Horrible Hanoi

Vietnam could not have been more different than Laos. Gone were the wide open spaces, with little traffic, smiling people and a very leisurely pace of life. In the place of all that was - Hanoi.
We flew from Vientiane into Hanoi. One of the common Characteristics we have spotted across S.E Asia is that despite cabin crews best efforts, it's a lost cause trying to get people to remain in their seats immediately after a plane has touched down. No sooner has a plane bounced onto the tarmac than, with engines still engaged in full reverse, a chorus of unbuckling seatbelts and text message bleeps will ring through the cabin and people will be up out of their seats getting their bags down from the lockers.

In what would become a recurring pattern for our time in Hanoi, things were taken one step further. In this instance it was the man sitting across the Aisle from us who, with 30 seconds to go before landing revealed himself to have already switched his phone back on because it rang out loud. Admittedly he was a little embarrassed, but not enough to not answer the call and chat away as we touched down. I did the only suitable thing one can do in that situation and dropped my bag on his head as I got it out of the locker after landing. We then had a lengthy queue to clear immigration and it was here that we realised they don't queue in Vietnam, at least not the women anyway. Despite there being what we in the west might recognise as a number of queues, there were still plenty of little old women who would just constantly push at your back and try and slip passed anyone they could. I spent about ten minutes fighting with one lady who just kept trying to sneak passed until it came to the two of us fully shoving each other with all our might. I'd say that I was the bigger person and just let her through but the truth is she beat me. She then proceeded to make it past about another dozen people, with her friend in tow until they got to the counter and because of something wrong with their passports held everyone else up for about 15 minutes while they were dealt with. By now, our blood was boiling with rage and we hadn't even cleared immigration yet!

This would set the mood for Hanoi. The people have a manner about them that is not tourist friendly. They are the least polite we have encountered anywhere, and you are always at your most guarded against rip-offs. This is not entirely new to us, but there is a much more unpleasant air about it all here, it's as if your presence is really resented. The restaurants are expensive, the accommodation poor quality and expensive, and the noise in the streets is simply impossible to describe. The city is filthy and smelly and nothing is made easy or straight forward.

If you're reading between the lines here, you might have deduced that we didn't really like Hanoi. We walked about plenty, and tried to spend as little money as possible. We hired a giant swan pedalo one evening and paddled about on the lake during sunset which was nice except that every time we drifted over some invisible line, an angry man with a megaphone espoused no end of fury at us from a boat. We ended up deliberately drifting over it backwards just to annoy him. There's only so much peddling a couple can do though, so we hired a man on a cyclo to peddle us home. When we got back he tried to double the price - even though we had just paid him and given him a decent tip on top. It was on the same spot we would later fight with a cabbie over our fare, this has never happened anywhere else on our travels at all.

We had about 4 days in Hanoi, and despite its less appealing qualities we had a reasonably good time just walking around and hating everything. The back streets are very narrow in Hanoi, but that is where everything that makes Hanoi Hanoi is. The roads are squeezed in by 4 or 5 story buildings, french colonial style, some with pretty little shutters and the like but with air cons and random pipes espousing water adding the Viet touch. The pavements are consumed by the shops stretching out onto the first few inches of road with food, dead or dying animals, toys, burning and whirring machinery and fires all diverting you onto the road. The next obstacle is the rows of motorbikes that look abandoned that forces you further out into the road where there is maybe about three metres of roads space left in the middle, filled with bikes and cars going in any direction. It is also the Viet way that pedestrians on any odd bit of pavement give way to motorbikes who have more right to that space. It is perfectly normal to stop dead as a bike runs across you path, literally in front of your toes, and then just parks and gets off, blocking you. Or the opposite, as you walk around someone sitting on their bike doing nothing, they will just roll into your way as if you are invisible.

In terms of sights, we went to see Ho Chi Min's pickled body floating in a big glass tank in his Mausoleum, but the cyclo man who took us there forgot to mention it closed at 10.30. Instead we wandered around and took in the vast open spaces and squares and the grand mansions that belonged to the communist party's leaders. We also went to see the Revolution Museum which was really a gentle dipping in the national propaganda machine. It turns out, that in all of Vietnam's history, of everything that has happened for the worse, it can all be attributed to either the French or the Americans. There is not a single mention of the internal Vietnam against Vietnam conflicts, except for the odd mention off some imperial puppets. The only consequencies which can be attributed to the Vietnamese are those that have undoubtedly benefited their great nation. And it occurred to me afterwards, that just maybe that was what fuelled the typical Hanoi'an's psyche and why it seemed they resented everything about us so much.