Crossroads: Hanoi, Vietnam

We arrived in Hanoi on the late bus from Sapa in time to meet up with our traveling crew for the next two weeks. After going our separate ways from Chiang Mai last month, we reunited with our friends Drew and Leslie, and another good friend, Levine, flew in from San Francisco to join us as our first official visitor from the U.S. It was our and Leslie’s first time in Vietnam, Levine’s first time in Southeast Asia, and Drew’s first time in Vietnam that month (he has been multiple times as a tour guide there!). We had a lot of adventurous activities planned for the country, including boating around Ha Long Bay, motorbiking through the karst mountains of Ninh Binh, and exploring some of the world’s largest caves in Phong Nha. But within our first few minutes in Hanoi, we quickly learned that the biggest thrill-seeking activity in the country actually takes place on the city streets.

With public transportation usage nearly nonexistent, and cars too expensive for most and too impractical on the crowded streets, motorbikes are the vehicle of choice in Hanoi. They say there are 5 million motorbikes in the city of 7 million people. The bikes are not just for commuting— they are used in all forms of daily life, from school pickups, to business operations, to delivering anything that might possibly fit on a 150cc Honda. A fun game was to spot the most ridiculous thing being carried on a motorbike. A family of four cruising around with the youngest child in front, enjoying the wind blowing through her hair, and the other crushed between the adults, or a mother carrying her infant child while talking on her cell phone and driving the motorbike, were common occurrences. We saw animals, both the pet and farm variety, often just sitting (hanging?) on the back seat (Drew said he once saw a water buffalo tied up on a bike!). We observed a business transporting reams of paper to an office, a courier delivering loads of wrapped Christmas gifts, and a woman selling vegetables out of a makeshift (and mobile) stand—all with just their bikes. And of course, there was also the absurd, such as the guy carrying a large tree branch on his motorbike that blocked multiple lanes of traffic.

So the next game became how we navigate these thousands of motorbikes whizzing by per minute, honking and belching exhaust into the hazy air (Hanoi has some of the worst air quality in the world). Imagine being a pedestrian in the U.S., and arriving at a four-way intersection to cross the street. Now imagine the exact opposite of that. The Vietnamese intersection has no stop sign, so every vehicle is going through it at once from all directions. All you see is a blur of bikes bobbing and weaving into a tapestry of bedlam in the middle of the intersection, and then a wall of motorbikes, at least twelve deep, through which you must frogger your body across. Everything you have ever learned as a young child about crossing the street in the western world is wrong. If you look both ways and wait for the vehicles to stop, you will be standing there all day. If you make eye contact with the driver, they will get confused and you will get hit. In fact, the best thing to do is to not look, and just go! That’s because the Vietnamese intersection is a great lesson in organized chaos; there truly is method to the madness. Since everyone is expecting chaos, the drivers are alert and anticipating every possible scenario (some say they have a sixth sense), and nothing that actually happens ends up being a surprise. There are no driving laws (or ones that they follow), nor a notion of “lane” ownership, so everything is fair game. Trying to make a difficult left turn? No need to stop, just turn directly into oncoming traffic, because the bikes heading toward you will go around you. Large truck heading right at you in your lane? No problem, just move over to the shoulder or drive on the sidewalk. So when we crossed the street, we just put our heads down and walked slowly with the flow at a steady pace with no sudden movements; the motorbikes anticipated our actions and went around us. It was scary as hell, but it somehow worked. That was our introduction to city life in Vietnam.

Getting to the other side of the street did not end the adventure. The sidewalk, if you can even call it that since it is almost impossible to walk on, is the front and center of Vietnamese life. In addition to being the parking lot for motorbikes, the sidewalks are filled with markets and street vendors. Stores, formal and informal, are piled high with so. much. STUFF. Clothes, shoes, bags, beauty products, toiletries, and cell phone accessories fill every nook and cranny; lots of western brands that are made in Vietnam, such as North Face, are available by the boatload– we’re unsure if they’re knock-offs or if the merchandise “fell off the truck,” but there are good deals to be had, since they looked pretty high quality. It’s as if Target laid out their entire big box inventory onto one city block. Anything you could possibly need—and much more that you don’t—can be found on the street.

And it’s not just merchandise. Outdoor food stalls cook up noodle soups, bubbling inside of big steel pots on electric stoves. Next to them, barbeques grill all sorts of meat and seafood products. Many a meal is consumed outside. It was at these sidewalk kitchens where we were introduced to Vietnamese furniture. Small plastic tables, and even smaller plastic chairs, cluster around the food stalls. The tables and chairs are so small, it is like joining a five-year-old tea party with their dolls. It was hard enough for Michael to fit in them, just think about Levine (6’4”) sitting on the street to eat a bowl of noodles, or to drink 10-cent beers, in a tiny chair. But unless you want to eat your meal standing up, this was the option.

One ubiquitous vendor on the sidewalk is the banh mi stand. Around every corner was an opportunity to procure some French bread, a small amount of chicken or pork in a sweet and spicy sauce, pickled veggies, and, if Michael was able to communicate with the vendor, no cilantro (or “zhao mui” in Vietnamese, the third most spoken Vietnamese word we used after Cam On, “thank you,” and Kem, “ice cream”). Because of their deliciousness, abundance, and the fact that they typically only cost around $1, we ate a lot of banh mi. There was one day where Michael ate three banh mi sandwiches, on top of regular meals, because, why not?

It was great to watch the vendors, or brilliant chefs in our view, make the sandwich out of their makeshift kitchen. A fresh loaf of French bread is pulled out from a nearby bin (they get deliveries twice a day to ensure freshness), sliced, and then briefly toasted to crisp the outside, while keeping the inside soft and gooey. Mind you, the toaster oven is just sitting on a box on the street, plugged into an extension cord running to who knows where. The bins that contain the meat (which has already been cooked in a pan on the ground) and the veggies and sauce all sit out on a table or in a cart, patiently waiting to be deployed onto the sandwich (no worries, the street dogs guard the stand from the rats). A slab of pate here, some meat and veggies there, and the sandwich is complete within a minute. All this needs to happen fast, as there is often a line at all hours of the day, especially early in the morning (some banh mi places close by 9:30am, because, as one proprietor described, pork isn’t fresh enough any later in the day).

All this street activity and hunger is fueled by coffee. Sweet sweet Vietnamese coffee. We’re not coffee drinkers, but we think it’s safe to say that Vietnam has some of the best, and strongest, coffee in the world. The classic Vietnamese coffee uses “robusta” beans, which are true to their name. Add in the sugar high from the condensed milk, and you’ve got yourself one major buzz. We often felt pretty loopy after drinking one of these, but they were so delicious that it was hard not to drink one every day. We tried many of the local varieties, such as coconut coffee (yum) and avocado coffee (less yum). Of particular intrigue was the egg coffee, which adds the richness of a frothy egg to the bitterness of the strong coffee and the sweetness of the milk, resulting in a viscous substance that tasted like the liquid form of a coffee-flavored mousse cake.

It was clear from all the entrepreneurial activity on the street that, despite Hanoi being the capital of a country with a one-party political system, Vietnam has fully embraced market capitalism. The Old Quarter was a good example of this. Unlike the free-for-all of the street markets, each small, narrow lane in the Old Quarter (and its even narrower buildings, since the property taxes are determined by the width of the building, resulting in lots of tall skinny buildings) features a unique industry, making it easy for customers to go to one area for specific items. There was spice street, which you could smell even before you arrived; bamboo street, showcasing the plant’s usefulness as a building product; toy street; silk street; and metalworking street (i.e. blacksmiths right on the street with hot cauldrons), to name a few. But no street was more popular—at least in mid-December—than the bastion of pure capitalism: Christmas street. Only 8% of Vietnam’s population is Christian, yet there is no war on Christmas here. The city, and country as a whole, was fully in the holiday spirit. Santa paraphernalia was sold up and down the street in the Old Quarter as Christmas trees stood in public squares, while Christmas lights twinkled all over the city and holiday jingles played on repeat in the coffee shops. It was a little weird to hear “Let it Snow” play inside a Taoist temple (no joke) while sweltering in the tropical humidity (in which locals wore all their poofy jackets and winter gear!), but that is the beauty of globalization.

Despite all the capitalism, though, there was still plenty of communist architecture to marvel at in this capital city. Outside of the Old Quarter, Hanoi boasts plenty of wide parade route-like roads, large plazas, and imposing statues, including, as we frequently saw in Central Asia, a statue of Lenin. Though we did not have a chance to see Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed body, we did stroll around Uncle Ho’s mausoleum grounds, as well as visit the grand Presidential Palace where he worked (but chose not to live in, in order to stand in solidarity with the people). Also similar to Central Asia, many of Hanoi’s government buildings and museums are grand structures that speak to the power and authority of the state.

But the most interesting site we visited was the Hoa Lo Prison, which was powerful both in exhibiting the atrocities of the American War (what the Vietnamese call the U.S. Vietnam War), as well as the mechanisms of communist propaganda. The prison was originally built by the French in the late 1800s to house Vietnamese political prisoners. Now a museum, we walked through different sections of what remains of the prison, learning about the miserable treatment the Vietnamese suffered under the colonists, including the French methods of medieval-like torture and the cells where prisoners were held for long stints of solitary confinement. Many of the political prisoners held there under the French became Communist comrades together in those rooms, and went on to be leaders of the country’s independence movement. After the French retreated in 1954, the North Vietnamese later used the prison to house American POWs, namely pilots who were shot down flying over North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

From many of these American prisoners—including Hoa Loa’s most famous inmate, the late Senator John McCain—it is well documented that they suffered similarly rough conditions, mistreatment, and torture as the Vietnamese endured under the French. It was so rough, in fact, that the prison earned the sarcastic nickname, the “Hanoi Hilton.” But this was not the story told at the museum. As if suddenly the prison went from a torture chamber to an actual Hilton hotel, there were photos of the POWs playing basketball, decorating a Christmas tree, and sitting around laughing and having a good time. There was also a shot of the Maverick smiling while undergoing a medical evaluation. As if these staged photos weren’t enough, the exhibit went on to say things such as, it was “…only a serene time for these American pilots to think about what happened and feel the beauty of peaceful life and warm humanity in Hoa Lo Prison.” We found this to be an interesting view into the state’s media, and that—despite the good relations between our two countries now and the fact that many of the former U.S. POWs, including McCain himself, have since visited the museum (there were exhibits about this, too)—there was still no room for any nuanced discussion of the way the Vietnamese ran the prison.

Our dose of skepticism aside, the museum’s exhibits about the American destruction of Hanoi in the early 1970s was still extremely powerful. With the U.S. about to withdraw from the war and head to the negotiating table in Paris, Nixon tried to gain some leverage by carpet bombing the capital. American B-52s indiscriminately bombed large sections of the city, regardless of whether they held any military importance. The exhibit showed photos of hospitals, schools, and whole residential neighborhoods that had been leveled and destroyed. The museum also dedicated significant real estate to the anti-war protests from around the world, including a large display of the protests that took place throughout America. Even as he was fighting the U.S., Ho Chi Minh was able to separate the American government’s involvement from the people’s reluctance, as the supreme leader looked upon the protesters favorably and urged them to continue.

After taking in all this history, we were back out on the streets of Hanoi again to take in more food and drinks. Luckily, we were there on a weekend night, when a section of streets in the beautiful old French Quarter bordering Hoan Kiem Lake are closed off to vehicular traffic. The locals take advantage of this: children were cruising around the closed streets in rented Power Wheels, teenagers were jumping rope and forming guitar circles, adults were practicing their ballroom dancing. It was great to witness such wholesome fun.

For many cultures, it sometimes feels like real life is hidden from visitors, obscured behind closed doors and drawn window blinds. There may have been some opaqueness at the museum on the government’s end, but the everyday Vietnamese life can be easily seen on the streets of Hanoi. The way the people cook, clean, sleep, care for their families, hang out with their friends, and get around town, are all out in the open—in an implausible flow of calm and order within a sea of wild chaos. And it was great to look up from crossing the street to see it.

Karen & Michael

Hanoi, Vietnam, December 12-13, 2019