Vietnam and Cambodia have long topped my “50 Things to Do before I Die” list. I got to see them both in one go, I reflect standing on a corner of Hanoi at 9am. The city rushes towards me on cyclos (rickshaws), motorbikes, even bicycles.
Everything is exotic, the lakes dotted across the city centre, the outline of trees, the pavement caf�s, the colours, smells, sounds and faces. The hustle� the humidity. And the heat! Steam trickles down my neck.
There seem to be as many cycles, cyclos and motorbikes as Hanoi inhabitants - a population of about four million. It’s not uncommon to see a family of four on one little Honda.
“Hoodoo!” shout the drivers, leaning on the bars or flapping their hands at a potential fare. Accidents are as commonplace here as showers in a monsoon. I felt heroic crossing the road to the old quarter, each small step a huge victory.
Everyone is terrified of the traffic when they first arrive, and afterwards grow to love it.
For all this, Hanoi is one of the safest and friendliest cities. Crime against foreigners is almost non-existent. For a country that has experienced so much violence - 5 million died in war against the US alone - this is phenomenal, especially considering that the Vietnamese are materially impoverished. Being able to walk about and stay out late without any fear changes one’s whole psyche.
It’s neither clean, nor enticing
It’s a country of young people with a mushrooming overall population of 84 million inhabitants, the average age being 25 years.
A favourite activity is meeting friends by motorbiking from caf� to caf�. In keeping with locals, I find my way to Phone Co, 11 (Hang Gay), overlooking the Old Quarter. It lies buried deep among the insurmountable lanes leading like tree trunk roots from landmark Huc Bridge.
This is a good place to meet interesting people and they serve fantastic coffee; smooth and strong. Vietnam is the world’s second largest coffee exporter, after Brazil. Their coffee is good. Really good!
Hanoi’s Old Quarter is a 1 000 years old and the heart and epicentre of the city; a heavily populated anthill with people, meat, fruit, vegetables, spices, silks and cloths put out on pavements or laden on cycles and cramped motorbikes. Every alley courtyard and pavement is used for buying, selling, displaying, or parking. Every square metre is a shop or restaurant.
There are more food stalls than citizens. Streamers of noodles float in pots to accompany standard fare; foods like phi, a noodle soup with beef or chicken. My trusty guide warned me against trying local fare. I needed no convincing. This is where I draw the line on mixing with the locals. It’s neither clean, nor enticing.
In narrow passageways people tuck into pig snout, ear, tongue, fish bladder, chicken feet, duck’s head, fried silk worms and roast dog.
Standing in thigh-deep water
Customers eat amid exhaust fumes and pedestrians. A gutter streams metres away carrying waste.
Supermarkets have come to Hanoi, but most locals still shop at the humble market for necessities. They stack everything, from huge chunks of softened bamboo, to silkworms, dogs to and exotic vegetables.
I linger and buy fruit. The woman smiles at me behind her fruit stall of oranges, apples and mangoes.
There are so many fine eateries where French colonial ambiance and Art Deco furnishings entice senses while fare titillates taste buds. At the famed Press Club I was presented with orchestras of flavoured food.
The Green Tangerine, the Au Lac and Le Tonkin didn’t disappoint either. The most expensive three-course meal in these salubrious colonial establishments costs up to $30 (about R230) - often far, far less. It’s impossible to enjoy a city and not enjoy what the locals enjoy.
Hanoians all love Hogan Kim Lake, a medallion of green water in the midst of a chaotic city: A landmark park in a city of parks.
I don’t like to get up early, ever. The Vietnamese do, always. The park is buzzing by 5.30am. The noise starts before first light of roosters. Joggers circumnavigate the perimeter and the elderly practice tai chi. Teenagers play football, break dance, warm up or hold aerobic classes.
The rest of the day the park is abuzz with peddlers and people watchers, hustlers, lovers, chess players, tourists and city folk taking time out. The Old Quarter is but a hop across from the park, and within near proximity so many historical vestiges I feel like I should be tripping over them every few seconds.
The wonder of Halong Bay
I spent the rest of that day doing touristy things, like taking a ride on a cyclo (tricycle with driver; a rickshaw on wheels).
These once were called the “ubiquitous” Vietnamese transport by travel writers. Ineffective and labour intensive, cyclos are a cute metaphor for the Communist regime before the late 1990s when the centrally-planned economy and tourism opened.
I traipsed through Ho Chi Ming Museum and Presidential Palace, Stilt House, and One Pillar Pagoda, an iconic square which is such a powerful draw for domestic and foreign tourists. I revelled at French architectural gems like the Opera House. Regardless of views on colonial Indochine, the French clustered architectural beauty in two districts - residential and municipal - is mind-boggling. I wandered the pavements awash with romanticism and marvelled.
I even took a place in the suffocating queue at the Hanoi Water Puppet Show and was pleased I did. Thousands flock here to the five daily shows.
Water puppetry is a 1 000-year-old Vietnamese performance art, whereby puppets carved from wood and lacquered to a high sheen are controlled by puppeteers concealed behind a stage set, standing in thigh-deep water.
The puppets exalt the folk-life, culture, traditions and beliefs of rural Vietnamese and celebrate the country’s indomitable spirit. It’s quaint but highly skilled.
One could spend months in this communist-capitalist city, with its French paw prints. But my experienced travel agent, knowing me well, insisted that to capture the essence of a country so steeped in history means beginning the journey in Hanoi’s South, then journeying to central Vietnam, and thereafter bustling Ho Chi Ming City in the far north.
She knows I always want it all. I hate this about me: The irrational deep-seated worry that I will miss out on something - a missed experience or opportunity that was within my grasp.
Unable to place a different foot in each city, I reluctantly leave Hanoi for postcard-perfect Halong Bay.
The Halong Bay natural wonder is a Unesco World Heritage Site, covering 15 000km of thousands of limestone islands and grottos rising from clear emerald waters.
Even its name sounds supernaturally created.
This spellbinding wonder is a must-see destination - more so if enjoyed on a steam barge - like the Emeraude! The Emeraude simply must be one of the best news stories in Vietnam. Travel agents report a deluge of enquiries and bookings from celebrities and travel writers alike. When James Brown, author of National Geographic’s book Traveller - Vietnam, elected my mode of transport I knew I chose well.
This overnight tour is heavenly.
The Emeraude paddle wheel steamer was launched in 2003. The barge is a replica of a 10th century boat that sailed Ha Long Bay when French Indochine was its most glamorous.
On board I was hard-pressed whether to sip cocktails and luxuriate topside in a wicker chair, schmooze at one of the two bars or visit Sun Sot Cave. (Cave of Surprise, by kayak, when anchored)
I finally settled predictably for everything - a manicure and traditional Vietnamese foot massage on the sundeck with high tea before watching the vessel’s faux stern wheel being lowered down to a deck and gliding off its edge to swim in the vast ocean. A lone bather, I felt scrumptious pleasure as the warm waveless water licked and caressed my skin.
After sunset, guests groaned through the buffet. Nobody complained.
This, after an endless lunch menu serving fried calamari, beer steamed crab and other delectable dishes. That night while the moon hovered over a blue black sea I stared out and marvelled at the tapestry of stars.
I will forever remember that for one brief moment in eternity, I captured the finest life has to offer. I want to hug this moment in my arms, revisit it again and again�
Continuing the Indochine mood of pampering, I had a traditional Vietnamese massage in my cabin before rolling over to sleep. Too soon day and night melded and I disembarked and made for the airport for a flight to central Vietnam. Constant movement was beginning to irk me at this point.
As I am constitutionally doomed to addictions of life’s awaiting attractions, I whirlwinded through a few days, cities and towns to Ho Chi Ming City - the pearl of South East Asia. Nowhere is the West’s love affair with Vietnam more passionate than in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon).
It’s a modern city with a growth rate as alluring to foreign businessman nowadays as its legendary opium dens and taxi girls were to previous generations.
Nothing in all Vietnam is as hallowed as the tunnel-ridden earth of Cu Chi, where 1 800 peasant guerrillas waged war on the Americans from 200km of hand-dug passageways and chambers.
Since it was opened up to the public in late 1990, people have flocked here.
I crawled and crouched through humid corridors under grown with the zigzag corridors designed to thwart weapons fire.
I clawed my way back up to earth surface, rearranged my organs and was escorted through the thick foliage where a lair hatch covers a booby trap of bamboo spikes driven into the bottom of a pit.
The Vietcong were inventive with ways to kill and maim American soldiers. The exhibition of booby traps demonstrates exactly how the American GIs the unwary fell prey to traps outside and inside the tunnels. Cu Chi’s peasant soldiers started burrowing deep under the district’s clay ground in the late 1940s during the French War.
By 1967, they’d excavated an underground city � a network of tunnels, kitchens, theatres, dormitories,
weapons nine metres beneath the earth.
Historically, the 25th US Infantry unwittingly situated its base above the tunnels and at the height of the Vietnam-
USA war, more than 200 000 shells rained down here each month, transforming Cu Chi into the most bombed shelled, gassed, defoliated and devastated area in the history of warfare.
At the War Remnants Museum, the Vietnamese proudly display how their impoverished land toppled a great power using only perseverance and guts. Relics of the Vietnam War are displayed in their terrible glory, including
“tiger cage” prison cells and walls of harrowing photographs documenting combat scenes, wartime injuries and the horrific American legacy of Agent Orange, still causing cancer and congenital defects three decades later.
I went outside, flagged an Xe (motorbike taxi), and made for Ben Thanh market. The silk and lacquerware are
plentiful and gorgeous, but my suitcase was taking strain.
In blistering humidity I made my way to the Fine Arts Museum and admired the ochre walls and architecture
before hopping across to the Grand Opera House and its upmarket boutiques.
I found nirvana at Ton Thiep, filled with eccentric boutiques like Gaa, Saigon Kitsch and So Co La.
I spent time at trendy coffee spots with Vietnamese and westerners, and took a cyclo tour of Cholon, HCMC’s
Chinatown. It was all Chinese architecture, traditional medicine shops, Chinese dragons and ornate pagodas.
For pre-dinner drinks I sat with friends at trendy La Fenetre Soleil, a quaint slice of Victoriana atop a flight of unkempt stairs enjoying sangria and tapas. I hung my hat at the famed Rex hotel, where I wined and dined in traditional settings at its Royal Court Restaurant.
Here I watched traditional folk dancing mesmerised by exquisite, nimble and delicate Vietnamese women.
The lovely Mac Kim (”Tina”) took time off work, to escort me in a search for the obvious - a bigger suitcase!
Longing to return…
Another time I dressed up and met friends at Level 23 of the Sheraton - arguably boasting the finest view of Ho Chi Minh City. Woozy, we made our way later to the Mandarin where the food is exquisite and the service superb; it’s a hearty recommendation.
Now, it’s almost morning, I hear this obscurely exciting sound, a reminder that I am far from home, on a luxurious adventure. No one waits for me, anywhere . So I will meander towards Lush nightclub, slink into a cubby hole at Q Bar, and then back to the sanctuary of the Rex before sunrise.
Vietnam, I promise to return. Before your country becomes so heavily toursited that it feels not much different from a trip to Disneyland; another worn theme park, embracing Starbucks, Mc Donald’s Pizza Hut and O’ Leary Pubs�
Before Vietnam discovers hamburgers or McDonalds I will return.
Meanwhile � it’s a short flight to Cambodia. Angkor Wat awaits me!
Nam Tips
Don’t take an American Express credit card. Use Visa or MasterCard and keep dang (the local currency).
Travellers’ cheques are exchanged only at banks� hotels as a rule don’t like dealing with travellers’ cheques.
Constant movement and packing can be exhausting. Take an almost empty suitcase, and stay in each place for several days, especially when travelling central Vietnam between Hanoi and Saigon.
Call travel clinics beforehand to check if you need any special vaccinations. A while back there was a typhoon - followed by an outbreak of cholera.
If you go…
Visas: South African passport holders need a visa to get into Vietnam, obtainable from the Vietnamese Embassy in Pretoria. However, it is recommended that travellers to Vietnam use a reputable travel agency such as Travkor, which the writer used.
Contact Ana Fasulakis on 011-883-7803 or email anaf.travkor@galileosa.co.za
Flights: Choose between Thai Airways, Malaysian Airlines or Singapore Airlines.
Cost: Packages range from R10 800 to R14 400. This includes the cost of economy class airfare; sharing twin/double accommodation in 3-star to 5-star hotels with breakfast; land arrangements on a private transport basis with guide and entrance fees. Travkor have regular tours and customise programmes.
Special OfferTravkor is offering a tour to Vietnam with an optional extension to Cambodia.
Departure: September 24 on Malaysian Airlines via Kuala Lumpur to Hanoi. September 25 and 26 in Hanoi enjoying the water puppet show, meals in the best restaurants and touring.
September 27 - two-day trip to Halong Bay, 24 hours on the luxury Emeraude cruiser with all meals and excursions included.
September 28 - flight to Danang
September 29 and 30 - two days in Danang and Hoi An with a visit to the Cham Museum and then on to Hue, the old capital with its magic Perfume River and the mausoleums of the Nguyen Royalty.
October 1 - Flight to Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) - a visit to the famous Cu Chi Tunnels of Viet Cong fame and all the highlights of this vibrant city - meals at the best restaurants.
Return: October 3 - return to SA via Kuala Lumpur or take advantage of an optional extension of three nights to magical Cambodia to enjoy Angkor Wat.
Cost on a sharing basis: R15 884 includes airfare, transfers, tours, entrance fees, cruise, all meals. Excludes departure taxes and visas. Phone Travkor on 011 883-7803.
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