The big relax

This is going to be a slightly longer post that usual…

If Koh Tao is a lazy Sunday in a quiet pub in the countryside, gently sipping a nice ale with friends, then Hanoi is standing in Picadilly Circus when England have just won the World Cup, the Rugby World cup and Wimbledon. The place is utterly nuts. Crossing the road consists of walking slowly enough for all the scooters and motorbikes to see the path you have taken so that they can swerve around you accordingly.

Yesterday, our first full day, we set off with our Lonely Planet South East Asia in hand to find some of the best historical sites of Hanoi. The first one in the guide, quoted as ‘unmissable,’ was 20km’s out from the city centre where we are staying (sort of.) We read the review in the guide, though, and it sounded as though it could be worth the money. We bartered the price of a Xe Om down to just over 3 quid. A Xe Om is somewhere between a push-bike and a sofa. So, for 3 quid, some poor sod rode us the 20km’s to the Vietnam Enthology Museum. We felt bad at times, but most of all, thanks to the odd way of crossing roads and that apparently Xe Om’s don’t stop for red traffic lights, we were just petrified. The ride took around 45 minutes and by the end the man wrung out a sweat rag he had with him, it literally poured onto the hot concrete. We relented and gave him his original asking price, thankful that he hadn’t died in transit.

We went into the Museum, it sucked, big time. It is a museum about the different tribes and ethnolinguistic groups of Vietnam. This could be fun, but it is set out in such a way that you feel exhausted after the first few steps. The issue being that in many of the tribes, the only visual difference is maybe a headpiece is blue rather than black, so it was very same same. We declined the use of a guide, our money to get back running dangeorusly low and us forgetting both of our bank cards. As a side note, there was an odd area of the museum which seemed to take a break from the tribes of Vietnam and instead focused on the joy of childbirth, including diagrams, videos and instruments such as ‘Vaginal expander.’ These did not seem to have anything to do with tribes, and instead were there purely so that anyone who wanted to know about the ethnolinguistic properties of the Muang tribe (pop. 5000) could also find out about A Man’s Role During the Birthing Process. Which was helpful.

Upon leaving the museum, we were accosted by a man on a motorbike. Looking into my moth-ridden wallet, I noticed that we only had a quater of the money we had used to get here. ‘That’s fine’ the man said, snatching my money and making it vanish. He rammed a helmet on our heads and sandwhich’ed us onto the back of his bike. So there was all three of us on this bike, with Lauren in the middle. It was both pant-wettingly scary and exhillarating. We made it back in one piece, thankfully.

Then onto dinner. Most locals here seem to eat literally off of the street. We decided against that after having stepped out of our hotel and seen two men stamping a rat to death just in the doorway of one such ‘restaurant.’

Instead we went to an obscenely overpriced place just off of the main square. We had pretty standard meals, but the choice was there to get ‘snake-head in chillie oil.’ Yum yum!

When dinner was out of the way we went to see the Water Puppets at the Municipal Water Puppet Theatre just off of the main lake in the Old Quater. It was awesome. The tickets cost us around one pound ten pence (we got the posh seats too!) and the first ten minutes of the show was the traditional Vietnamese band playing solo’s on their various instruments. There was one which is meant to be played only by men as it makes women fall in love with the player instantly. This time it was played by a woman and much to everyone’s dissapointment, none of the men in the audience appeared to fall in love with her. The show itself was acted out in about 3 feet of water, with the pupetteers invisible behind a green cloak and the puppets being about 2 feet high and held in such a way to look as if they ware floating on the water. It was a confusing show, being narrated in Vietnamese (I know, how incosiderate is that?!) and at one point where I thought I understood the plot, the king had issued a reward to any man who could find his lost sword in the lake, my ideas where ruined because two dragons started fighting over a ball. Still it was really good fun and at that price it was well worth it.

As some general notes, there is a place just down the raod from where we are staying where beer is cheaper than water. At only 3,000 Dong it makes it about 10p per half litre. It does taste like chemicals but by my reckoning, the street water used to wash the glasses balances the pH out or whatever, so there’s no risk to me.

Lauren had a sprite.

Tags: , Hanoi, Travel, vietnam, Water Puppets

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 2:54 am and is filed under Travel, vietnam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.