Day 1 – Hanoi, Vietnam
I was looking forward to being met at the airport, but couldn’t see my name – or any creative alternative – on the signs of the taxi drivers awaiting red-eyed visitors to Hanoi. My hotel, it transpired, had forgotten to book one. I consulted my phrasebook for help negotiating a fare with the freelance drivers mopping up the lost, virginal, and confused. Feigning familiarity with the process, no doubt poorly, I agreed to pay the first man I approached the huge number he conjured onto the screen of his calculator. It exceeded the standard fare by a third. I took the hit philosophically: the extortion rackets run by airport taxis were well documented.
When I arrived at my hotel in the old quarter, I chose to be friends with the receptionist, but felt it only fair to point out her slip. While doing so, I was mystified by the significant discrepancy between her stumbling spoken English and the relative fluency of her email. It came to make sense later. For the same $20 tariff, my show of goodwill was reciprocated with an upgrade to a room in a sister hotel that was bigger and better.
The reported descriptions of traffic were accurate: everyone wildly slalomed around with only a slight emphasis on keeping to the right side. Despite the cacophony of horns, the drivers didn’t seem too perturbed – it was just the simplest way to communicate their presence though it’s moot how effectively they stand out from the messy confusion of the audio soup. Inevitably, there are times when you need to cross the road on foot. Here, the best action is to simply walk without paying heed to the traffic – the locals are well-versed in avoiding you, but it’s important to do so in a predictable and steady fashion.
I ate my first dinner close to the lake in the commercial heart of the old quarter. In a lively street of restaurants, I ordered a dried beef salad packed with fresh herbs. Healthy and not quite enough. One of the hazards of eating alone is the commitment to one dish when you’d rather sample two or three. Still, there’s always tomorrow. I almost forgot to sip the vinegar and peanut sauce from the bowl.
It was a busy morning in which a full night’s sleep following a sleepless one induced myriad schoolboy errors. Firstly, I misplaced my passport and visa in a (too good) hiding place. I took my concern to reception – the last place I remembered seeing either – and they denied everything, while offering me a daytrip instead. It was less a response than one of 20 learned phrases – much like being directed to a FAQ page on a website because one of the prepositions in your query was found in an otherwise irrelevant answer. Fighting back a minor panic attack, while staying just within the boundaries of politeness, I returned to my room and noticed the tell-tale bulge of lost documents beneath the kettle mat.
Soon after, I was overcharged by a rickshaw driver wanting $10 to take me round a few corners to my original hotel. After consulting the hotel receptionist about a fair price, I paid him two-thirds of what he asked on the basis that if we hadn’t arranged a price, he didn’t have a monopoly on naming one. He left cursing. Honours even. It was the last time on my trip that I felt ripped off. (It turned out to be a wasted journey anyway as the hotel didn’t provide breakfast.) It took a few days to realise the two hotels were two points on the same line though when led from one to the other by the receptionist, we changed direction at least four times.
I ordered Ban Mi with pork and pate in a soft and crunchy baguette from a stall down the road. A very inappropriate breakfast, perhaps, but I wanted one under a belt I was happy to loosen a notch. At a nearby café, I ordered my first Vietnamese coffee. The two orders represented an enticing marriage of East and West – perhaps the only two positive legacies of the colonising French. The drink arrived as separate components – an expresso-sized dose of coffee with small jugs of water and condensed milk. Unlike the Ban Mi, the coffee matched the hype, possibly due to the sugar rush of the milk. A delightful morning ritual was established.
From here, I made my way to the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, where signs clearly banned the wearing of shorts or shirts without long sleeves. A cab back to my hotel would’ve solved that issue, but my customary tightness over unnecessary expenses kicked in. This was the biggest mistake of my entire trip – an opportunity to file past Uncle Ho never again presented itself. Instead I went to an army museum and then to what became known as the Hanoi Hilton – the infamous former French prison – including guillotine – that was later used to house US pilots such as John McCain. It was claustrophobic and cramped and the main thrust of the exhibits was on the harsh treatment of the natives by the French. Not perhaps what most (American) visitors were looking for, but the authorities made sure it was what they got.
On an overcast day, I wandered up to the adjoining lakes, where the relative calm offered relief from the massed crowds squeezing through the labyrinthine lanes of the old quarter. Later, I chose one of the restaurants popular with locals and backpackers where we sat on tiny chairs and ordered by pointing at picture menus. One of the staff found it hilarious that I ordered in Vietnamese and joked about it to a crowd of chortling locals. I grinned along. I think his emphasis was on my trying to speak Vietnamese.
Today’s unusual breakfast involved eating/drinking a giant bowl of Beef Pho.
My hotel was full so I needed a room for my final night in town. Happily, my original hotel, the Mayflower had one for a similar price. Here I became better acquainted with the young Ms Kim of my first email contact. She hails from the Chinese border and lives with friends locally. She apologised for the missing airport taxi and hazarded that my therapeutic training explained my lack of histrionics. It may help.
Late the previous night, we’d negotiated a trip to Halong Bay. She’d assured me that the colleague who’d book it in the morning spoke good English too. In practice, they were both equally competent at using a translation app. Sign language is king with heavy recourse to useful props such as pictures and calendars. I was glad not to be leaving that day as I hadn’t slept well due to general holiday over-excitement. The first trips I was offered were beyond my budget and needs, while the least luxurious looked more than adequate. After a blister-inducing hike around the museums the day before, I settled for visiting the peaceful Gardens of Literature where young scribes once learnt their trade – an oasis of tranquillity amid the noisy chaos of the city.
Close to home, evening dinner was a sizzling BBQ served by po-faced locals slightly off the tourist strip. I’d hoped to rediscover a wild heaving crossroads of eateries I’d stumbled through the night before, but without a local SIM card to guide me through the maze of lanes, that outcome was in the hands of serendipity. Serendipity cocked a snook. After about a fortnight of ruing this decision, I decided it was now no longer a good value purchase. A passive gambler’s fallacy. Silly me.
Halong Bay – Day 3
For two days and a night, I entered the picture postcard world of Halong Bay.
We headed east of Hanoi for 2.5 hours with me riding shotgun up front ahead of 16 others. We stopped first at a pearl centre where I heard nothing of a brief lecture in a room where 50 or so other brief lectures were taking place simultaneously. Opportunities to distort our holiday spending abounded. As our bus was now parked somewhere completely different amongst 100 others, I instead sought some familiar faces from those complete strangers who had sat behind me. Another hazard of travelling solo – not having anyone say: ‘Oh my god, we forgot Gareth in that toilet 30km back! At least we have his bag.’
We boarded the boat around midday. The loud dance music greeting us was an omen. This imposed presumptuous mood could hardly be ignored so I embraced it. Hobson’s Choice. After all, this was the economy tour. The more expensive trips allowed you to buy into a specific age-group or social class. Nonetheless, my $20 single supplement bought me a delightful single cabin with a view. Lunch and dinner were good – its mix of pork, chicken, vegetables and fruit was a complete meal without division into separate courses. First beer soon came, went, and was followed by more before merging into the cocktail hours. Weed materialised. My $45 bar bill represented the cost of the trip’s one true drinking session. It was a fun diversion from the pacific solitude of the remainder.
It also oiled the wheels of sociability with the generally youthful others. Various people shared their life stories with me before knowing I was a therapist.
Like British sisters, Jess and Ellie, the former, well-travelled, married and with lots of therapy behind her, a happy party woman who shares adrenalin junkiness with a skydiving absent husband. Little sister Ellie also confided a lot. I reminded her of another Gareth she liked. Boyfriend Tom was chirpily friendly and travelling with an interesting itinerant, D, who’d escaped from the mid-west and was using a TEFL qualification to travel far and wide away from it. Judicious use of weed countered his ADHD. His restaurant boss sent him off for a smoke when his focus appeared to drift.
An adventurous Aussie couple, Mark and C, had motorcycled 600 miles across the country – a venture that particularly impressed me, however much quieter the country backroads might be. Mark revealed a certain blue-collar conservatism in his implacable refusal to join in with the party games and karaoke. He wouldn’t sing, while C threw herself into the strangely inevitable Celine Dion duet. Nobody could follow that so I stepped forward to sing Sixteen Tonnes. I’m not sure it was what the crowd was expecting. I sang alone and received several wordless claps on my back.
I fraternised too with Daniel, a trainee clinical psychologist whose birthday we celebrated three days early; two young Swiss bankers; and three Chileans. Of the latter, I spoke bad Spanish and better English with the male of the trio, an affable phenomenologist, exchanged basic greetings with his sweet girlfriend, while flagrantly failing to catch the eye of her equally petite (and quite lovely) cousin Valentina.
The group was completed by a cheerful Italian family in which the parents relied on their Roger Federer-lookalike sons to translate, and Polish-Canadians, Jack and Ewa – retired in their 60s – and my only on-board seniors, who cheerfully disagreed about most of their travelling experiences (he loved Paris, she hated it). These two described being diddled for two million Dongs by an airport taxi-driver, and how – coincidentally – Ewa had filmed the episode, which led to them tracking the culprit down and using the evidence to force him to give half their money back.
Rounding off this intense 30 hours of socialising was… Diedra, an Irish nurse still happily working in A&E after three years; two equally sweet non-identical Danish twins, Silla and Mathilde, 19, whose trip was compensating for a lacklustre lockdown, and their compatriot, 22-year-old Janus with whom I kayaked the morning after to blow away my boozy cobwebs. The Danes were the first and last I spoke with from our taking the second launch to board to being dropped off last back in Hanoi. We lost contact only in the very British boozy middle portion. They all seemed quite affectionate towards me which made me wonder if I reminded them of one of their father’s more likeable friends.
Hue – Day 6
Three Vietnamese girl-women flirted with me over dinner at a restaurant they ran without a fleshed-out adult in sight. In my experience, their cheeky confidence was not mirrored by the often-demure females of the country, but reminded me of young indigenous women (with added mischief) on market stalls in Latin America. I wonder if, like them, those from the poorer classes here skipped being teenagers. Their middle-class equivalents seem already plugged into the matrix of international technological consumerism.
I accepted the invitation to eat through a combination of their collective winning charm, the late hour, and the unappealing drizzle beyond they alley of my lodgings. I chose a strange spring pancake chicken affair with a hot (very) sweet and sour sauce. I wasn’t eating many balanced meals – more sampling each very different dish one by one.
I’d spent a hard-working afternoon writing a World Report piece on Dubai rather than dithering in the hot Hue sun after arriving at 8.30am on the 13-hour sleeper train. An Indian corporate lawyer, Shriyani, slept on the bunk below and was delighted to hear one could change career at 40, which still gives her a handful of years to reinvent herself. We were joined by what I assumed was a mother and son Vietnamese couple and all slept quietly despite the blazing light remaining stubbornly on throughout.
I’d been delighted to board without anything going wrong. Sharing an alphabet helps when reading the train times, but when the woman on helpdesk doesn’t speak English, you hope everything runs smoothly. If it ran like British rail, I was fucked.
Bar for the usual dodgy wi-fi, the hotel was pleasant, friendly, and less than $10 for a functioning clean en-suite room. I’d settled for the same place Shriyani had booked after briefly and indecisively wandering a few blocks on this periphery to the tourist quarter. Like most travellers, she was one step ahead of me in organisation. We took a stroll to the Perfume river – the old bridge between the two halves of the city a significant location in one of the American war’s fiercer battles in which the defending Vietnamese occupied the ancient citadel. I was a little underwhelmed initially though the wide central avenues were calm and empty compared with everything I’d seen. Like the mountains of Quito, it also gave me a reference point for getting home. I elected against the Citadel in the baking afternoon sun.
I ate at a café close to the mouth of my hotel’s alley. The owners had researched well. Western breakfasts and local coffee came with all the cultural variations at slightly more than the going rate, but it was affordable and closer to what my body expected for the day’s first meal. Its beers were advertised as being ‘cold as your girlfriend’s heart’. The owner spoke goodish English, as did the hotel manager. Both were affectionately attentive to my attempts to wrangle sense from their intonated language.
I covered many miles walking around the citadel, market, and backpacker zone. The citadel was vast and well preserved. Only a few fenced off sections heaped up with rubble looked unlikely to be reconstituted into anything useful or pretty, along with a few others where repair work looked scheduled. Unlike their Western equivalents, the majesty seemed to be in form over content. Perhaps people of the East don’t need ‘things’ as much as Westerners, but in these public places, the balance and harmony of Eastern thinking is embodied by these vast symmetrical structures and the gardens and water features filling the spaces in between. It was unclear how much damage was done when the North Vietnamese forces faced the Americans across the river from behind its ancient walls. Yin, Yang, and Harmony presumably took a long holiday.
As a tourist, I didn’t really pay much attention to the commercial centres aimed at the local middle classes and jammed with the technology of companies from neighbours like Japan, South Korea and China. Most of my interactions were probably with the poorer sections of society bar those individuals at a management/owner level, who I imagine were only modest earners. I’d been surprised to see Vietnam rated as lower middle income – an upgrade from being one of the world’s poorest before it opened its markets. With GDP per capita at $3,750, the emphasis is on the ‘lower’, but the visible absence of extreme poverty, begging, or humble shacks in the cities illustrates the upwards shift.
Around Hue, I started enjoying my chosen ‘Nam book, the award-winning Dispatches, by Micheal Herr. Recommended by its modest yet sufficient length, and ringing endorsement from Graham Green, my initial excitement was slowly eroded by its rambling streams of consciousness style, the barely decipherable GI dialogue, and the slang terminology of war. Quite possibly a brilliant evocation of the madness, mess, and confusion of being there, but I hadn’t been… so was frustrated by the absence of explanation.
A kilometre or so from my lodgings, I experienced my first draft beer in the tourist sector. It showcased a more relaxing party atmosphere than the extremes of Hanoi or Saigon – the locals more warm and affectionate. (At the weekend, it all changed. Fans of fun from home and away embraced their crazier sides.) Despite inclinations to go native, I was sometimes treated as an awkward oddity in local restaurants where my ordering was almost entirely guesswork. A willingness to speak Vietnamese – rarely successful in intent – was appreciated and often gave amusement to those who’d crossed the Rubicon of learning English.
A set menu here let me combine several aspects of the cuisine. Prawns and satay sauce were prominent themes. From my vantage point above the street, I espied and swapped greeting with the Italians from Halong Bay who were still emanating a force field of charming goodwill.
Earlier, I’d spent $15 on a vape that took an hour or so to track down – cheap tailor-made cigarettes are the default choice so it’s still the lesser of two evils. Despite the seemingly outrageous price, it was rechargeable and lasted weeks. I finally threw it away in England as its durability and strange tasting fuel struck me as suspiciously wrong. The effort and expense to procure it were further reasons for giving up.
It’s always strange to find Saturday nights a ‘bit much’. The buzz of the tourist trail is not always conducive to peaceful contemplation – even the mostly empty little eatery with its cute low wooden tables where I dined just off the strip. I ate a barbeque beef dish with some fries, onions, and peppers; the beef was tough though the strong umami tone of the sauce was seductive (I’m 10 days into marmite withdrawal). Before this, it took me longer to send two emails about my radio report than it did to write it.
Appearance-wise, I feel set apart from the crowd in my jacket, jeans, and boots – quite dandified among the t-shirt, sandal, and short-wearing populace. But I like exhibiting my own ‘style’ over the dressed down ‘holiday’ uniform of travellers old and young.
Today, the trip’s first rain set the agenda – it foiled a visit to a pagoda, but allowed an excursion to the riverside Ho Chi Minh museum, which raised my admiration of Uncle Ho another notch. Its comprehensive biography of the itinerant polyglot illustrated how his political consciousness was forged on shifts in steamy kitchens amid the proletariats of the West. It suggested a kind, thoughtful and restless man with a steely sense of destiny who transcended the circumstances of his birth. He saved kitchen leftovers for the less fortunate.
For the next day, I arranged to cross the Hai Van Pass after forgetting to bargain with a wise old fellah named Voy (64), who gently assailed me with facts on a street corner when I’d sought shelter and a full breakfast. With a patient air of desperation, he waited nearby as I whiled away the morning drizzle. Slipping out the back would’ve conveniently deleted his existence from my plans, but my nagging conscience suggested a small change of plan for me might be a large boon for him. I soon found myself accepting his $50 quote to get me over the pass. Earlier, I’d been coached at reception to bargain for under 35. His age, knowledge, and grandchildren were a factor. Five hours with stop-offs and applied wisdom that would cost the earnings of a 50-minute zoom call… It was no time to barter.
Hoi An – Day 9
The Hai Van Pass proved eminently surmountable for two men on a 110cc moped. Its international fame derives from its appearance on Top Gear, which is thus much quoted by local motorbike owners. Old Voi was up for the task, but hadn’t made the trip for five years, and not from this road. At one point, he asked for directions! The blind leading the blind…
The pass itself was far from scary and took less than 30 minutes of the 4-hour ride. The weather was mostly overcast and spitting – though lighter than the day before. Visibility was poor. The moped and its 120-year-old cargo chugged remorselessly and painfully upwards. Five minutes at the ‘viewpoint’ summit was more than enough for a few photos of the grey hazy landscape below. Steep in parts, our sedate pace up and down its sweeping curves was anything but nerve-wracking.
On the far side, we drove through Da Nang– a modern-looking city seemingly catering for tourists seeking bland beach resorts and a heavily diluted local identity. No obvious centre materialised in the many kilometres covered to gain the road to Hoi An. In the war, GIs took beach breaks here from the fighting. I congratulated myself on not scheduling an overnight stop. I imagined it being a relatively expensive and depressing experience.
From here, Voi began questioning drivers at traffic lights and dismounted several times when baffled by roads beyond his memory or built since his last trip out. Luckily, I insisted on him taking me all the way to the unsigned commercial centre – as he was initially minded (quite innocently, I think) to drop me off 10km away on its outskirts.
I bought him lunch and a beer in Hoi An, before he wended his weary way home. I almost offered him a night in a hotel – a full shift was perhaps a rarity for him these days. I hoped the $50 stretched much further than it would for me. When I messaged to check, he’d made it home safely and gave the impression the adventure was as much his as mine.
Initially, it was hard to work out Hoi An – a former major port that’s now the country’s most popular destination for visitors. From the roadside, we couldn’t discern an obvious centre until we spied a flow of visitors towards a lantern-lit pedestrian quarter. Food and clothes are the greatest draws to this small city of 120,000, but the canal-lined old quarter with its temples and merchant houses draw on the influence of old traders from China, Japan and France. Within it, energetic consumers of food and fine clothing were crammed around a quarter set about a small lake. I found a good-enough hotel nearby with all I needed from a room except, of course, reliable internet.
I’d eaten thrice by nightfall. Following our pork and rice late lunch, I lined my stomach with a rice cake down by the lake where the spectacular fleets of lantern boats ease past, and briefly fled the stall-side stools during a sudden squall. Second dinner was taken with a German woman who was placed opposite me for maximum efficiency of seating. She warned me to commit to a few more nights in my hotel as she’d been forced out of town by a lack of beds. I’d tried to book a place before arriving but the internet failed so thought myself lucky to have a hotel with that very name for 300 dong a night (£11).
It was my kind of shoppers’ paradise here – a rare thing for one who rarely window shops. I’d already spotted the perfect silk dressing gown and several dapper shirts.
At my new local, I was the only customer. Chanh (cold tea) cost 15 dong – a number so small in English pence to not bother calculating. Elsewhere, I spent almost £30 on three beautiful shirts – two cotton, and one in black silk sporting a red dragon. I contemplated a magnificent dressing gown for a hundred. For some reason, I’d decided a Far Eastern dressing gown was a crucial piece of my life puzzle. As an undersized 6-year-old, I’d owned one in turquoise that I presumably donned before smoking my bubble pipe. At the time, we lived in the Philippines so it was perhaps more part of the uniform than it would’ve been in the Home Counties. I also owned a rather dapper grey three-piece suit that came with shorts rather than long trousers – I was, after all, only six. So perhaps I’m harking back to that lost simpler time when I still wrote in pencil, grazed my knees, and listened to Pinky & Perky.
As predicted, I bumped into a moped-mounted Shriyani, who was between suit fittings.
She drove us to a beach where it was rather overcast and mizzling, and a village where I ordered a tender chicken fillet at a place set up for cooking classes. I was very hungry in Hoi An – it must’ve been all the fine dishes assaulting my senses. That evening, I upgraded my daily strawberry smoothies to a daiquiri for a pre-prandial drink around the boating lake.
I went to My Son in the morning, which doesn’t sound the way it’s written – not in English anyway. It was a so-so experience partly due to the Americans previously bombing most of the site out of existence, and the constant drizzle. A short late boat trip brought us home, a delay which briefly becalmed our enthusiastic guide who said most things thrice with a mildly delirious delivery that successfully transferred the native intonation into another language. On the trip, I met a charming and beautiful Ecuadorian woman. She had an exuberant lust for life that was clear from the beaming smile she bestowed on us as she took her place on the minibus. Quite the Holly Golightly with the worldly wisdom and determination of one who survives well on lavish charm. She travelled alone, but I imagined small smitten crowds flocked about her.
I was (again) woken at 1.30am thinking it was time to rise. A wave of anxiety swept over me about the question of whether the RTE editor had anonymised my cue for the Dubai piece or if my identity as a foreign critic of the regime was now established internationally.
The Early life of Luther eventually ushered me back to the Land of Nod.