From Sapa, we took the train to Hanoi, our first big city in a while. By the time we arrived there, we had been looking forward to getting back into an urban environment, and Hanoi did not disappoint at all. Unlike Bangkok, which really felt like a Western city with Asian details, Hanoi felt entirely Asian. The streets were packed with motorbikes at almost all hours of the day, and the thrumming roar at rush hour felt and sounded more like a train passing than anything else. There are dozens of cafes, the patrons sitting on the sidewalk on the ubiquitous plastic chairs that are scattered all over the city’s sidewalks. It’s a very cool city to just walk through and we had a great time exploring it. We stayed in the Old Quarter neighborhood which is packed with tourist-oriented activities like ‘getting hit by a scooter after drinking too much bia hoi‘ or ‘perusing prints of old propaganda posters celebrating the 5000th American plane to be shot down’.

This trip has really made me realize that I enjoy visiting and walking through cities. It might have something to do with being raised so far from an urban area. Maybe I’m making up for lost time? Not sure. Regardless, these last few months have been a real treat. From Amsterdam to Jaipur to Bangkok to Hanoi, the cities we’ve been lucky enough to visit on this trip have all been enchanting in their own way. Some more than others, of course, but each of them has small idiosyncracies that make them special. Hanoi is a very exciting place for people like me to visit. It was different than any other place we’d been. Bangkok was the last big city we had visited before Vietnam but, like I said, it felt very different.

One of the most common sights in Hanoi are women making their way around town, selling various goods from either overloaded bicycles that they push around or from large platters bouncing on wooden slats that sit on their shoulders. While most of them sell produce bought from the market very early in the morning, some of the women carry around huge pots of broth and soup ingredients. Still others carry around beverages in ice. It mostly just made for interesting background atmosphere until we made a visit to the Vietnamese Women’s Museum. Besides exhibits on women in Vietnamese culture (including their service in the Vietnam War), there was a small exhibit on these women that you see pushing their bikes and carrying their goods around town. Apparently, many of them come from villages far outside Hanoi and have only come to the city because their family can no longer survive on the income from farming. They wake up before dawn to buy their supplies at the market and then make their way around town until they’ve sold it all. Most of them only see their families once a month and live with other women in crowded conditions. It added more to our understanding of the city and did a lot to humanize what had been more a photo-op than anything else.

The two other major sites we visited were the Truan Quoc pagoda on an island in West Lake and the Hoa Lo Prison Museum, aka the ‘Hanoi Hilton’. The pagoda was nice though it was very crowded. There is a cutting there from the Bodhi tree in Bodhgaya, which some of you will remember we visited way back in India.

The Hoa Lo Prison Museum was the first place where we got a taste of what it’s like to be on the losing side of a war with Communists. The museum talked about the prison’s history as a prison for both Vietnamese while it was under French control and for American POWs during the Vietnam War. While I would never defend the things that Americans did in Vietnam during the war, the Vietnamese exhibit on the use of the prison as a place for American POWs felt like nothing but propaganda. Specifically, the treatment of American POWs is presented as benign at worst and pampering at best. The exhibit talks about how well American prisoners were treated and how they were lucky to have been captured by the humane and generous Vietnamese. They were allowed to play basketball and celebrate Christmas and lived happy and carefree lives, despite being enemies of the great socialist cause.

I didn’t expect much balance in a state-sponsored description of the American POW experience but it was incredible to not only see the torture of POWs ignored but to have it replaced with pure propaganda. There is never any mention of any morally questionable actions on the part of the revolutionaries. Of course, there’s every chance that American exhibits do the same thing and I just don’t notice it. Maybe it was even just confirmation bias, or maybe I was being overly sensitive and self-conscious. I don’t really know. I do know that it forced me to reflect our country’s actions in Vietnam and the consequences those actions have for our moral ground. Do we have any right to complain about abuses committed against our soldiers when our government hasn’t even taken responsibility for things like the unexploded ordnance in Laos and the ongoing effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese? Does the My Lai massacre mean that Vietnam owes us nothing when it comes to acknowledging their own horrible actions in the war? Being confronted firsthand with the reality of the Vietnam conflict and its consequences seemed to make everything a lot more personal. These questions stuck with me all the way through our time in Vietnam but it was here in Hanoi that they first entered my head.

Topping off our Hanoi experience was our visit to Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum. Our sources say that Uncle Ho wanted to be cremated when he died, but the leaders of the North Vietnamese army believed that he was too important to the cause to be burned and buried. They still needed his symbolic cache to keep the revolutionary spirit alive so they preserved him a la Lenin. It was a strange experience. They don’t allow pictures at all (you also can’t put your hands in your pockets) but I don’t think they would do it justice. He’s just laying there in this glass box with a sort of empty moat between him and the walkway. There are four guards at the bottom of this moat standing stiff as boards at attention. It’s completely silent and everyone’s gaze is pivoting around this dead guy who didn’t really want to be there in the first place. Like I said, it’s surreal.

Thankfully, and I really, really want to emphasize this, Hanoi wasn’t all about moral quandaries and Uncle Ho’s waxy corpse. Most of our time was spent walking through the streets enjoying the city’s sights, sounds, and tastes. We found a completely vegetarian restaurant not far from the Prison Museum called Com Chay Nang Tam that served some delicious dishes. We sampled the coffee from a few of the sidewalk cafes that dot the city blocks, their patrons clogging the sidewalks on tiny plastic chairs. It’s a very stimulating city and there is always something to see.

The main highlight of our time there was seeing a show at the water puppet theater. It was high on our list of things to do in Hanoi and it absolutely did not disappoint. It is traditional Vietnamese art form that originated in the rice paddies (you can see how that works when you watch the videos below). It was really cool to see it live and I recommend it if you get a chance. The shows were lively and funny and very beautiful. Sadly, I did not get one of the coolest ones on film, where two dragons with sparks coming out of their mouths swim around underwater and then surface. It was pretty awesome.

We really enjoyed our time in Hanoi. I feel comfortable listing it as one of my top five cities. The combination of the Asian chaos with the slight civilization of development and the subtly subsumed Western influences of the French make it a wonderful place to wander. In some ways, it is a perfect counterpoint to our next stop, Halong Bay.