I’m woken by the loud and endless beeping of horns. I walk through Hanoi, the sky a curtain of vapor. Rain spits down on me. It collects on the canopies above shops and cafes, cascading over the sides into buckets along the pavement and into basins on the curb where restaurant and café owners wash their dishes.
I am stopped short by a huge cauldron on the side of the street. Inside, white soapy looking liquid froths and bubbles. A woman serves it to people in bowls. I ask for some. I sit down on a tiny chair and she serves me a big bowl of it with what looks like stringy meat and crispy fried bread on top. It costs 25,000 dong. About 82p.
It tastes like porridge, except it’s not a creamy porridge or a watery porridge, it’s foamier, jelly-like and tastes like it has gravy mixed into it. I can’t tell what the meat is, but the whole thing is delicious. The air is moist and warm and the gravy-porridge is boiling hot. The rain bounces off my cap as I sit on the side of the road and eat my meal.
I keep going. I pass plucked chickens with their heads still attached. I tiptoe across the road – the only possible way there is to cross – praying I’m not suddenly impaled by a motorbike. There are motorbikes going in multiple directions in the same lane. What side of the road are people supposed to be driving on? There doesn’t seem to be any rules.
There are roads rich with coffee shops, the owners begging me to come inside and sit down – trying to lead me by the hand. Coffee shops blaring rave music, others which play Cold Play and Madonna.
I walk on through the jungle of a city and the mist and vapor appears to thicken, it conceals tall palm trees, turning them into enormous shadows which tower over buildings in the mist. I make my way to the Mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh. The final resting place of the communist hero of the Vietnam war. The guy who helped kick the French out of Indochina. But the Mausoleum appears closed; there’s no way to get in, and I’m walking around in the fog and the mist and the gargantuan palm tree shadows.
I find an alleyway. I go down it. Eager for some respite from the relentless roads and clogged sidewalks. I’m about halfway down when I hear motors behind me. A whole line of motorbikes have entered the alley. It didn’t occur to me that even this narrow little passage between buildings would serve as a lane for traffic. I stick myself against the wall as they go by. But the procession is endless. And then they come from the opposite direction as well, tooting at and swerving round each other. There’s no room in this alley for three different parties. Whenever there’s a chance, I hurry further towards the light at the end of the tunnel. But to my dismay, once I reach it I realise I’m only at a crossroads. The alleyway is an endless network of interconnected backstreets, and getting through them is like trying to edge your way along a window ledge on a skyscraper.
When I finally get out of the interconnecting back passages, I find a lake in the middle of the city. Beer and coffee shops line the circumference with long wooden benches. I get a glass of beer for 15,000 dong (about 40p).
Hanoi is as colourful as it is grey, mysterious as it is chaotic. An ancient metropolis with many winding streets that look like they’ve glitched with a forest; rows of unusual and distinctive trees dot the sidewalks, making it feel like you’re walking through part jungle part town. A jungle-town filled with the smells of grilled meat, raw meat, steam from onion and coriander soups and swamps of mushy white noodles.
I link up with the Romans in the evening. They’ve decided they want to stay in Hanoi for a bit longer. This weather doesn’t exactly make one want to rush to the beach.
Tiberius kicks off after being ordered to pay 360,000 dong for some grotesque garlic chicken and egg fried rice. Almost 13 pounds. A true travesty. Nowhere else was charging anything near as high. But the owners of the restaurant aren’t backing down. Soon there are multiple angry Vietnamese surrounding us and shouting at us, waving massive menus in our faces, and Tiberius is eventually forced to pay up. It was all quite embarrassing really.
Today was a day of exploration, but it didn’t feel like I was exploring at all. Most of the time I felt lost. Nothing has been gleaned. Nothing distinguished or learned. We have not moved forwards. I have neither stayed with the Romans nor broken away from them. They have decided to stay a couple days longer in Hanoi but beyond that do not know what they are doing. Tiberius feels incredibly bitter about being scammed. His walls have gone back up. He feels distrustful. We have a new hotel almost no different from our last. Although, thankfully we now no longer have to deal with a heap of broken glass on the shower floor.
I felt sluggish and not like to sleep. I suddenly knew what I had to do. It was getting incredibly late and the roads were starting to quieten. I dumped all my bags in the hotel room, then departed in nothing but shorts, shoes and a top. In the foggy night, the neon lights of the buildings and the traffic blurred into a colourful mist, the sky was a reddish-blackening bruise, and I went running into the midst of Hanoi city…
