1. Do Your Research

This advice is slightly hypocritical coming from me, someone who likes to travel without a guidebook and just see what happens. But for a first-timer to Vietnam, forewarned is forearmed. Work out what you want to do before you arrive, even if it’s only a vague idea. Check the public holidays — not much is open over Tet so it’s not really a good time to be traveling through Vietnam.

Also, make sure you check the distance from the airport to the town you’re flying into. Some airports, like Nha Trang’s Cam Ranh International Airport and Dalat’s Lien Khuong Airport, are about 30 km from the towns they serve. If you’ve booked a budget airline, getting to and from the airport by taxi might cost more than the flight!

2. Be Aware That Vietnam Doesn’t Do Mid-Range.

It’s a case of choose your poison. Choose the budget option and get a backpacker-ish cheap experience. Choose fancy, and pay for the privilege. There’s very little in between. This goes for hotels and tours, especially in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

3. Take Trains over Buses

Vietnam’s main train line, which links Hanoi in the north and Ho Chi Minh City in the south, was built in the 1880s during French colonial rule. The train line hugs the coast, making for some spectacular views, especially through Central Vietnam.

The trains are old and a bit grotty and most carriages have a squat toilet at one end and a sit-down toilet at the other. But the beauty of taking the train is that you can get up and move around. Overnight train trips are also quite comfortable in a four-berth soft sleeper, much MUCH more comfortable than an overnight bus journey.

Vietnam has an extensive system of sleeper buses. However, the buses are designed for Vietnamese-sized bodies and have no toilets. So if you’re 1.5 metres tall and slender, you will probably feel comfortable sleeping on the narrow top bunk with your hand luggage under your knees and your shoes in a plastic bag under your head. If you’re not, you may well find them cramped and claustrophobic.

4. Don’t Sweat the Little Things

There are some travellers who seem to be a state of perpetual agitation over the possibility of being ripped off. Their anxious faces stare at the taxi meter, not what’s outside the window. They think every taxi driver is taking the scenic route (when in fact there are a lot of one-way streets in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City). They quibble about paying airport tolls, which don’t appear on the meter, and VND3,000 (13 US cents) for a wet napkin at a restaurant. They are, in short, a pain to be around.

Sure, it’s a bit confusing when you don’t know how things work. But you can’t assume everyone is out to rip you off. Some people are. But they’re usually professionals, smiling assassins, who’ll get you in a way you least expect. And they won’t ping you for 13 cents, either. So loosen up a little. Have fun. Find your sense of wonder and ditch your sense of paranoia.

5. Don’t Buy Banh Mi in Hanoi

It’s terrible. Wait til you get to Central Vietnam. Hoi An does great banh mi, so does Ho Chi Minh City.

6. Ignore Cyclo Drivers

While the cyclos (pedal-powered rickshaws) plying the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City look like a romantic relic of times gone past, the reality is that the cyclo drivers of today are usually con artists. They’ll take their gran to the market and back again, and charge next to nothing. But the ones who speak enough English to engage a foreigner are usually on the make.

I had visiting friends who were royally scammed by a cyclo driver in Ho Chi Minh City a few years ago. Outside the War Remnants Museum downtown, a friendly cyclo driver offered them a city tour. He pulled out a book of written recommendations. He flirted and chatted to them in excellent English. He said it was VND100,00 for a one-hour tour. So my friends agreed. They settled back in their cyclo and listened to the commentary. When the driver asked if they’d like to see something interesting here, they agreed. When he asked if they’d like to see something interesting there, they agreed.

Several hours later, the cyclo driver stopped and announced the tour was over. There just happened to be a crowd of cyclo drivers at the stopping point. The driver said my friends needed to pay US$80 EACH. (That’s nearly 1.8 million, compared to the original quote of VND100,000.) He proceeded to tell them that his initial quote of VND100,000 was per person. And that when their 100,000 was used up, he then took them here and there, so things added up. To US$80, a few dollars short of the average monthly income in Vietnam.

My friends were so intimidated by the other drivers lurking around that they paid up, jumped in a taxi and came back to my house. The girl was in tears, the guy furious with himself for being so gullible. The thing that stung the most — they thought they’d made a new friend in the cyclo driver. They’d had such a great time hanging out with him and listening to his jokes.

6. Hanoi Pho Is Not What You Expect

Pho originated from Hanoi and worked its way down the country, evolving along the way. Hanoians believe the Hanoi-style of pho is the purest and the best. It’s quite an austere dish, served with only a wedge of lime and some chopped chillis. In the South, pho is served with a dizzying array of sauces and sides and huge baskets of fresh herbs. This is the style of pho that travelled all around the world because it was the Southern Vietnamese who fled Vietnam in the 70s and 80s. I much prefer the Southern style of pho, even though I’ve had some great bowls of pho in Hanoi.

7. Don’t Fear the Squat Toilet

Provided you bring tissues and keep your clothes out of reach of the floor, you’ll survive. Just don’t look down to check your aim if your sunglasses are on top of your head.

8. Consider Taxis for More Than Just Getting Around Town

For journeys up to two hours or so, considering getting a taxi rather than the bus – or train, or plane. This is most cost-effective when you’re in a group, but it’s not outrageously expensive even if you’re alone. It’s a lot less hassle going door-to-door than navigating your way through a city to the bus or train terminal.

Mai Linh and Vinasun taxi companies operate in most towns in Vietnam (more details here). There are set fares for common destinations, so you can call up and get a quote. For example, a taxi from Ho Chi Minh City to Vung Tau costs about VND1 million, which is about US$45. The ferry costs VND150,000 per person on weekdays, VND200,000 on weekends. Once you add in the time and effort it takes to get to the ferry terminal in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 4, then from the ferry terminal in Vung Tau to your hotel, the taxi option is quite appealing.

9. Don’t Get Upset by the Local Style of Queuing

The Vietnamese don’t queue. They also have a very different idea of personal space. This can make buying tickets, shopping at the supermarket and going through airport security very uncomfortable. Try and relax.

10. Don’t Go to Girlie Bars

If you don’t go, you won’t get scammed, so won’t regale anyone with terrible tales of being ripped off in Vietnam.

Thanks to MM for Vietnam and rsseattle for Pho: both are creative commons on Flickr.com.

You can buy Vietnam: 100 Unusual Travel Tips and a Guide to Living and Working There on BookDepository.com for $18.82. They ship free to almost anywhere in the world.

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The post The Friday Photo: Rice Terraces appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

View from a bus window #1. Mist, mountains and waterfalls, near Sapa, Vietnam.

The rivers turn turbid and golden, rapids smearing the surface like toffee coming to the boil; young rice seedlings and their older siblings stipple paddy terraces in varying greens; waterfalls appear everywhere you look.

Old women from the hill tribes carry leaves for making hats, sporting bright wellies over their leggings. Fireflies switch on their mating lights at night. Dramatic storms with sheet lightning pass over, sky darkening like a giant’s hand cast over the sun and after the rain, the earth has a rich, deep scent of settled soil and teeming life.

The nine-year-old was looking forward to our first proper rainy season journey. As he put it, “We might as well stay up all night. I’ve always wanted to stay up all night, and I’ve never done it. The bus the next day leaves so early we might as well… Plus, we’ll save sooo much money on the hotel room…”

The bus strained all the way from Sapa, gears crescendoing on the slightest incline, winding steadily round gorges pierced by hundreds of sudden monsoon waterfalls, spouting colours from brilliant white to tartrazine yellow, past stands of tall, dark mountain bamboo, and those forlornly drooping pines which are to Asian highlands as cypresses are to Greek.

When the mud becomes more than usually hillocked, and the ascent is sufficiently steep to outclass a vehicle which clearly does not have long for this world (about once an hour), we are kicked off the bus to process uphill through the mud like a refugee column.

We stopped at this beautiful gorge for, err, an hour or so. Not, in fact, to admire the view. But so the trucks you can see just past the parked lorries at the bottom of the shot could finish repairing the road sufficiently for the other vehicles to get through.

Zac by a gorge, Sapa, Vietnam

As we head down, the skies brighten and the temperature warms dramatically. There are paddy terraces, suspension bridges, tumbling rivers, clusters of conical hills leaning crazily askew like so many drunken witches’ hats.

Paddy terraces show the different shades of young rice. North Vietnam.

Moving upwards again, the sky becomes darker, the scenery more dramatic, and the going slower.

Suspension bridge over gorge, Vietnam.

Repairing roads in this region is a task that might define Sisyphean. Since the landslips, which happened a couple of days ago, road crews have been working round the clock to break and lay sufficient rock on the mud to hold the next few vehicles, then smoothing the surface again for the next round.

Clearly, I should have taken the chap at the guesthouse literally when he explained that we would be leaving a day later than planned because, “No road! No road! So no bus,” and mimed landslides (with hindsight) quite effectively.

And, if not then, surely the way the old lady with the sequinned top and velour trackies set up not so much a camp as a plastic sleeping mat and rice-sack pillow in the centre of the aisle rather than take a seat would have warned me that something was up.

But no. I thought we would be there by nightfall.

It is dark, pelting with rain and riven with sheet lightning when we arrive at a riverside dorp by the name — I later discover — of Muong Lay. It is about 6pm and we have been in transit, if not exactly moving, for ten hours or so. We are ordered off the bus into mud of a consistency I have never encountered before. It is smooth and clay-y, almost syrupy in parts, quite extraordinarily slick and rich, forming gloopy puddles that would be delightful were one in wellies. Or even in reach of a shower.

Z removes his sandals before the mud does it for him and we squish through the dark to the town’s main source of illumination, a cafe which doubles as someone’s front room with the usual backlit plastic sign advertising com (rice), pho (noodle soup), bun (noodles) and my (a different type of noodles).

The atmosphere is carnivalesque. Two horrifically stoned yet amiable truckers, with slender, Mongolian features and bloodshot eyes, are sharing a large pipe and nibbling on unidentified chicken bits.

We are welcomed as old friends. (For some strange reason, our fellow falang have opted to stay on the bus.) Would Zac like a hit on the pipe?

“No,” he says. “I’m nine years old. I don’t smoke ANYTHING.”

There is laughter. They try to force it on him.

“NO!” he says. “I don’t smoke.” More laughter.

Would I, perhaps, care to join them?

I also pass. The beers begin to flow.

The scion of the household, aged three, is brought out in his Bob the Builder orange pyjamas and forced to shake Z’s hand for a photo. It makes him cry. A stray motorcyclist appears, clad head to toe in translucent plastic raingear, giving him a slightly ghostly effect. More photos are taken.

We are informed that the road will not now be fixed until morning and we will be spending the night in Muang Lay. In other words, on the bus. Which is not a sleeper bus. Nor a coach. Nor a passenger bus. But one of those 1960s cannibalised school buses, like the chicken buses of Guatemala.

Z is complimented on his beauty. The conversation turns to me.

Am I married? Where is my husband?

“We saw him in Hanoi,” I say. “He’s in England now, working, but we’ll be seeing him in Australia, later in the year.”

The rain is falling so thickly that the view through the open door looks like the beginning of a particularly steamy shower scene. (Albeit maybe one with a specialist edge.)

I ask how near we are to Dien Bien Phu. “It is one hundred million kilometres from here,” says one of the truckers.

I laugh, and observe that with no road it might as well be. He looks at me blankly.

The young, sweet-faced waiter, who is 26 but looks about nineteen, draws a map on the back of a carton of Vinataba cigarettes. We have, in the last twelve hours, covered roughly two hundred out of three hundred kilometres.

Surreally, a glamorous woman in flawless makeup, high heels, pale nylons and black silk cheongsam with sequinned trim, hair pulled back in a sparkly barrette, steps out of the mire that passes for the road and into the caff. She is, I would say, pushing forty, and well known to the denizens of the truck stop.

She slurps at her bowl of pho. Ribaldries fly her way.

Emboldened by the hormones which her arrival has provoked, our waiter leans closer into my personal space and puts his hand on my shoulder. “You can always stay here,” he says.

Oh god! I think. Here we go again.

We are saved by the emergence of the driver’s right hand man, still in his Ho Chi Minh pith helmet and pristine white T-shirt. The road is fixed! The bus is moving!

The mood on our transportation is festive. The old lady begins to spank folk with her fan for transporting mud onto the bus, and hence her tarpaulin bed. (Z and I, who look like we’ve been mudwrestling, get it vigorously.) The driver replaces Vietnamese ballads with Lady Gaga’s The Fame and spurs his chariot to the giddy heights of, ooooh, i don’t know, 30mph or thereabouts the second he hits a stretch of tarmac.

Men are working through the night welding tall bridges over the gorge as we pass by, blowtorches casting surreal shadows on the river far below. All dreams of staying up forgotten, Z falls asleep, and so do I, awaking at the ungodly hour of 3.30am in Dien Bien Phu, with two hours to wait for our next bus.

As we embark on our three hour journey to the Lao border, 40km away, in a minibus which, even by Asian standards, is tightly packed, the flatlands of Dien Bien Phu have a kind of ghostly beauty. Farmers work with hand-ploughs and buffalo to prepare for the new crop. Women set out their baskets full of fruit and vegetables. I see a signmaker wheeling his stand to work and one man riding his bicycle while towing a water buffalo on a piece of twine.

Ploughing the land, not long after dawn. Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam.

We sleep for most of the three hours it takes us to travel forty kilometres to the border. Once past formalities and through to the Lao side of the border we are greeted by… yes, a bulldozer, preparing our path.

Junior and I have now rather had it with the bulldozers. “Can’t they just finish the bloody road, ALREADY?” he asks me.

It is 3pm by the time we reach the bus’ destination: Muang Khua. Or, more precisely, the landing stage on the wrong side of the river from Muang Khua:

Welcome to Laos! Swimwear optional.

We take a longtail across, and a pickup to the bus station. There are, of course, no more buses to Luang Nam Tha. Udomxai, a construction industry hub with a very Chinese feel to it, three or four hours away, is our best bet for a place en route with an onward connection and a place to spend the night. And so, well, here we are.

We will be doing the bulk of our travelling by boat from here on in. There too you get to see a side of nature and a slice of life you would never imagine from a plane. But the rain will be most firmly on our side.

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This little girl is six, and had been carrying her eighteen-month old little brother in a sling on her back for most of the day.

The forlorn look?

Well, it could be the weight. He’s a chunky little fellow: he probably weighs more than half what she does. Or it could be the way he’s tugging at the huge silver earrings the women and girls all wear.

It could be the impact of the Chinese melodrama on the telly she was watching through the window, nose virtually glued to the glass.

Or it could be that she’d had a hard day at work, hustling tourists to buy embroidery and bangles with the baby on her back.

Child labour in Asia comes in many forms, and in the cool, scenic highlands around Sapa, where we are now, it’s often very photogenic.

In this shot, she looks a bit more like a little girl again. She’ll be married in a decade or so, and the cycle will start again.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for hosting Photo Fridays, a collection of travel pics from around the web.

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Or, for that matter, the absolute, unalloyed luxury of starting every single day with a complete free rein.

Where shall we go today? What shall we do? What shall we see?

All, as it happens, for less than the rent or mortgage on a one-bedroom London flat.

I was self-employed, single and working from home when Z was born. On a Sunday. By Tuesday, I was back at the laptop, newborn at boob, hitting a deadline I’d hoped to get out of the way before he arrived.

Now, I’m aware that working from home is many mothers’ dream. But, like self-employment, it tends to spill. You cannot leave your work at the office, because your office is your home. When jobs for different clients collide, you work all the hours god sends, and then some.

Preparing for a holiday was a frantic scramble: endless late nights at the laptop, followed by a last-minute squash of possessions into backpack (usually sitting on it, by the end), check of passports, cards and tickets. Enough, in fact, to make you need a holiday in itself…

So… here we are. Our year out to travel the world has extended to a multi-year trip. My assumption that we would return to the London grind has been replaced with a desire for a 300-euro a month rental somewhere the boy can become bilingual in Spanish and I can work much, much less.

And what have we done with today’s time?

Well, we caught the night train from Hanoi to Lao Cai, a highland town spitting distance from the Chinese border, and picked up a bus to Sapa.

It’s a slightly surreal place, Sapa. Tiny Hmong women in dark leggings and endless scarves and minuscule Wen Xai ladies in scarlet turbans wander amid French colonial buildings, fantasy Pyreneean mansions appear amid dramatic contours clad in oriental pines, while water buffalos laze on the endless rice terraces.

We had coffee.

Breakfasted. Bought a penknife, with a compass. Chatted to a Vietnamese family at our guesthouse and two Hmong ladies in town.

And then we went for a walk, in the blissful, cloudy cool, four miles or so, to Cat Cat village down the valley, below the cloudy hills.

We looked at the wonderful landscape, the maize, young rice and paddy terraces, and the bamboo irrigation system. Played pooh sticks in an irrigation channel. Z built an archipelago out of mud, tried to catch a butterfly, and picked me a bunch of wildflowers.

And, yes, as they say on the postcards, we are having a lovely time. Thanks to Josie at Sleep is for the Weak for the writing prompt, time.

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This depicts, believe it or not, a traditional tribal tomb.

Can you imagine what the funeral was like?! I mean, seriously.

Z’s dad, who visited with us, thought it childish of me to preserve this immortal — albeit definitively (ethno)graphic — image. Despite having sniggered audibly himself.

The phrase, “Be Confucian”, came up, a handy catchall I would recommend to any parent, which S introduced after unschooling on Confucius . (Believe you me, as a parent you learn a lot more by unschooling with your child than you ever would by following the Year 4 primary syllabus.)

Anywise, we have learnt from the museum of ethnography that the tribes of Vietnam are about as Confucian as the tribes elsewhere in the region (though the ones Z and I have met have consumed their lethal rice spirit from large plastic jerry cans rather than charming ceramic jars).

Take the Han-hi. They propitiate the harvest spirits with a lengthy round of drinking games involving a seesaw and a wobbly bamboo balancoire.

Fall off. Drink. Fall off again. Repeat until you all fall down.

They have both seesaw and balancoire at the museum, outside the lovingly built traditional house, complete with granary and stables. Great fun for Z. Who, I should add, was totally sober. Although possibly not quite as fun as the 18m-high men’s house with stairs to match.

We caught a water puppet show at the museum, too. Another traditional Vietnamese entertainment which one can imagine working just beautifully performed al fresco in its original setting of a flooded paddy field, with a lot of baying, booing, gasping and rice hooch. Though, to be honest, it’s pretty cool simply in the tranquil garden of the museum, surrounded by the infinite varieties of traditional tribal houses.

The puppets tell simple morality tales, enlivened by excitements such as firework-spouting water dragons or predatory tigers climbing trees above the water, the better to bounce on cute baby ducks, in stints of about five minutes each. It’s really fun.

The puppeteers? They work waist deep in that murky water, behind the green bamboo screen, emerging for the curtain call sporting quite fabulous gold silk robes which, I couldn’t help thinking, must be an absolute bugger to wash.

Anywise. Tomorrow, or, rather, today, since it is 30-ish during the nights, and my spawn, even when not super-heated, has the irritating habit of saving up about two hours’ worth of chatter and insights until some way past bedtime then filibustering like a pork barrel politician, is our last day in Hanoi.

We are taking the night train to Lao Cai, high up in the cool (yay!) hills near the Chinese border, spending the day in Sapa, admiring the landscape and the colourful costumes the wholly assimilated tribespeople in those parts don for the crowds, then making our way to Dien Bien Phu, the scene, in 1954, of a spectacular French military collapse unparalleled since …. ooh! … 1940 or thereabouts, and for our purposes the last stop before crossing the border into Laos.

In Laos we will trek, stay with some rather less assimilated hill tribes, and possibly (roads permitting) spend a couple of days in a treehouse reached by zipwires watching the gibbons.

Hanoi has been wonderful. But, as ever, when we leave a city for the last time on this journey, I’m beginning to itemise what we haven’t done.

Here, we have managed to miss not only the Vietnamese State Circus in Lenin Park — I lost my credit card an hour before we were about to go on Sunday (DOH!), and they have no shows Monday and Tuesday (double DOH!) — but the mausoleum complex of Ho Chi Minh. Where the founding father of Vietnamese nationalism (and Communism), who specified in his will that he wanted to be cremated and his followers should not “do a Lenin” and embalm him, is preserved, in perpetuity, Vladimir Ilyich-style.

Z had rather been looking forward to this, as had I. As he remarked, before we learnt that the museum is open on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays only, “I’d like to see a human body preserved in formaldehyde… I think when I’m a grownup I will be buried in an airtight vacuum coffin so my body doesn’t rot.”

Today, I think, we will go to the Women’s Museum to learn about women soldiers.

Z, however, thinks otherwise. “A women’s museum?” he said. “Why can’t we go to a men’s museum? Or the arcade? Or the waterpark?”

I guess we’ll have to see how well my feminist educational urges stand up to the heat…

The post Putting the Graphic into Ethnographic appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Now, there are not many places on this planet where a passing nine-year-old boy would be welcomed into a factory, given the tour, and then provided with his own workstation to get to grips with incense manufacture. But Vietnam is one. And the sheer kindness of all the craftspeople we met yesterday, with nary a hard sell or tour group in sight, was truly wonderful.

We took a bike (with a driver — I’ve seen two motorbike crashes in as many days) from Hanoi into the countryside yesterday, to see conical hats and incense being made, something Z had really hoped to see back on our visit to Hue earlier in the year. We drove past bullock carts and motorbikes laden with fresh cut rice, through rural byways over carpets of golden husks drying in the sun, watching women in pajamas and conical hats cutting grown rice as others prepare the wet season, until we arrived at Chuong village.

This gentleman, a veteran of the war against the French, single-handedly revived the craft of making elaborate, traditional conical hats after he lost a limb in the war. He works with thread, bamboo, and the leaves of a type of palm tree (cured by sun-drying, soaking and sulphur) to produce eight different types of the traditional Asian headgear once so disparagingly known as coolie hats.

Meandering through the countryside in search of incense makers, we dropped in on this lady, who was making baskets.

As in most of South-East Asia, staring is completely socially acceptable in Vietnam. This has its downsides, as when one is endeavouring to answer emails only to be surrounded by a curious crowd. But, when it comes to crafts, nothing beats just being able to wander up onto someone’s front porch and sit cross-legged staring at them until it’s time to go. Particularly not when it’s someone whose hands work with the fluency and speed of many decades’ practice.

And, finally, we made it to the incense factory. Well, technically, two. In the first, a largely female workforce, assisted by some machines, were cleaning, sorting and splitting bamboo for the slender sticks which form the base of the incense. It’s a process still done by hand in many rural households at this time of year. As here, at the roadside:

At the second, the bark for incense is aged, chopped and heated. Oil is added, then the mixture is passed onto the bamboo sticks, and they are left to dry to the grey, slightly powdery joss sticks we’d recognise in the west.

Z was fascinated. Totally enthralled. And, because he was so curious about what was going on, the forewoman, a lovely middle-aged lady, set him up on a workstation with a young guy to keep an eye on him, and let him work the machines. You can watch the video here:

We have seen and done some amazing things on our journey so far: navigated down the Mekong, explored Angkor Wat and World War II wrecks, trekked the Ho Chi Minh trail, taken a junk round Halong Bay, travelled in style on the roof of a bus and met people from survivors of the Cambodian genocide to Filipino ladyboys. For Z, though, who like many children loves the processes by which things are made, making his own incense is one of the highlights of our trip.

Unexpected Pleasures

Hue, with a Y

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]]> https://www.escapeartistes.com/2010/06/08/making-incense-conical-hats-baskets-crafts-north-vietnam-travel-family-children-kids-rtw-factory/feed/ 4 https://www.escapeartistes.com/2010/06/07/shopping-hanoi-vietnam-art-stores-flower-stores-shops-florists-bicycles-pencil-sharpeners/ https://www.escapeartistes.com/2010/06/07/shopping-hanoi-vietnam-art-stores-flower-stores-shops-florists-bicycles-pencil-sharpeners/#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:04:27 +0000 http://travelswithanineyearold.com/?p=1274 It was S’s (the nine-year-old’s father’s) last day with us today. And we spent it in Hanoi. The bulk of it, in fact… drum roll…...

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]]> It was S’s (the nine-year-old’s father’s) last day with us today. And we spent it in Hanoi. The bulk of it, in fact… drum roll… shopping for a… cymbal clash… pencil sharpener.

Now, when it comes to travel, I’m a great believer in the power of mooching. Sort of ambling around. Not doing very much. Gawping a little. Making friends with people you meet. Slowing way, way down. And seeing life around you as it is lived, not as it is composed for a tourist postcard.

But it’s good to have a mission. And a mundane mission, such as a quest for a pencil sharpener, a good kindergarten table spring roll joint, the perfect souvenir lighter for your pocket pyromaniac or all of the above, makes for a better walking tour of the city than any number of tour guides could provide. It brings you straight up against how alien life is, in its everyday mundanity, and takes you on a lazy tour of a great city’s back alleys and byways.

Because, believe you me, buying a pencil sharpener is a hell of a lot harder and infinitely more enlightening than scoring opium, silk dressing gowns or lacquer vases. And, yes, since you ask, I am regretting allowing Z his choice of lighter.

Now, I don’t have a problem with Z’s pyromania per se. As far as I’m concerned, the desire to set light to things and see if and how they burn is a natural part of growing up. And, when it comes to lighters, as with books, pens, paper, toothbrush and laptop, I’d frankly much rather he had his own.

He has burnt himself precisely once. And now he knows that melting plastic really, really hurts, he approaches the stimulating task of fusing plastic straws with a great deal more caution than parental warnings could ever have engendered.

When it comes to parenting, my default is to say yes unless there’s a good reason to say no. Money, like computer time, is rationed. But Z has been hoarding his pocket money for the last five weeks and shopping for the perfect lighter for rather longer than that. So when he set his heart on a lighter not only shaped like a gun but also with a built-in laser pointer, and haggled with the vendor to get it in his budget, his father and I were, like, totally fine with that.

Here he is. Deep in discussion with the vendor.

On the other hand…

I smoke. S doesn’t. Our son owns a lighter. It is shaped like a gun. Removing a cigarette from the packet has never been so fraught with danger…

The built-in laser pointer added an extra-special magic to our day after his dad’s return to cooler climes. Particularly once he realised that the gecko on the balcony across the alley would track the bright red light as if it were a bug. (Final score? Gecko one. Z nil.)

But back to the pencil sharpener…

It’s hard to wander Hanoi without encountering exotica. The walls of scooters hooting lethally towards each other then merging in mysterious ways. The gilded Chinese temples, the vendors selling seven different varieties of live snails, the cramped rabbits, flip-flopping fish and tired bonsai in the marketplace.

The old ladies in their limpet hats flogging fresh vegetables from rattan baskets on a yoke, the incense stores and fireworks stands, the tourist silk ‘n’ lacquer ‘n’ Ho Chi Minh T-shirt emporia, the hustlers wearing fake sunglasses and lighters on a tray around their necks like 50s cigarette girls, and the massed aerobics in the city parks.

In Vietnam, as in medieval Europe, stores of a similar (or identical) nature tend to cluster together. There is an entire corner in Hanoi devoted to stove extractors of various kinds. Whole streetfronts lined with dried medicinal fruits…

Yards of knitting stores, with bobble hats in funky wool, bamboo needles cheap as chips, and great perspex display cases crammed with fluffy nylon yarns.

No sewing needles, though. That would be too easy. For those (and safety pins), which were also on my shopping list today, you need a trimmings store. The pavement outside it will look a bit like this:

Yet all these tiny, individual stores survive. Thrive, even. Supporting staffs of three or four, with barely room in the cramped little box of a shop to pour tea from the communal thermos, let alone serve customers, should any squeeze their way along the pavement, their capitalist ethos burning strong as it always did in communist Vietnam.

It’s refreshing. In the West, we knock out low value goods like needles, thread, pencils, safety pins and sellotape in corner shops, 24 hour stores, or giant supermarts. The few specialist shops that survive, like traditional haberdashers, sell the whole spectrum from cloth to thread to yarn and knitting needles. A spectrum which, in Hanoi, would take up four or five individual stores on four or five individual streets.

That is, with the exception of pencil sharpeners, which are few and far between. And, yes, I know you can use a knife… And, on reflection, I imagine almost all Vietnamese do.

I’d done a previous pencil sharpener mission in Haiphong, where we had three hours to kill between the slow boat and the train, and had kept a weather eye out for sharpeners on Cat Ba island, too. I found amazing dragon sculptures, a gorgeous high-spec calligraphy store (which looked, from across a street filled with surging storms of scooters, very much like somewhere selling pretty notelets, and therefore, surely, pencils too), a theme park, fine fruit and some gorgeous IndoChinese alleyways. But no pencils. Or sharpeners for that matter.

But today there was an urgency. S returned to the UK today. Bringing presents (lacquer and Ho Chi Minh T-shirt, since you ask) and, more importantly, birthday cards to two very important people. Cards which Z would not create without sharp crayons.

I have to say that once S armed himself with a blunted colouring pencil to insert obscenely twixt forefinger and thumb — miming comes in bloody handy, all over South-East Asia — I assumed our objective was achieved.

But nobody, it appeared, of all the folk we asked, knew where one was to be found. They understood what we were asking for. But had nary a clue where one was to be had.

Because it’s not like in the West. Where needles, thread, and pencil sharpeners are cheap goods, that get lost, or thrown away, and replaced on a whim. They are items, in their own right, which merit a journey to their own special store.

We passed the bonsai trees. The incense stores. The fireworks shops. Walked past children’s clothes alley and down plastic toy street, until we found a man who pointed us to this place. You see, once you know what you’re looking for, it’s easy. They had faded boxes full of drawing pencils, too.

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]]> https://www.escapeartistes.com/2010/06/07/shopping-hanoi-vietnam-art-stores-flower-stores-shops-florists-bicycles-pencil-sharpeners/feed/ 3 https://www.escapeartistes.com/2010/06/05/cornucopia-dinner-friday/ https://www.escapeartistes.com/2010/06/05/cornucopia-dinner-friday/#comments Sat, 05 Jun 2010 19:59:16 +0000 http://travelswithanineyearold.com/?p=1237 This is the fruit stall in the alleyway next to our guesthouse, in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Friday evening. It’s just an ordinary store. Nothing fancy....

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]]> This is the fruit stall in the alleyway next to our guesthouse, in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Friday evening. It’s just an ordinary store. Nothing fancy. No posher than the laundry, the menders, the barbers, the old lady who wheels her cart of lurid plastic sandals here every morning and home every night, or the five separate cottage industries selling street-fried spring rolls side by side in the cross-alley.

Yet these ladies don’t just sell the obvious — melons, watermelons, bananas, apples, oranges, limes, fresh mango, eggs. They’ve got rambutans, litchis so fresh they still have their leaves on, passion fruit the size of your fist (one dollar a kilo), those succulent sour plums you dip in salt and chilli, custard apples, great cannonballs of pomelos, bigger than a man’s head.

Oh, and mangosteens. The succulent, tough-shelled, very perishable fruit known as the Queen of Fruit. In the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria offered a reward to anyone who could manage to bring her a ripe mangosteen to try.

Those were the days before airfreight, of course, so nobody claimed the reward. And Queen Victoria died unfulfilled. Did she miss out!

The leathery shell of a mangosteen doesn’t look like much, but the white segments of fruit nestling within the scarlet lining once you slice it open are a revelation. The flesh tastes like a tangy, sherbety, turbo-charged litchi, with intense notes of peach, pineapple and strawberry. And it’s really fun to eat.

Not as much fun, however, as rambutans, the little pink and green hairy fellas which look like an alien lifeform just invaded (even more so when you pop open their shell to squeeze out the juicy, translucent fruit within).

Pomelo is another amazing fruit. It’s a huge, green, pear-shaped citrus, intensely aromatic, with enormously thick pith. Once you’ve hacked your way through the outer covering, the segments are jam-packed with huge, dry tendrils of juicy flesh (AKA “bottles” in the juice-making trade):

The taste? Well, imagine grapefruit meeting orange, but not too sharply, with the aromaticism of lime but none of the sourness.

The fruit binge functioned as little more than a starter to Friday dinner. We made our way through the Hanoi hubbub of scooter jams, pavement diners on kindergarten tables, girls peddling flowers from bicycles, chaps hawking dodgy DVDs, fake watch vendors, honking horns, flashing neon, and the like out to what we call Food Alley, Cam Chi.

Here seafood awaits its fate in fishtanks, women scrub pots on the street, raw chickens and plates of clams serve as streetside advertising displays, and the scooters bip-bip steadily off Hang Bong and down the lane while folk dine at plastic tables from plastic chairs, great vats of hotpot bubble on the table burners and, in the corner coffeeshop, resting motorbike taxi drivers enjoy third-rate action movies on flatscreen HBO.

It was, in fact, the hotpot that we were there for. A gigantic, bottomless soup that you create among yourselves at table, hotpot provides a way of eating that could have all the complexity of the tea ceremony if you knew how to negotiate it.

You start with a big plate of meat, fish, shellfish, squid and innards of various sorts. A plastic box of noodles. Another plastic box with greens. And a great big pot of broth, packed with taro, mushrooms, tofu skin, tomato, pineapple and more, bubbling away on the burner.

When the broth’s ready, you add your favoured components — plus some for the pot — as and when, and wait for them to cook to perfection, stirring a little as you go. Succulent prawns… Tofu slabs… Those lovely wide, flat ribbon noodles they do so well in North Vietnam. The fantastic clams they have all over the country. Tender kidney. Fresh squid. Water spinach. Thin slices of lotus stem…

Then you dip in with chopsticks, a ladle or a strainer, fish out your favoured bits and dig in. The mildly sour soup broth gets stronger and more flavoursome the further you go in. It’s a deliciously communal way to eat. Like a fondue. Only more varied. More flavoursome. More communal. Just better, in fact.

Thanks to Delicious Baby for hosting Photo Fridays.

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]]> https://www.escapeartistes.com/2010/06/05/cornucopia-dinner-friday/feed/ 2 https://www.escapeartistes.com/2010/06/04/single_parent_family_rtw_travel_children_kids/ https://www.escapeartistes.com/2010/06/04/single_parent_family_rtw_travel_children_kids/#comments Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:45:15 +0000 http://travelswithanineyearold.com/?p=1232 “Madam,” said the chap on the scooter, eyeing the motorbike erratically parked some distance from the wrong hire shop (and, indeed, the pavement) with a...

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]]> “Madam,” said the chap on the scooter, eyeing the motorbike erratically parked some distance from the wrong hire shop (and, indeed, the pavement) with a sort of bemused, yet ineffably polite contempt, “Your husband has asked me to come and find you…”

Now, I guess this sort of “women drivers, pshaw!” shtick happens all the time to married women. And, much though it offends my feminist sensibilities to admit it, I am, sadly, pretty much your stereotypical woman driver, with absolutely zero sense of direction to boot.

However…

Given that neither Z’s father nor I have ever been married, and certainly not to each other, given, in fact, that we’d known each other for about two seconds when we conceived the boy, the phrase “your husband” adds a sort of extra special level to the everyday vehicular humiliation I am familiar with as a regular patron of emergency callout services in the UK.

You know. “Well, I don’t think there’s a mechanical fault. I’m pretty sure it’s not starting because I forgot to switch my lights off again,” “Is that the AA? Yes, I’m afraid I’ve locked my keys in the car,” “Excuse me, Mr. Traffic Warden. Do you know what this red light means? It went on and told me I should pull over, then steam started coming out of the engine and now the car seems to have sprung a leak…”.

S has been with us for the last fortnight, and the last week has been pretty much full of “your husband this”ing and “your wife that”ing. Basically, everyone on Cat Ba island made the entirely natural assumption that the giant Western parents of the giant Western child who were sharing the family beach hut and the laundry, chucking their offspring around the sea, hiring junks, etc, were, well, married.

This has probably been weirder for S than for me. I have, after all, been travelling for over four months, and fielding queries about my husband’s whereabouts with reference to his throughout that time, while, as a non-resident parent who looks younger than he is, the default social assumption is that he is free of bonds either parental or marital.

Z, as ever, has taken it all in his stride. We have always spent time together as a family – we’ve spent Christmas together, go to the cinema together, to picnics together, etc. — so it’s not the first time, for example, that Z has walked with one hand in each of his parents’ hands.

It is, however, possibly the first time he has observed that a deserted hilltop would be a good place for people (in general, naturally, certainly not his parents, oh no) to “snog”…

All in all, the experience has tended slightly to the surreal. And that’s without the added bad-Hollywood-romcom-weirdness of spending the night on a junk in one of the world’s most dazzling environments without, well…, without getting laid. Or the prospect thereof, for that matter.

So there we were in a restaurant, sat by the fishtanks watching my dinner grappling with its blue nylon string bonds and speculating how long the parrotfish had for the world, while looking out over the fish farms, sampans and neon-clad floating restaurants of Cat Ba port.

The owner pops over, and we are having the usual conversation about how old Z is, how many brothers and sisters he has (single-child families are a real novelty all over Asia), when the guy enquires, “Only the one? You don’t want more?”

S and I look at each other. “I don’t know, darling,” I say brightly, channeling a spritely 50s housewife, still on the bennies but due a Valium to take the edge off it just as soon as she gets through with vacuuming the soft furnishings. “What do you think?”

“Well,” he says, solemnly. “We’d like a little girl, of course. But it’s difficult to find the time. You see,” he continues, warming to his theme, “I’m very caught up in my career…”

After the chap leaves, Z asks, “Why don’t you just tell him the truth?”

“It’s complicated to explain,” I say. “It’s just like we talked about when people ask me where my husband is, and I answer with reference to your dad.”

“But why don’t you just say, ‘She’s NOT my wife!’ and explain what you mean,” he asks his dad, using the intonation he uses when correcting vocabularily-challenged strangers with the stern admonition, “I am NOT a baby!”

I am trying to think of a delicate way to phrase an explanation when S spares me the trouble. “Like, ‘She’s not my wife, she’s the recipient of my sperm?’” he says.

“Exactly what I was thinking!” our son exclaims approvingly.

I am simultaneously pleased that Z has fully processed the story of his origins – he’s been told since he could talk that he was the best surprise either of us ever had – and frustrated that I didn’t formulate the phrase first.

Unfairly, perhaps, given that I had been thinking along the same lines, I am also mildly cross with both of them for… well, I’m still not sure if it was precisely rude but if I’d said the gendered equivalent it would have been offensive in the extreme.

Anyway, it has been odd. We have genuinely had some amazing times. But the husband schtick has been very, very odd.

There are roles you default into as co-parents. I find myself saying things like, “I’m not sure, why don’t you ask your father?” “Your dad and I have both told you that you can’t jump off the kayak because of the jellyfish. Now, get back in the boat AT ONCE.”…

S carries things for me. Which is weird for me. When he gets a sinus headache, I go into maternal fussing mode, which goes beyond weird to virtually doing his head in, without the comic impact of Z rushing in with a thermometer and endeavouring to insert it under his tongue.

And when I am on the wrong end of a quite phenomenally discomfiting seduction attempt from a chap at the beach huts who barely comes up to my shoulder and looks young enough to be my son – long story – the phrase I find myself squeaking piteously is: “But my husband! My husband! I need to go and find my husband!”

More weirdly still, I do go and find him.

Anyway. We’re back in Hanoi. In separate bedrooms again. And, lordie, did THAT take some explanation when S first arrived at the guesthouse…

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