Day 6 - Hanoi - 12th September 2014
Hanoi Day 6 – 12th September 2014
We wake at 5.45 am and arrive into the craziness which is Hanoi at 6.30am, just half an hour after our ETA, time enough for minimal ablutions at the communal bathroom which is also a walkway to the next carriage. It is sad to leave this lovely old train.
Our camera and phones are so fogged up with a combination of the cloying humidity of the city and the freezing air con of the train, we cannot take pictures, and join the throngs heading along a surprisingly modern and new platform and stairway following faithful Tea to our waiting air conditioned bus. Now this part of organised travel is good! We say goodbye to Tea who has told us many amazing and funny stories, and whose wife is expecting their first baby next month, Gerald has done a collection and he is given $50 in addition to his ‘already’ tip, he is pleased.
I am gobsmacked once more by the sheer numbers of scooters and motor bikes with tiny babies, toddlers and children wedged between Mum and Dad, or standing upright on the seat, held there hopefully with a firm grasp, in the midst of murderous traffic, four and five to a vehicle – none wearing safety helmets, although some have masks to help prevent inhaling the toxic exhaust fumes which are thick and oily in the air, and a few wearing sunglasses.
Straight back to our Hanoi Home, the Pullman Hotel, where we eat a big breakfast of Vietnamese fruit, including rambutan, passion fruit and pho and pork dumplings, jasmine tea and coffee for Gerald. A shower, and reorganising luggage in another lovely room overlooking the pool, and I head to the travel desk to find out about a Street Food Tour. No, she says, definitively, we have not got those. Surely! I exclaim, and she relents, opens her laptop, and finds a company in the Old Quarter, accolades galore on Trip Advisor, for $20 a head. I thank her and take the number, and ten minutes later we have a booking for 11 am. Travelmarvel wanted to charge us $45 a head, so I am feeling pleased, and after a short taxi ride, we are in the heart of the Old Quarter, where we spent hours walking just a few days ago.
The tour is absolutely magic. Our guide is a young smiling woman, Miss Moon, born under a full moon she tells us, she wears a large floppy hat, over a long pony tail, black rimmed glasses, and like many Vietnamese women, appears fresh as a daisy in this heat despite her long sleeved belted polyester top, with tight black leggings. We spend 3.5 truly wonderful hours with her, and a couple from Melbourne, Brian and Jan. Brian, amazingly, has just returned from his fourth trip Kenya where he flies hot air balloons across the Masai Mara!! Jan has had an illness which has killed off both her taste buds and her sense of smell, for a foodie, a true tragedy …. and is on medication – which she can only take for brief periods of time as the side effects are so serious – which gives her both senses back for a short period of time. Wow. This tour is a true highlight for me, and I know it was not Gerald’s preference, so I am grateful to my Beloved for his generosity. Miss Moon is very knowledgeable and charming, she has a soft spot for me, I can tell, as I eat everything she puts in front of me, and with delicious tamarind broth dripping from my chin and chop sticks dropping food in an ungainly manner, she grins with delight as I love chilli, and she claps her hands and hugs me, and says I am her ‘best customer’.
We eat each dish in a different location, walking a long way between courses, down side alleys, dark doorways, we see women crouching on footpaths amongst motor bikes, boiling vats of oil, piles of vegetables laid out on baskets, tiny women bearing baskets on sturdy wooden sticks slung over their shoulders, laden with produce, women using big machetes to chop fresh pork and chicken, and my nose is assailed by such a variety of delicious smells, I salivate. Miss Moon kindly explains all the health benefits of the food we are about to eat, tactfully avoiding the issue of how MUCH we are going to eat. And yes, they eat dogs, but we won’t be having any today.
For those of you, like me, for,whom food can be a sensuous experience, here is what we eat – each one in a different location –
1) Crab soup, a broth to die for, flavoured with tamarind, to which we added herbs and crisp slices of banana leaf, and chilli – sprinkled with the juice of tiny green cumquats
2) Sticky rice cake with green bean paste (broad beans my taste buds tell me) served on a banana leaf, standing on a street corner with scooters whizzing past
3) In a tiny cafe, on miniature kindy size chairs and tables, the lightest thinnest pancake you could imagine. We watched the owner make it, two fires burning, a thin smear of rice flour and water spread on a hot pan, covered with a dish as she turned to the second fire and hot pan, where the same dish was now complete, and she lifted off a pancake as fine as a cobweb, a thing of beauty, and passed it in a chopstick to another lady, spread another layer of rice paste, as she turned her attention to the first fire and hot plate, and repeated the procedure. Served with crispy pork, chilli, crispy shallots, purple basil and coriander which you dipped into another unbelievably delicious broth, on an Asian spoon ……
4) A bowl of mixed fruit – lychee, jackfruit, papaya, watermelon, dragon fruit, and melon, in coconut milk, with tiny chips of ice and chunks of avo! Creamy and firm, what a taste sensation, and who would have thought to do that?
5) We go to Beer Corner and risking life, sit at a corner shop on baby stools, actually on the road, and drink local beer. Well, I sip it, but revert to water, the men have two each and Gerald drinks mine as well. It’s as hot as hell here, and we are sweating profusely, they turn on the fine misty water shower, taking pity on us white people, for which I am grateful. Here I purchase two t shirts for $5 the pair for Joshua for basketball, emblazoned with Good Morning Vietnam! And a lacquered box of orange coasters for June with a dragon fly inlay made out of egg shells, an exquisite thing, for $6.
6) Refreshed with liquid and shopping, we set off walking again to Pork Street. Streets here are named for what they sell, makes sense, so we have Silk Street, Pho Street, Shoe Street, and so on. Here we have Gerald’s favourite, BBQ pork in another subtly fragrant broth, with lip smacking, finger licking roast pork, with lotus roots. Here I have to raise the white flag and say ‘enough’. Gerald feigns surprise and says he has never in fifty years heard his wife say ‘enough’ when it comes to food. Miss Moon is ecstatic and laughs uproariously.
7) We wake up two ladies in coolie hats with their tiny pineapples in a string basket hanging off the handlebars of their bicycle, and Miss Moon carefully chooses two pineapples, each the size of an orange, it is delicately peeled, with the prickly top left on, and sliced lengthways, and we eat it like an ice cream. I have never tasted pineapple this sweet. So I clearly had not had ‘enough’ after all.
8) Weaving through streets I could never find again, Miss Moon leaves us momentarily, with instructions to stand in the shade, and rushes across the road, returns with four sugary hot, deep fried, golden brown Donut Cakes. OMG, this is cholesterol city. She beams with pride as we all do as we are told, and eat this rich sugary delight. I wish I hadn’t, ‘quease’ comes over me.
9) Barely able to walk we head to the ‘secret’ coffee shop, and up some stairs in an alley, find a verandah filled with people smoking and drinking coffee. They take one look at us and switch on the air conditioning. We are here for the famous Egg Coffee. A curious mix of coffee, some sort of milk infused with egg and ice cubes – I am not a coffee drinker but I love this!
It is a half hour over our scheduled tour, we have had such a good time, and have learned so much. Crossing the road with Miss Moon is a lesson in life, we are told to stay close (‘sticky rice’) and she leads us out into the traffic like a protective mother duck with her four babies close behind, waggling her fingers at the approaching traffic, which amazingly slows to accommodate our procession, all the time chanting ‘sticky rice sticky rice sticky rice’ which the four of us soon emulate. Quite a sight I imagine. She teaches us to say thank you in a delightful way, explaining how happy the proprietors will be if we say these few words, which mean ‘Thank you, that was delicious!’ I take it on phonetically, in words I can relate to. The first sounds like ‘come back’ the second like ‘shit’ but with a z sound, and the third like ‘nong’ a word Australians use to describe an idiot. So as we leave each tiny establishment, I practise ‘Come back, zzzzzhhiiit nong’ to broad smiles and a squeal of delight from Miss Moon.
I am sorry to say goodbye to this lovely young woman, and we head back to Silk Street where I have purchased a heavenly white linen Vietnamese traditional split to the waist garment (name?) in white linen, sigh, and a pair of elegant black linen shorts, which they have been altering whilst we have been eating. Including the alterations to fit my lack of bosom, it costs us $80.
Dripping with sweat and the exertion of overheating and walking for four hours, we head back to the lake, and as I retrieve my fan from my bag, a small pink feather, from my Mom’s feather boa, escapes and floats off into the crowd. ‘Off you got Mum’, I think silently, and wonder what she will make of this land. Yeaterday, whilst observing the determination of the hawker women, I said that I understood their doggedness, and would do the same if it meant the difference between my child going hungry or not. Gerald asks me, do you think you would survive here, alone, if you had to? I pause, I am not certain, and he scoffs and says, ‘Would your Mom?’ Oh yes, she would. So perhaps she has left to make some enquiries.
We collapse into a cab and head back to the Pullman. Even my feet look fat. Can that much my food have headed south that quickly I wonder? Or is it the heat? We head straight to the pool and I spend a happy couple of hours writing.
At 6.15 pm we are in the foyer to meet Quong, our tour guide for the next three weeks, and join up with another recently arrived group of 16 people. They are joining us apparently. Eeeeek. I am challenged by the small group we already are. As we walk into the room, I don’t need to glance at Gerald to register his sinking heart, his alarm, as it exactly mirrors mine. Oh no. We studiously avoid each other’s gaze, I fear my despair is written all over my face, as we six are the last to arrive although it is 6.15 pm exactly, The Appointed Hour, and the assembled group have clearly been waiting for some time. Waves of irritation flow in our direction. Gerald and I are notoriously punctual, but I am reminded of my parents, who were always at every appointment at least 40 minutes early. These people – note to self, ‘these people’ is a hostile frame of reference – are very, very old, and make our current group – whom you will recall I have been complained a fair bit about – look positively youthful and remarkably healthy. Quong, (‘Kwong’ rhymes with Dong), on the other hand, is youthful and healthy, with remarkable English, and a pronounced English accent, rather like Tom Kime’s, despite the fact he has never been there and went to Uni in Queensland and worked on a chicken farm. True story. That chicken farm happens to be owned by Mick and Allison, who are in our group. Also true story. He is charming and funny, plays to his audience, and briefs us in basic culture, safety, and an outline of the tour.
We head to a very large bus and back to the wonderful KOTO Restaurant we visited a few nights ago, the one which supports disadvantaged youth and trains them in hospitality. Herding 24 people across the crazy relentless honking traffic is a skill which thankfully Quong is masterful at. I see the look of horror on the faces of the other patrons as all 24 of us grey haired folks totter into the restaurant, as helpful staff open doors, help people over the threshold, (yes really) and assist some to sit. I want to pick up a glass and make an announcement, “Attention please! This is a terrible mistake. We are not really with this group. My husband and I are young in spirit, funny, interesting and we do yoga three times a week! Oh, and my husband swims several kms per week!”, but I restrain myself. There is a picture of Julia Gillard on the wall – I bet she never came here in a big bus with a lot of people with walking sticks – along with other notable people from around the world, and we have another delicious multiple coursed meal. I know, I know. We sit with ‘our group’ now a close knit team after the intrusion of the newcomers, and share stories, laughing somewhat excessively, I am possibly hysterical.
I am not drinking in Vietnam as I don’t like beer, and wine is prohibitively expensive, so alcohol is not to blame, but I must share with you that I am aware of a strange phenomenon occurring. ‘Our Group’ have suddenly taken on a charming familiarity, have a wit and sense of humour I have not heretofore noticed, and the ‘New Group’ are clearly the outsiders, the ones I don’t want to hang with, and clearly ‘Our Group’ need to stick together. Either that, or we have possibly joined the ranks of elderly group travellers in the last four hours. Or perhaps I have just been kidding myself and we really are boring old facts after all.
Gerald and I act out our hostility by being first on the bus in the front seats. And first off the bus. See how spritely we are.
I have so enjoyed today.