The father and mother sitting next to me at Hanoi airport are glued to their phones, their two little girls run around the unbelievably clean gate area, content in the knowledge that they can see their parents and that there are lots of people to take them back to their parents. The mom looks up and signals to them, pulls out an ipad and on comes a Beyonce video. Mom is bopping away throwing Bey moves, the girls fall about laughing at her feet (on the totally spotless granite floor).
I am leaving Hanoi today. It is a bittersweet moment as this was my first visit back since 2009 and I am extremely fond of the Vietnamese.
On arrival at the aiport everything works like clockwork, moving travelators purr and take you to the right place. You wait at security, green uniforms, gold stars, red flags yellow stars. The guard looks at you intently and his eyes crinkle up as he stamps away. Basically warm people.
Then you are projected out into a moving scrum a million people deep.
It will be Tet-Lunar New Year- in a few days, and the whole country is on the move. I get in the car and 40 minutes later pull in at the hotel. There are many more-nice, new- cars on the highway, nearly no bicycles in town, just lots of fancy motorbikes. We cruise past Mercedes and BMW dealerships, a Maybach pulls into the hotel drive in front of us.
The pollution is epic. Pain in your lungs at the end of the day epic. We walk around the streets on our first day, faces pulled with jetlag and smoke inhalation. The Louisvuittondiorchanel megamall has just opened 10 minutes away, girls are instagramming themselves to death on its steps, doing little V signs or holding teddy bears. They have extravagant selfie sticks. They don’t smile. Luxe is serious business.
A bit further we come to Hoan Kiem Lake, the heart of the city. On Sunday when we go back, the whole area around HKL is pedestrianized. Children ride little cars around freely and the only transport allowed is cyclos (bicycle rickshaws). Everywhere people are crunching down on sunflower seeds and spitting husks out. A whole city block of Four Seasons Hotel is going up on the east side of the lake.
I use cyclos in the following days because they simply won’t exist in a few years, and also they can weave their way around anything. The drivers are in their 60s or more. ‘Where you froooom?’, they cry after I haggle them down on price and get scooped into my lovely seat. ‘England Number One!!’They respond when I tell them. Greatly displeased I remind them Vietnam Number One! Now the guy will pedal me to Da Nang and back.
The Old Quarter is a tangle of streets each named after the trade that used to be there-eg silver street, silk street….they still stick to that and have modernised definitions to include jewellry, textiles and so on. It makes it easier to see what you want while Mr Cyclo waits patiently for you.
‘What do you do for Tet’ I ask the waitress at Cong Caphe. Cong Caphe is an unmissable place set up to look like Vietcong army offices in the 60’s complete with little spectacles on desks and everyone dressed in army green. The caphe is delicious-in my case coconut caphe complete with the star.
‘I have to visit my husband family. I am sick of it. I only have 2 days off and I must to the village and sit with them, and I miss my own family.It will be different for my daughter’. She is annoyed by this and wants to talk about it.
‘My father is old now and deaf from the shelling after the war and I need to see him’
The war is never far away, even now.
In the grounds of the hotel we are staying in are some tunnels that were used in fighting by the Vietcong. The entrance to the tunnels (which guests can visit…WHY???????) is marked by a sign that says Please refrain from laughter. Persons died in this tunnel.
Alas, alas we now come to the tourists. Fifteen years ago they were rare and usually French. Now they come with Michigan State baseball caps and Hawaii tee shirts and haw haw their way around the place, or do the opposite which is thank and praise the staff so lavishly and condescendingly you want to just die.My blood pressure is in a very bad place for a few days.
I go up to breakfast in the lounge next morning to find a BBC and a CNN screen. I pull a chair under the CNN screen and fortunately the screen still has a kill button on the side so I do.
‘We never watch’ laughs the waitress. Wisely. She proceeds to show me pictures of her little girls at school making Tet decorations. It looks like a lovely school and they look happy. ‘Where is the school’ I ask. ‘Twenty kilometres away’. She commutes in every day in time for breakfast.
I did all the arty things-Indigo Store and workshop, the Temple of Literature where you can go to see no tourists if you time it right, the area around the Cathedrale St Joseph-inspired by Notre Dame -which looks like a 2D graphite drawing full of ittle shops and cafes all waiting patiently for someone even as they put up elaborate Tet decorations, red and gold.
The war is never far away and the spirit of the people who emerged victorious from the tunnels lives on in the little girls falling about at the aiport, every waitress pulling at the reins that restrain her, every artist that paints so beautifully in her workshop-for these are uber-artistic people-and every kind hearted cyclo driver who was probably 10 when the war stopped.
Living proof that the human spirit soars and does not die despite the many and continued assassination attempts against it.
I love your very poetic description of Hanoi. I deeply enjoyed your wonderful descriptions of this beautiful city.
Your observations about how tourism has changed from a unique cultural experience into just another Western bubble transplanted into yet another country are palpable. Unfortunately, this isn't just limited to tourism. The charm of cyclos pushed by men in countryside attire with conical hats is disappearing and being replaced with corporate imitations of a Soviet era communist war themed cà phê shops. Most of the older citizens have been trying their best to forget the American war for the last 30 years, not to mention the French, Cambodian and Chinese wars of the same period. Previous generations are war weary who would much rather look at their new iPhones and spend the day sipping cà phê and their nights pounding cans of bia than reminisce on a culture they are trying to forget. This is a tragedy of the cultural exchange, where a person goes to a country to experience a quant local lifestyle only to leave a tiny bit of Western culture behind, slowly stripping the host country of what truly makes it unique.