hanoi

Now it’s time for the long march, a trip down the coast of Viet Nam from north to south.
I’ve caught up with Ian again and we are making this trip, flying into Hanoi, which is unexpectedly cold, requiring extra layers, and misty and grey for the first few days at least. On the final day when the sun shines it’s vastly improved and you get a much better feel for this city of boulevards, tree-lined and motorbike filled, with its lakes and quiet cafes.
Hoan Kiem Lake stands between the old quarter and the newer colonial city, and is a nice size to walk around, very popular with the locals who sit and chat, have a little glass of yellow Vietnamese tea, play draughts or stroll arm in arm. (Apparently around 6am they also do exercises there but needless to say I didn’t witness this myself.)
From here you can wander into the old quarter. This really is an intense experience. The huge area is filled with shop houses, each narrow street specialising in a particular trade, from rice to leather to silk to bamboo screens to fruit and veg. Shoe Street has more footwear than you’ve seen in your life. Glass Street is packed with glaziers, cutting to order, and mirrors for sale. There is an Ironmongery Street full of angle grinders and welding torches arcing away ; and a Tin-bashers Street, where you can cacophonously experience the making of A/C ducts and tin boxes, laboriously, by hand, right there on the street. Another street is full of paper lanterns and fake money to be burned in ceremonies for the dead.

The whole place is filled with noise and colour; the streets crammed with push carts, trolleys, overloaded motorbikes and ladies in conical hats with those panniers suspended in a yoke across their backs (still a surprising number of these). We saw a motorbike forcing its way through the market with two whole pigs loaded across the back; another was loaded with crates of rather shell shocked live hens.
Every other corner seems to have a small temple, some of them very old, and you can also visit a merchant’s house, set up much as it must have been in the past, with a trading area at the front and calmer living quarters at the back around a tiny internal garden.
At night Hanoi gets quiet early. By 10.00 the streets are almost empty and by 11.00 most bars are pushing you out and putting the chairs on tables. Hanoi generally feels like the administrative centre as opposed to Saigon’s commercial hub: Washington to New York.
Apart from the must-see Ho Chi Minh mausoleum – a socialist realist tour de force where you can just imagine the PLA thundering past on May Day under the unblinking gaze of the Politburo – the best cultural sites in Hanoi are the Temple of Literature and the Ethnology Museum.
The temple was founded as Viet Nam’s first university and has a series of cloistered gardens with some fine examples of local temple architecture dating back almost a thousand years (though like most temples here repeatedly re-built). The Confucian ideals of sound ethical administration were taught here and the graduates – just a few every few years – are commemorated in carved stone plaques confirming their achievements.The new Ethnology museum is well arranged and describes the history of Viet Nam’s minority peoples – there are over 50 ethnic groups with a total population of 5 million. While the Vietnamese kept to rice farming and fishing along the coastal strip and in the deltas, distrusting the mountains, the other groups have spread across the hills that make up most of the country, with many diverse cultural approaches to survival. The museum has a number of full size replicas of tribal houses. The spare use of material and the understanding of lightweight structure is very impressive.