’s a curse of being American that tipping is bred into you and you can never forget it.

Wendy gave us our morning instructions at 9am. She was taking us on a walk and later we were to all meet up for the water-puppets. I sat by Hans and repeated everything she said.

We went outside the hotel, into the chilly, gray morning. Wendy demonstrated how to cross the street in Vietnam.

“Walk slowly, don’t stand still and don’t run.”

She demonstrated a few times. We all just about had coronaries.

The streets of Vietnam cities, as I’d actually read in a Pico Iyer book, are crazy. There are only a few cars, but motorbikes and mopeds and bicycles are everywhere and there is little order to how they travel along. You cross the street by stepping first into the gutter and then proceeding slowly into traffic. You keep your eyes on the motorbikes, so that the drivers can see that you are aware of them. You walk steadily as the vehicles all veer around you. When you cross the middle of the street, you turn your head the other way, and repeat your performance.

It was pretty harrowing, and supposedly the traffic is much worse in Saigon.

Our walk was through the old section of the city. Hanoi has a lot of character and old colonial French charm. The souvenirs are good here – a lot of silk and lacquerware. Motorbikes are not just on the road – they are often on the sidewalk, moving or parked, so one must be alert. Pedestrians are also everywhere, and it is quite common to see a woman, with two giant bundles hanging from opposite ends of a stick, walking with a little bounce down the street. The locals were very fashionably dressed and really outclassed us in our hiking boots and fleeces. All of their clothes had designer labels – but presumably none of them are real. Everything in the stores had labels – North Face, Calvin Klein, Versace – but it was all priced at between four and twelve dollars.

We visited a number of shops and districts and even went by a pharmacy where a grizzly old man would take your pulse and offer you a herbal prescription. Having nowhere to cook herbs and no way to get them back through U.S. Customs, I didn’t bother.

At 6pm, we took cyclos to the water puppet show.

Wendy had warned us about rogue cyclo drivers and of course I immediately got into the wrong cyclo. She caught up to me in her cyclo and told me to “get out and move to this cyclo.” Embarrassed, I did so, leaving the rogue cycle driver to his own devices.

We rode through the crazy traffic, as the motorbikes steered around us. It all seemed a bit deadly but we all made it safely to the water puppets.

According to the guidebook, the water puppets are a bizarre, exclusively Hanoi folk artform. A small band plays traditional instruments and sings from an elevated (dry) platform. Meanwhile, marionettes are manipulated around in a small, deep pool of water, demonstrating various vignettes from Vietnamese life.

A couple of wooden dragons swam out first, spewing fireworks from their mouths and bobbing around.

They were followed by farmers driving oxen through rice paddies and various rodents and country scenes, all splashing about in the pool. Two phoenix-birds laid an egg together and hatched a baby phoenix, and then they all swam away in domestic bliss.

I looked around, my mouth open with astonishment. This was really weird.

Everyone in the theater was a tourist. It reminded me of watching whirling dervishes in Syria, or Amazon tribal dances in Peru, or kabuki theater in Tokyo. The question for all instances is this:

Is this stuff for real??

Surely it is a traditional Vietnamese handicraft. But surely they don’t do this for fun on a regular day. Surely this is purely for our benefit.

But I am a jaded cynic… it was an interesting and colorful spectacle and while I am not likely to return any time soon to the water puppet theater, I was pleased to see it once.

On our cyclo trip from the theater to the Hoa Sua restaurant, Lochie’s driver lost a piece of his cycle in the middle of a busy intersection. He jumped off the cyclo and went chasing a chain, leaving Lochie’s cyclo drifting backwards in the night, right into oncoming motorbikes.

They all deftly steered around her. She laughed, a much more easygoing reaction than I would’ve had.

Wendy has laryngitis and I had swollen glands and a really sore throat. I couldn’t even eat my meal at the Hoa Sua restaurant. I seem to catch every respiratory illness that goes around. I should just count my blessings that I don’t get traveler’s diarrhea, I suppose.

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