Electric Hanoi

Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, is crammed with 9 million people and is considered the governmental centre of Vietnam to Saigon’s business capital.  

At first we wondered if staying at the hotel might be our best strategy, considering the life and death experience you encounter every time you dare to cross Hanoi’s busiest streets. The fast-paced hustle and energy of Vietnam’s capital and second biggest city, however, is electric and totally addictive.

What seemed almost as crazy was the local market, which we travelled to in search of some trekking essentials before our hike in the Vietnamese mountains, and then again after our return to find a replacement shoelace and buttons.
   

This enormous market spanned dozens of blocks in all directions, with each area having a certain specialization like building supplies, textiles, kids wear, buttons etc.  There did seem some logic in this except that there is no way to find out where the different sections were.  It took us almost two hours to find the “silk sleeping sheet” we hunted that was a critical hygiene element for our trip.  And once we found them, we could then find 100 of them, which didn’t seem to make for great bargaining power for the sellers.  When we finally abandoned after 3 hours, we still hadn’t been able to find the section with travel towels and settled with buying one from the local grocery store instead.

As for the buttons and shoelaces, there was an overwhelming number of them, with buttons being sold by the thousands.  What was also in abundant supply were the hiking knockoffs – with North Face, Under Armour, Nike, Supreme (or Suppeme as it was sometimes spelled!) and other sports brands being well represented – sometimes all on the same piece of clothing!

In retrospect, however, the time to find the silk sheet and towel was worth the effort – they proved a godsend during our hike… 

All Aboard!

A very early morning flight on the impressive airline VietJet, we arrived early in Hai Phuong on Vietnam’s north-eastern coast to catch a surprisingly quicker transfer (as we opted to not stop at the gift shop on the way) than promised to Ha Long Bay. 

Ha Long Bay – meaning “descending dragon” – is a UNESCO Heritage site and in 2012 was named one of the 7 New Natural Wonders of the World.  The Bay features almost 2,000 limestone karsts and isles in all different shapes and sizes.    The limestone in the Bay has experienced 500 million years of formation and the karsts have taken 20 million years under the impact of the tropical wet climate. Local legend says that the gods sent dragons to protect Vietnam from invaders, and these dragons spat pure jade, which landed in the water to form the karst islands. The dragons found the area so beautiful they decided to remain there, forever protecting Vietnam from invaders.

We boarded our boat, Bhaya Classic 3, along with 38 other passengers, all of us eager for a unique way to celebrate Christmas.  After an onboard safety briefing, we settled into lunch to realize that we were certainly not alone in this idea - 600 other tour boats also launched off into the Bay that day.  And every day of the year. At the same time.

Apparently the government controls when and where the boats will go, and in typical bureaucratic fashion the idea of staggering the departures seems to have not been considered. With overcrowded Hoi An and now Ha Long Bay, we were starting to wonder if Vietnam had become simply too discovered…

We arrived at our first stop, Cua Van, one of the Bays’ traditional floating fishing villages.   This community housed approximately 100 families who live full-time on boats and floating wooden houses.  The communities have shrunk over the past 50 years as the government has worked to relocate the community members to nearby towns in order to better support them with education and other basic necessities.  Nonetheless, those who remain in the villages, support themselves by fishing (both out on the water and via fish farming) and are said to have become more wealthy than their land-resident neighbours because of the extensive tourism dollars they now generate. 

Their houses are small with the most basic of amenities and most residents seem to spend the majority of their day outside of it, either undertaking fishing-related or tourism tasks.  Almost all houses, however, have dogs that stay near the home, most likely to act as guards when the men go out to fish and the women row the tourists around the village (with their feet!) in their rowboats.  As farm fishing can take a year to harvest the fish, we learned, thieves have been known to come and cut the nets and steal the fish – and a barking dog is an effective deterrent.

To celebrate Christmas, the boat crew organized a party for all of us.  And we found ourselves totally caught up in the accompanying childhood games.  Perhaps it was the gluhwein or just the Christmas Eve spirit, but musical chairs was addictively fun and incredibly competitive.  Geoff bowed out after a tumble with a fellow boater (totally not his fault to be clear) but Beth went on to win the title…and the accompanying bottle of wine.  She declined a rematch the next evening.

Although we (and all of our shipmates) missed the boat’s 6am Tai Chi session, we awoke early the next day to head out to some more remote parts of the Bay.  Too cold to swim, we instead kayaked and had a fabulous morning checking out the limestone formations, the small temples on deserted islands, and hidden beaches, while also watching quietly a smaller fishing village community go about their day.  They checked the nets, repaired a boat, sat with friends for lunch, all while children played boat games with rocks in the water.  After a day of sailing, it felt we were seeing real life.

A short and too-touristy visit to a local pearl farm will likely not stay long in our memories save for the cringe-worthy realization of how they actually harvest pearls.  They first open the oyster shell, pull out its membrane and then reinsert a piece of that membrane along with a mother of pearl ball into an oyster’s ovaries or gonads before setting it back into the water to harvest for the next 3-8 years. I think every man walked a little bit differently that afternoon after the tour.

Nonetheless, as we sat on the deck as our day boat made its way back to our main boat, the sun finally shone brightly and warmly, and the quiet and stunning sites of the spectacular Ha Long Bay were a true Christmas gift to be sure.

Hoi An Aglow

Being our regular habit, we booked a walking tour to familiarize ourselves with Hoi An. 

Picked up by our guide, Thang, we wandered over to the Old Town, conveniently a few minutes walk from the hotel. 

Along the way, we stopped at the day market, learning all about the local fruits and delicacies, while gently encouraging Thang to shorten his vivid descriptions of the meat and fish stalls whose smells wafted through the warm hall.  All of the market vendors quickly learned that we were vegetarian and waved us over to try their “meat-free” food, which Thang confidently attributed to Beth’s small size being a dead giveaway for vegetarianism. He did not understand how it was possible that Geoff was also vegetarian – the only acceptable answer was that he must drink a lot of beer.

Hoi An Ancient Town, once a major Southeast Asian trading port in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, saw its fortunes dry up with the silting up of its river beds, and is now a living museum of what Vietnamese life would have been like hundreds of years ago.  

Made a UNESCO heritage site in 1999 (thanks in part to a Polish expat who fell in love with the city and spent most of his career encouraging the locals to takes steps to protect its special history), the city now welcomes tourists to its Chinese temples, pagodas, French-colonial shop houses and canals to experience this multicultural city made up of Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and French influences.  It also strongly encourages visitors to get a custom-made suit, which can be made in less than a day!

Our first stop was to the Quan Cong Temple, where we learned about the Cham and Chinese influence on the city, with Vietnam incorporating many Chinese symbols and beliefs, including part of its language, into its everyday customs.  Although 80% of Vietnamese do not practice religion, many will still come to the temple to pray to the goddesses of fertility, wealth and independence.  Surprising was the number of female gods that guided the community, with the Goddess of Mercy being the most prominent figure, and even more of a draw than Buddha himself.

As we wandered around the town, we were struck by the large number of tourists in the city.  The Japanese Covered Bridge – a Hoi An landmark – was so packed that we wondered if this 18^th century bridge might actually collapse.

Collecting tickets on one side but not the other, this famous bridge was built by a prominent Japanese man as a way of reaching into the Chinese quarter of the city.  As a result, the bridge blends both Chinese and Japanese symbols, with sculptures of dogs and monkeys at the two entrances to represent either the Chinese Years when the bridge was built or the birth years of two Japanese emperors.  Though which reason was the right one remains a mystery, the fact that we prefer to travel slightly off-season to avoid an onslaught of tourists had become very clear.

Striking was that despite the small size of the city, most of the tourists seemed incapable of walking, with the Koreans particularly opting to be ferried around in cyclotaxis that clogged up the streets.

A boat ride to watch the sunset led us to a riverside café to enjoy Cao Lau, a special noodle dish found only in Hoi An.  These noodles are made from special well water in Hoi An, making them specifically local. If you didn’t think too hard about the cleanliness of the well water we saw that day, the noodles and their crispy fried noodle garnish, were divine, as was the craft beer offered at the café.

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To finish the day, we made a quick trip to the night market to check out the local merchandise and see thousands of lanterns lining the street and for sale in the kiosks (another key Chinese influence), and watched as the local bingo players undertook their nightly games, vendors sold neon trinkets and buskers played peppy music to bring the town alive.

With so many lanterns aglow, the power actually blew, bringing one side of the canal to a midnight black.  As we breathed in what we were confident was overheated carcass for sale on the side of the road, the darkness of the town meant we could imagine that it was simply the pleasant smell of “cinnamon”.

Our introduction to Vietnam...

Our arrival in Vietnam was admittedly not our smoothest.  Concerned about making our tight connection from Hanoi to Hoi An, we paid an expedited visa and immigration service to hurry us through.  This turned out to be no faster – and likely more frustrating – than the regular process as we stalked behind our guide, doing our futile best to move things along.

Luckily, we arrived at the domestic flight terminal on time only to find out as we were doing the final plank walk down to the plane, that our plane had just been delayed for reasons unknown.  After 2 hours of waiting, they finally informed us that the plane would be delayed another 3.5 hours. Unfortunately the lounge that we had access to was located on Floor 3 of the bi-level terminal.  

Convinced that the flight would not actually leave at the new time, or worse that it would leave whether the issue was fixed or not, we rushed to cancel our current flight and book on a different carrier who still had a few flights leaving that evening.  Some confusion around how to actually get our checked bags back and how much luggage weight we actually needed to buy for the next flight, we helped navigate the process by trying every type of Vietnamese beer on offer in the airport cafes and passed the time by researching every Vietnamese trinket and souvenir at the airport’s gift shops. Our hunger was satiated by the only vegetarian thing available in the terminal – “French Fried”.

We finally arrived in Da Nang and made our way to the Anantara in Hoi An.  We arrived too late to go out for dinner either in town or at the hotel’s decent restaurant and settled for a “Western” pizza cafe by the side of the road, listening to the hotel staff repeatedly tell us how unfortunate it was that we didn’t arrive earlier so we could have enjoyed the lantern festivities that had been specially crafted in honour of that evening’s full moon.

The Anantara, converted from a French colonial prison, was considered to be among the nicest hotels in Hoi An. Though its design was quite lovely, and it had a great location, for some reason the room would just not stay dry. Neither cranking the A/C nor leaving it off made any difference – everything was quickly covered with a film of humidity.

Looking forward to tomorrow…

The Ultimate Soap Opera...

Fascinated by Greek Mythology, we had signed up for a mythology walking tour which sadly was drained out by the heavy rains.  Luckily, the sun shone on our final day, allowing us to reschedule.  We arrived, however, to find our “private tour” packed with 14 people and a quiet guide, and suddenly our decision to reschedule was seeming less brilliant.

Nonetheless, we walked the streets of Athens and the Acropolis to hear all about the exciting lives of the Greek gods.  Created in the late 8^th century BC by a poet hoping to make religion more accessible and relatable to the Greeks, these gods had different strengths, personalities and always a fair bit of drama.

Zeus and his wife, Hera, reinforced the traditional male-female relationship, with the all-powerful Zeus loving Hera but also frequently disappearing to copulate with beautiful Greek mortals.  Hera was the jealous wife always scheming to get rid of Zeus’ mistresses.  Dionysus, the god of wine and theatre, for example, was born out of Zeus’ leg after Hera was so intent on ensuring that this progeny of one of Zeus’ indiscretions wouldn’t be born, that Zeus ate his mistress and sewed the baby into his thigh until he was fully plumped.

When Hera finally had a child of her own, the baby was so ugly that she threw him off a cliff, causing Hephasteus additional disfigurement that only made things worse.  Hephasteus then devised a cunning plan to hurt his mother which he managed to strategically turn into a marriage to Aphrodite, the most beautiful goddess of them all.  Unfortunately, the fates did their work and eventually Aphrodite managed to marry the most beautiful man in the kingdom, Ares.

But what was surprising was the similar themes that Greek Mythology had to other religions. 

First, and most obviously, Roman mythology.  The Romans were fascinated by the Greek gods and their escapades.  When the Romans conquered Greece, they decided to keep the religion and simply change the names of all of the Gods to reflect their culture.  The stories all remained virtually the same.

But Greek mythology also has remarkable parallels to Christianity.  For example, the story of Zeus and the Great Flood.  The opening of Pandora’s Box had caused many problems in Greece and humanity had become unruly.  To punish them, Zeus decided to send a great flood to wash away mankind and start again.  As such, he protected only the King and Queen, putting them in a box, while floods drowned the rest of them.  When the water cleared, the King and Queen emerged from the box, solved a riddle and then threw stones over their shoulders which created new human beings that repopulated the earth.

Perhaps we are all more similar that we sometimes think…

The birthplace of democracy...

After a morning at the Acropolis Museum, an airy and attractive museum that tracks Athens’ history and houses 5 of the original maidens from the Temple of Athena, we met up with Vicky our local tour guide for the afternoon. 

A history teacher and debate coach, Vicky passionately taught us about the dawn of democracy in Athens.  Our first stop was Pnyx Hill, a hidden treasure of Athens, to see the most beautiful views of the Acropolis. 

Pnyx is the central hill in Athens and beginning in the 5^th century became the gathering spot for all Athenian men (because “total equality” still did not extend to women) over the age of 20 years to come and discuss the issues and decisions of the city.  The hill actually went through 3 stages of development, to properly respect the Acropolis and Athena and also the growing number of participants.  To vote, the men each used broken pieces of pottery – either in white or black – to cast their decisions.

So serious were they about people participating in the democratic process, that they took several steps to ensure participation:

•        On each meeting day, they paid every man a day’s worth of wages so he wouldn’t lose out for showing up, and
•        Perhaps even more effective, they had men go around town with whips and paint, whipping any man who was caught missing.  The whips were covered in paint, leaving a lasting stain that showed a man to be unwilling to do his civic duty. Being considered an “idiot” was the highest form of shame in town, meaning to be uninformed and disengaged.

The Speaker's Pulpit

Although they viewed all men as equals and that everyone with a voice that should be heard, this did not extend to women.  Although Athena was pretty much the goddess of everything that made the city function, the Athenians enthusiastically saw women as second-class citizens, relegated to home tasks, disengaged from the economy and disallowed from attending city meetings and even most theatre performances, except for the tragedies as they instilled “important life lessons”.  Unsure exactly of why this class system existed, Vicky explained that Athena was born out of Zeus’ forehead and thus may have been seen as an output of a man, rather than as a woman leader in her own right.

Socrates/ Prison

In addition, democracy as it functioned did have some limitation.  For example, the freedom of religious thought.  Socrates, for example, was imprisoned and put to death as a result of wandering around the Agora (the local marketplace) and encouraging men to think critically and realistically about the Greek Gods and whether they might not be reality.  Ultimately, Socrates was put to death for his free thought.

Many also argue that their embrace of democracy is ultimately what led to Athens’ destruction – a critical vote sending limited financial resources to expand the Acropolis rather than fund their army. Perhaps women’s critical and practical thinking could have helped with that decision!