Land Of The Conical Hat
We have just returned from the latest leg of the Asia holiday tour – the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. We nearly didn’t get there at all – by pure fluke we were out with a friend who had just been (that was the night Jane made us see Phantom of the (80s) Opera) and she was chatting happily away about Vietnam and what to do and how to get the visa…. visa?? what bloody visa? Noooooo!! We just managed to get an agency to rush it through before the embassy shut down for the May bank holiday (3 days before the holiday itself – I guess they wanted to gear up to it, get the noodle supplies in). Otherwise, off we would have trotted to Changi airport, only to trot back again soon after, cursing and gnashing our teeth.
We spent 4 days in Hanoi, the capital. In Hanoi, pretty much everything happens on the street, which is great for people watching and taking pictures of people whilst pretending not to (ooh! look at that big soviet style multi-storey-carpark-esque building! let’s take a photo! and good news if the tiny lady in the conical hat balancing unfeasibly large baskets of melons / live fish / an entire vegetable garden on her pole-over-the-shoulder-thing happens to be in the way at the time).
We saw people serving up elaborate meals all cooked on portable coal-fired stoves at little makeshift restaurants where they’d stolen all the furniture from a local infant school – you’d feel like those visiting politicians who go out into the community just before an election having to sit on those tiny chairs and pretend to talk to the kids. Lots of hairdressers with mirrors artfully stuck to the wall to create a true barber’s experience, a couple of people pulling out other peoples’ grey hairs / nits (not sure which) – I assume for a fee, someone having a manicure, lots of people (ok men – the women were generally too busy with the hawking around of obscenely heavy basket type activities) sitting around playing board games, shooting the breeze and drinking something that looks suspiciously like wee.
And – loads of people had conical hats on! What more could you ask for?
One of the key aims of this holiday was shopping, so we bought the Luxe guide, gave Andy the task of navigating and carrying stuff and set off. Lots and lots of laquer stuff – mostly unspeakably garish but the occasional Nice Thing – plus after looking at the same stuff for 4 days you start to think that actually it’s quite nice. Marvellous handbag shop – all individual designs and hand-made, in an ultra glam, completely over the top shop (walls covered in purple velvet, that sort of thing).
There are some fantastic shops selling old Communist propaganda posters – some very simple (we good, US bad), some more elaborate, and lots of Uncle Ho (Chi Minh’s) disembodied head telling people to do stuff like “Me, I exercise on my own each day, this is good for the body” (I think the dodgy translations add to the charm). My favourite one was “Small children should do small tasks” with the floating disembodied head and and a picture of small children doing small tasks like lugging buckets of water for miles and digging. Andy and I both got “victory will be ours” t-shirts which appeals to the part of me which wants to run its own dictatorship and defeat the fuckwits of the world (quite a large part in fact). Mine says it in Vietnamese therefore is cooler.
We also went to Halong Bay and splashed out on a night on the Emeraude, a ship which has been designed in the style of a paddle steamer which used to sail that route in the 20s. Halong Bay is stunning. Mainly cloudy at this time of year but we got an afternoon of sunshine and it was gorgeous. Best bit was swimming around in the bay and then buying a couple of beers from a woman who had set up her own off-licence in a rowing boat. And champers on deck in the evening.
All polished off with 2 visits to Restaurant Bobby Chinn, the best restaurant / bar in Hanoi and possibly the universe. On the final night we got mopeds back to the hotel and as it was independence day we zipped past a stage with lots of official looking types in uniforms singing along, probably about the victorious motherland and Uncle Ho and those damn Americans and how well they’ve cornered the market in conical hats.
Jo 3 May 2007
Commenting is closed for this article.