Vietnam adventure
The only battle is with bikes as Keith Ward goes to Hanoi.
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EARLY on in our visit to Hanoi we are given our first lesson in survival: How to cross the road and live to tell the tale.
This is peacetime in Vietnam’s war-torn history. But pedestrians do battle with traffic in daily conflict on the streets of its capital.
The odds look daunting as we cower on a kerbside at traffic lights near the city’s central Hoan Kiem Lake. Circling it is a wide, one-way, road-cum-racetrack. Lined up on our left at the lights is a battalion of motor bikes, perhaps 20 across and as many deep. There is a sprinkling, too, of pedal cycles, cars, rickshaws and buses. But motor bikes rule in Hanoi. Here live 5million people and nearly 2million motorcycles.
There are pedestrian lights, but their phase is so short, and so many road users ignore them anyway, that you cannot depend on it.
“Traffic lights just for decoration”, laughs our guide, Luu Duc Thien. “Heh – like Xmas tree.”
He tells us to cross the road not at the lights, but further along the street, where traffic has had a chance to loosen up. He then urges us to step out into the road, in what seems to us to be a suicide mission.
“Please not to hesitate, not go back”, urges Thien. Full of trepidation, we are shepherded slowly across the street. A miracle happens. Shoals of motorbikes weave and slither around us. Amazingly, without touching us, or one other, or hooting at us.
By the end of the week in Hanoi, we were crossing streets with some of the nonchalance of the locals.
The old city of central Hanoi is a bustling grid of 36 narrow, dusty streets. Pavements, where they exist, are narrow enough. On to them are parked motor bikes in their hundreds. Trying to negotiate your way on foot through this maze, you need to tread warily. If you don’t trip over a bike, it will be customers at a so-called “dust cafe” squatting on low plastic stools to sip the all-day staple pho (noodle soup), or a tinsmith hammering out pans and cooking utensils on the pavement, or a slip of a girl in a coned hat hauling a few hundredweight of fruit in two baskets slung from a yoke across her shoulders.
The bikes, some loaded to ridiculous heights, can hurtle suddenly out of a shop, house, or alley.
Many of the country’s third-world aspects remain, in its peasant countryside with paddy fields and buffalo-drawn ploughs, primitive housing, dusty side-streets and rubbish-strewn roadsides. But the landscapes, against mountains in varying shades of silhouette, are magnificent.
Hanoi has its department stores, western hotels, smart restaurants, tree-lined boulevards with pavement cafes (a legacy from 100 years of French colonial rule) and a wealth of cultural interest.
Vietnam is indelibly linked to war and particularly the military conflict with the USA from 1965-73, which took between two and three million lives and devastated a generation on both sides. After a prolonged and vain attempt to stem what they saw as the communist threat in Asia, the USA withdrew. The “hard” communist north centred on Hanoi was reunited with the “soft” south containing Saigon – officially renamed Ho Chi Minh City – to form today’s Socialist Republic of Vietnam. An estimated 1m-plus Vietnamese fled to other countries. Remember the Vietnamese boat people?
Communism had won.
But today, more than 30 years on, nobody much wants to mention the war. The country must look forward, they say. And much of the economy has been freed up, with private enterprise playing a part.
Many Vietnamese speak English. New white goods overflow on to the pavement from shop fronts. In Asia, Vietnam is second only to China in its rate of annual economic growth.By 2003 the old enemy, the USA, was importing Vietnamese goods worth $4.5billion, four times the value of trade in the other direction.
In Hanoi the American dollar is widely accepted, not just at the Hilton, but for paying your cycle-rickshaw taxi driver. It is certainly easier to handle than the official Vietnamese dong, exchanging at about 25,000 to the pound sterling.
Vietnam is a country for travellers, or at least tourists, not surf ’n’ sand sun worshippers. It’s an experience to savour.
There was one poignant reminder of the country’s embattled past. We joined the queue at Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum, to file past the waxen, preserved figure of the country’s hero and leader, who died in 1969.
We were sternly motioned by the military guard to make way for a group of veterans. As they came away from the tomb, several brushed tears from their eyes.
* VIETNAM FACTFILE
Keith Ward stayed at the 5-star Hanoi Hilton Opera hotel (www.hanoi.hilton.com), quietly situated next to the Opera House, within walking distance of the city centre. For an arrival package of two nights’ B&B, airport transfer and visa handling he paid about £72 per person, sharing a double/twin. Available through Discover East (www.discovereast.com.vn) A visa is essential for Vietnam, through your travel agent or direct from the Vietnamese Embassy in London. Further info: Vietnam Embassy in London (020 79371912; www.vietnamembassy.org.uk )
