Hanoi in the rain

We stayed four or five days in Hanoi which was a couple more than we wanted but an unseasonal typhoon had devastated central Vietnam and Hanoi was receiving the tailend of it. There was no point in going to Halong Bay until the rain lifted so we bought Vietnamese raincoats and wandered round Hanoi. Vietnamese polythene raincoats are great, btw - they are large enough to fit over your motorbike, plus most of your luggage, and in extremis a second person. Because of this, they are not nearly as sweaty as you might think. Lots of air circulates.

01 - Ho's funeral casket

Being us, we did a tour of all the Communist sites first off, although apparently November is the month designated for polishing Ho's body and dusting the brasswork so most of them were closed. The Army Museum and the Revolutionary Museums were both open and covered much the same ground. Surprisingly, both museums put the boot in to the French far more than the Americans - although of course the North Vietnamese never delivered a knock-out blow to the Americans whilst there are a myriad of different ways in which the triumph of Dien Bien Phu can be re-enacted. And are.

Actually, Dien Bien Phu is pretty much the quintessential French battle. The French decided, for no outstandingly obvious military reason, to Make A Stand at Dien Bien Phu, a remote valley near Laos which they could only supply by air, built a series of defensive garrisons which they named after the commander's mistresses (Gabrielle, Isabelle, etc.), sent a cable home saying "Don't panic! We cannot possibly lose!" and were promptly annilihated by the Vietnamese, at which point, the author of the prediction, being an honourable gentleman, blew his brains out. And that was the end of the First Indochinese War.

By this time, the Americans were in it up to their armpits, backing a succession of South Vietnamese leaders so corrupt and incompetent they make the Palestinian leadership look like geniuses. How many mistakes did the US make in Vietnam? I dunno, but the $60m mistake was letting the French back into their colonies in 1945 (a policy which was considered, but no-one could be bothered to have the row with de Gaulle).

We also dabbled our toes in Vietnamese culture, attending a performance at the Water Puppet Theatre, and then a night of Vietnamese folk music and dance at the opera house (mainly because we wanted to see inside the opera house). The Water Puppet thing involves puppets which dance around in a tank of water, operated by sticks under the surface of the water. There are a series of (mostly watery) vignettes, the best of which included dragons water-fighting and a love scene between two chickens (don't ask). It was OK, but confirmed in me the belief that puppet shows are for children. (To be fair, children would have loved it).

As for the Vietnamese folk evening, where to start? Well, it began with the man from the Ministy of Construction welcoming most of the audience who were the pressganged delegates of an international building conference. Most of the singers appeared to be warming up for the day when Vietnam is let into the Eurovision song contest. Most of the dances involved six women, grinning like synchronised swimmers and waving their hands mechanically in a distinctly unsynchronised way. The highlight was a dance about a Vietnamese peasant collecting the rice harvest, not a subject I had previously thought leant itself to camp. I was wrong: the women in the role of chorus came on stage waving sheaves of rice (some of which they accidentally dropped) and grinning like air stewdardesses and then on pranced a male dancer dressed in brown sequinned peasant pyjamas to act out the main part. Paul and I had to work so hard to stop laughing that we stopped finding any of it funny. A man came on with what looked like a bag of golf clubs, which turned out to be 8 different wind instruments all made of bamboo and he proceeded to demonstrate them in turn. More Eurovision song contest contestants appeared and gave it some welly. The clock appeared to stop moving. Verdict from your fearless critic? If folk art was any good it would just be called art.

The best thing about Hanoi was just wondering around the streets, people-watching. The second best thing was buying four pairs of designer glasses (one pair of ordinary glasses, one pair of prescription sunglasses each) for a mere 5.5 million dong (that's a bargain to you and me).

The food was a bit of a let down, although it has to be said that India (for those who could eat it), Thailand, Cambodia and Laos are all outstandingly good places to eat. North Vietnamese food is closer to Chinese than the South Vietnamese food we get at home. The most ubiquitous dish is pho and there is a pho stand on every block with dozens of Vietnamese sitting on tiny blue plastic chairs stuffing their faces. Pho is noodle soup: the cook has a big bowl of broth on the boil and when you order she adds noodles, slivers of meat, green vegetables and herbs. If it's any good, you then get chilli sauce and lime juice to season. It can be excellent and it can be rancid: it depends entirely on the quality of the stock. There is no point in ordering pho in a restaurant unless you want to pay for the privilege of not sitting in the rain as the restaurant owner will simply run outside and buy a bowl of pho from the nearest pho stand and charge you double.

Once the rain had lifted we went on a two-day tour to Halong Bay. Halong Bay, pirates' paradise in the Gulf of Tonkin, is an enormous area dotted with the most staggering limestone karps. The scale of it blew us away. Since there are few places to land most people go on tourist junks, which I must say are surprisingly luxurious. The boat pottered around, and we had a go at kayaking and on the second day visited an entirely closed lagoon, accessible only at low tide through a tunnel. All very picture postcard perfect.

On the boat with us were a couple of young second generation Vietnamese-Americans (they spoke Vietnamese too), visiting the grandparents in Saigon and then doing a tour up country. You would think, woud you not, that it would be impossible for such people not to have something interesting to say on the subject of Vietnam? And you would be wrong. They were nice, pleasant, well-brought-up blanks, which just goes to show that for all the blah blah blah about the broadening effects of travel it's not where you take your body but what you do with your mind that counts.