Welcome to Scooterville

 

How many mattresses can you carry on a scooter? Evidently, the answer is 5. I was so surprised, I forgot to take a photo, so you’ll have to trust me.

The population of Hanoi is 8 1/2 million people. There are also 6 1/2 million scooters, the majority of which seem to be on the road at any given time, carrying from 1 to 4 people and/or a staggering amount of cargo. Helmets are supposed to be mandatory, but like traffic lights, it’s more of a suggestion. Safety footwear ranges from flipflops to go-go boots to 4″ heels. It seems like madness. Most of the intersections are uncontrolled, no stop or yield signs, just honk and keep going. Pure chaos, but there is obviously some method in the madness. Traffic moves. And there are surprisingly few collisions.

It’s the same throughout Vietnam. But in major cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon), the traffic frenzy reaches a staggering level. Crossing the road is an adrenaline rush all on it’s own.

Hanoi is the political, cultural and economic center of Vietnam. It has been the capital of Vietnam for most of the last thousand years, and was the administrative center of all French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia). The old quarter of Hanoi still has many beautiful french colonial buildings, now used to house various ministries.

At the center of everything is the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum. Within, the embalmed revolutionary leader lies bathed in soft light, encased in glass and guarded by four ramrod straight soldiers.

We lined up, like thousands of others do daily, to file quietly by. I’ve never been comfortable with demagoguery of any sort and though impressive in ceremonial grandeur, I found it a bit off-putting. Uncle Ho actually wanted to be cremated and to have his ashes scattered in various places throughout the country he helped to liberate and unify. I wonder how happy he is being used as a political prop.

My favorite part of visiting Hanoi was wandering through the warren of alleys in the old quarter. Almost every building has a store or small restaurant on the ground level. Apparently everyone who isn’t riding a scooter, is selling something! And the street food is delicious.

The irony is that Vietnam is a communist country. At least on paper. It is certainly a one party state with a strong central government, but they seem to have tossed the Marxist dogma in the rubbish bin. Capitalism is firing on all cylinders here. We saw this in huge new factories and the generating plants that lined the highway on our 2 hour drive to Ha Long Bay. I can’t help but wonder what Uncle Ho would think of all this.

Ha Long Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It’s a karst landscape that has been partially submerged leaving 1969 steep-sided islands. The name Ha Long means “descending dragon”. It’s quite beautiful despite being thronged with tourist boats. That’s one of the things that you have to get used to in traveling through most of SE Asia –  the crowds. Vietnam itself has a population of more than 100 million people in an area less than 1/3 the size of Ontario. For you stats fans, that works out to a density of 300 people per square kilometer. In Canada it’s just over 4/km². So your odds of a moment of solitary enjoyment are slim.

After spending the night on our Ha Long Bay cruise boat it was back Hanoi to board the overnight train to Hue. Though small in total area, Vietnam is over 2,000 km long. The accommodation is 4 to a cabin, which we shared with another couple from our group. While not luxurious it was comfortable, and most importantly for me, the bed was long enough. A lot of things in SE Asia aren’t built for someone my size.

The Nguyen dynasty made Hue (pronounced Hoo-ay) the imperial capital from 1802 to the end of the French colonial administration in 1949. There are several imperial temples and mausoleums dotted around the city as well as a large, impressive citadel and royal palace. These were heavily damaged during the Vietnam War, referred to as the American War over here. The fighting was particularly fierce during the Tet Offensive in January, 1968, when the Viet Cong captured and held Hue for 26 days. The walls of the citadel are still scarred with bullet holes.

The palace and other royal sites were left partially ruined at the end of the war. They were seen as feudal relics of a “reactionary” regime. However, with the liberalizing reforms begun in the 90’s, that view began to shift. They are now seen as cultural emblems of a long and proud history. The palace has been almost completely restored and work is ongoing on other sites. It goes to show you that history or at least our view of it is always subjective and never static.

While in Hue, we were able to meet for supper with our niece, Mélisande Champagne. She works for Backroads, a bicycle tour company with destinations around the world. Currently she’s overseeing the maintenance of their fleet in Vietnam and Cambodia. It was great to be able to rendezvous with family half way around the world.

One final note: many of my Kenny relatives are buried in Lillies Cemetery on Hwy. 15, about 40 km north of Kingston, Ontario. There is one gravestone that stands out – the distinctive white marker of an American military grave. Robert Kenny, one of my father’s cousins felt it was his duty to join the American army, to fight against the spread of communism. He rose to the rank of Sergeant, before he was killed in a place called Binh Dinh, south of Hue. I will not debate his decision to go, but I have thought of him several times as we travel through Vietnam. The war is never far away here. Or more properly wars, for the Vietnamese have been fighting off invaders for centuries. Though Robert didn’t die in Hue, nowhere have I felt the ghostly presence of a man I never personally knew, more intensely than here, with my finger probing a bullet hole in the blood red brick of the Hue citadel.

Here’s the link to the photo gallery for this post.