Hanoi (Making a Buerk of myself)

Situated in the far north of Vietnam, like some crazy uncle shoved up in the loft conversion, Hanoi is one of the most enjoyable cities I have ever visited.

Life here is so rich, so thick it is almost mesmerising. Wandering the narrow streets of the city’s Old Quarter, taking in the scenes all around you is like drinking the coffee the locals lace with condensed milk: it is so thick, so strong and delicious you can only digest a little at time.

Drink in too much and you quickly suffer from sensory overload, your brain reeling from trying to process a million beguiling sights, bewitching smells, bewildering sounds.

In Hanoi I could walk the streets for days, seeking out my fellow human beings, peeking into their lives. A Western voyeur in an another dimension, where the streets hum with humanity and life seems so much more vivid than that back home.

Tiny shop fronts heave with goods, piled up to the rafters, bearing down on their owners. Often you can discern the shopkeeper, subsumed within a mountain of their goods, dozing against a rice sack or half-buried under an avalanche of boxes.

Many streets specialise in one particular type of product. This street sells only metal articles, that one purely toys. One shop I came across seemed only to vend sellotape.

We visited street markets in backstreets, where stall keepers sat outside Chinese-style temples and faded French colonial buildings. We saw tubs of crabs, string bags full of crawling toads and ducks hanging from hooks, glazed and ready to eat.

And all around us there were the buzz of commerce and the excited chatter of the street. People crouching on tiny plastic chairs around noodle stalls, or gathering under banyan trees and ragged awnings, where the sunlight plays through in thin shafts as they deal out a deck of cards.

Cockerels strut along the pavement, kids play keepy-uppy with colourful shuttlecocks and scrawny boys roam the streets selling faux GI zippo lighters, emblazoned with US army slang.

An old woman gnaws on a stick of sugarcane whilst other similar sinewy women plough the streets carrying bamboo shoulder poles, their baskets stuffed with tropical fruits: pineapples, persimmons and oranges, jackfruit, lycees and star fruit.

My favourite are the banana ladies, offering two varieties of banana, starchy ones in one basket, the sweeter ones in the other. All wear pointy straw hats, all bounce merrily along, swaying with their load as they tout for business.

You get the impression that this is life as it has been in Hanoi for hundreds of years. It’s survived war with the Chinese, the French and the Americans, the latter of whom managed to park a huge B52 bomber in one of the city’s ponds.

But unlike in Britain there is nothing nostalgic about this life: this is raw, hard-edged commerce and for many life is tough. Ever on the lookout for a new way to make money the Vietnamese eagerly embrace the modern.

Alongside traditional lacquerware and lanterns you can buy the latest knocked-off DVD - the new Bond Film, Quantum of Solace, appearing on the streets here well before it graced cinema screens.

The roads pulse with traffic: mopeds zip along, their horns quacking like indignant Donald Ducks; cyclos crawl past, their driver eyeing you up for trade; carts groan under staggering loads, their owners blithely steering them through the maelstrom.

Even motorbikes are pressed into freight duties, piled up with mountains of boxes, weighted down with heavy appliances, balancing ladders, bamboo poles or metal rods .

Pressed into every use imaginable the omnipresent moped has taken over the streets, spilling out onto pavements, blocking access to all. We had to climb over a squadron of them, backpacks and all, simply to get to our hotel.

Faced with an ambulatory meltdown, the authorities have been forced to act, passing a new bylaw banning the two-wheelers from blocking the walkways. Clearly unworkable, this leads to comical scenes whenever a police car hoves into view up the street as moped owners dash frantically to their trusty steeds, avoiding the long arm of the law.

Even here, in this bustling urban environment, above the noise, we often heard birdsong. It reaches out across the tiny lanes, penetrates across the lines of traffic, lighting your load and bringing a smile to your face.

Gazing up at some of these tiny choristers in their ornate cages, dangling outside a shopfront I was enthusiastically greeted by their owner, a lively chap who beckoned me inside and proceeded to show me his collection of finches.

They turned out to be a prize-winning collection, successfully entered into singing contests with other birds. The man proudly showed me his finest songster and the many pennants and rosettes it had won.

His next contest came in two days: I left him to continue his preparations.

Further down the street I spotted a creature of a more familiar hue - none other than former newsreader, Michael Buerk.

Keen to secure a photo with the legendary anchor man I interrupted his holiday and introduced myself. Lara (with camera) was utterly embarrassed and sensibly retreated to the Ladies, leaving Fewins to make a fool of himself.

“We’re travelling round the world!” I blurted to the man with the famous wink, “Without flying!”.

“Good luck with your trip” he said smoothly, before diving for the safety of his tour bus. Well it was hardly as newsworthy as an African famine was it. It wouldn’t even make The Moral Maze.

Yet I remained undeterred - who needs a photo when you’ve got an endorsement like that? I’ll have to insert it at the top of our homepage: “World in Slow Motion - as endorsed by TV’s Michael Buerk!”.

Hectic street life, Michael Buerk, golly I needed a drink after that. And what else than a Bia Hoi - ’fresh beer‘ brewed locally and served up on the street, all yours for 20p.

Relax, recline on a tiny plastic playgroup chair askew the broken pavement, and try and avoid falling into the path of the traffic just inches from your elbow.

Draining the dregs from the bottom of the glass a flash of inspiration hit me. Perhaps Hanoi’s more like the local brew than a coffee: cheap, refreshing and just a little bit rough.

And unlike the coffee you’ll be wanting a refill.

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Hue to Hanoi: letting the train take the strain?

Tired of the tourist soap, in Hue we elected to tackle the next leg of our route by train. We wanted to see a bit of Vietnam other than the tourist fleshpots, and encounter local people rather than Westerners.

Perhaps travelling by train would give us more of a chance of doing this.

We were looking forward to getting back onto the rails again, rather than onto yet another bone-rattling, leg-twisting, ironically-named ‘sleeper bus’.

Trains have always seemed to have more soul about them; fun, friendly, more of an adventure.

The photojournalist Tim Page, who’s rattled along a few Vietnamese railways in his time, puts

this better than me:

"Train travel allows the mind to wander, the eyes not really focusing on the passing countryside, the heady clackety rhythm becoming white noise, a mere sound tapestry to meditate upon."

"On a train you actually have a sense of getting somewhere, denied the traveller sealed in an aluminium tube zooming across the sky.

"There is an intimacy with your fellow voyager, a shared sense of the adventure rather than the common fear of being five miles high in the inexplicable."

So the Saigon - Hanoi train it was. Often termed the ‘reunification express’, the entire journey takes about thirty hours between the two great cities. Former opponents, now united.

Hue’s French-style train station (the ‘Ga Hue’) is a modest-sized building. Its pink paint is peeling off, leaving the impression the last person to paint it came from Le Havre rather than Hue.

Inside the small dusty waiting room, we occupied an entire row of flimsy plastic seats, our enormous bags dwarfing the slender locals hemmed in around them.

I poked my head around the door to glance at the platform: it was uncomfortably quiet, hardly a soul moved, let alone a train.

The scene looked more like one from my childhood bedroom - two platforms with low awnings faced each other across diminutive train tracks, barely lower than the platforms themselves. It was almost like revisiting my boyhood.

Did this Hornby Railways outfit really run all the way up to Hanoi?

Vietnam Railways is hardly enormous. Unlike say their Chinese neighbours, the Vietnamese, the 13th most populous nation on earth, do not enjoy a great spider web of a rail network. Indeed it’s a minor miracle that there’s a railway at all.

It runs the full length of this long land, winding its way along the coast, hemmed in by the high land to the west, battered by typhoons from the east.

During thirty years of war the line experienced more than its fair share of destruction, attracting the unwanted attentions of from Viet Cong guerillas on one side and American B52s on the other.

And even now it still can find itself under attack, running the gauntlet - in some provinces - of unfriendly locals, usually children, who like to let off steam by lobbing the odd rock or two at carriages.

Yet still it runs on, repaired and patched up, a symbol of the dogged determination of the Vietnamese people.

Back in the waiting room this determination was much in demand, as the minutes ticked by and the time dragged well past our designated departure time. Still no train.

The locals seemed unconcerned, dozing in the seats, nonchalantly sipping green tea and gazing at the traffic outside.
Finally, 50 minutes later it was action stations: a guard stirred, a tinny loudspeaker croaked out some kind of announcement and we were allowed onto the platform.

People plus baggage began shuffling onto the platform. Hardly a great swarm of people like you’d have to contend with in China, more a trickle of the unhurried.

A group of men crouched down on the platform, lay a battered old briefcase on its side and immediately started playing cards. They fingered their dirty old dong notes whilst others crowded around, watching the gamblers.

A young couple strolled up and settled down on the bench next to us, resuming the cooing they had been so rudely interrupted from back in the waiting room.

And still no train.

I began to wonder what it could be that was causing such a severe delay. Mexican bandits? The wrong type of snow? Richard Branson?

Finally, an hour later than scheduled, the noise level seemed to pick up, passengers stirred and, to much whistling both from its driver and the sundry guards on the platform, a train appeared, its headlights piercing through the descending gloom.

The dusty green carriages hauled up in front of us, the grimy windows obscuring the interior. We quickly boarded, hauling our bulky loads through the narrow corridors as the rabble pressed up eagerly behind us.

Peering into our cabin we found it already occupied: a large family, big enough to fill a small village stared back at us, their grubby kids sprawled all over the beds. Cue frantic hand signals and pointing at beds and tickets before finally the guard came along and turfed these stubborn train gypsies out.

Although ‘soft sleeper’, our cabin didn’t quite live up to our expectations: it held six beds rather than four, crammed in so that each bed had about two and half foot of space between it and the one above. Grimacing as I adopted a contortionist pose I squeezed my slim frame into a bunk at the top, hauling my pack up behind me.

We’d heard many scare stories about theft on such trains and I’d come prepared, squashing my bags into the tiny cubby hole over the door and securing them up with the bike chain I procured back in a Beijing market.

The chain‘s oily odour - one of Lara’s constant sources of complaint - added to the heavy fug of our narrow confines.

The bare strip lighting, the only light which worked, bore into my retinas and bounced off the soviet-style décor - a kind of faded bluey-green paint, reminiscent of the old trains I once travelled in Eastern Europe.

There was a jolt, and we started moving: ten hours through the night to the capital.

Our companions turned out to be the cooing young couple from the platform.

We held the usual confused conversation with them that we’d had with all fellow passengers since leaving Europe.

Courtesy of Lara’s point-it book and my natural flair for charades we covered marital status, family and occupation before moving on to the details of our time in Vietnam and our trip as a whole, with the aid of my much-used Michelin map of the world.

We moved on in the dark, crossing the former DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) around the Ben Hai river, lying on the 17th parallel - the dividing line when the North and South fought each other.

I felt the call of nature and sought out a suitable facility. A brown swamp sloshed around the bowl, splashing over the edge onto the floor with every jolt of the train. I tried another: locked. And another: also locked.

I sought out the guard, in his tiny broom cupboard of a cabin and persuaded him to open the one remaining, semi-useable fortress of solitude. No water - I silently thanked the ex-work colleague, a cleanliness obsessive, who had furnished me with handcleaning gel before leaving .

Back in the cabin more passengers joined us at Dong Hai; our lovebirds left us at Vinh, and through it all we fitfully slumbered, rocked gently to sleep by the motion, suddenly woken by a clang or a bang.

A short night, abrupt ended at 5.30am. Raised voices, doors slamming, a knock at our door: we’d arrived. Hanoi.

Alighting on a deserted platform I rubbed my eyes and pulled on my fleece in the cold morning air. The light was just seeping into the sky, revealing the faded yellow hue of the station, another French-style edifice.

I may have been half-asleep but there was no let-up from the touts. A particularly merciless posse awaited us in the station forecourt.Taxi drivers and cyclos, baguette vendors and orange sellers, the descended on us like crows on a sheep's carcass, tugging at our sleeves and searching for our wallets .

Their patter was well-worn: the same old tricks, the same old questions. Again and again.

‘Hey where are going?’, ‘Ello moto?’ (Are these people moonlighting for Motorola?).

In my dazed condition I felt like giving up, chucking a grubby wad of Dong in the air and making a run for it as the mob fought behind us, scrabbling in the dirt for the notes falling like autumn leaves onto the tarmac.

I needed a bed and a wash. I needed some tourist soap.

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