There isn’t much about the Narita Airport that we don’t know, after six hours of wandering around yesterday. Our JAL plane to Hanoi left on time after a bumpy beginning the five hour flight smoothed out but our promised ride to the Golden Lotus Hotel never showed up, probably a little retribution for our Monday night no-show. So we hired a "taxi" and arrived at our hotel around midnight. It's a charming place with huge rooms but unfortunately they have a room for only one night so we will scramble today.
"Good Morning, Vietnam!" is how millions of American servicemen were greeted each morning by Armed Forces Vietnam radio for their 12 or 13 month tour and I couldn't resist adding it to the journal.
After breakfast the desk clerk secured a room for us at the Lucky 2 Hotel down the street. The room isn’t as nice but it costs $25 less. We moved our luggage and set out to find ET Pumpkin, Lonely Planet's recommended travel agency. Walking around Hanoi’s old city is a dangerous as Cairo – maybe more so. There are few cars but thousands of motorbikes and scooters, racing wildly and tooting their horns. There don’t seem to be any road rules so you can get blindsided from either direction. The sidewalks are packed with more parked scooters, street venders, racks from shops and bewildered Caucasians so one is forced back into the the mayhem of the street.
Few streets cross at a perpendicular and all the street names seem the same. Hang Hom becomes Hang Trong near Nang Ngong and so on. Connie finally got us to the agency and we were able book a tour to Sapa on the northern border with China. We leave Saturday and return on Tuesday morning, sleeping two nights on the train in Pumpkin’s private car. It’s a bit expensive but we don’t have a car rental or driving to deal with. We may hook up with them for excursions to Ba Be National Park and Halong Bay next week.
Food in Vietnam is inexpensive and so far very good. We ate lunch (Prawns, rice, spring roll and a diet coke for about $13. You get 16,200 dong for a dollar making us multi-millionaires despite the lousy stock market. With full bellies we wandered around the old city looking at temples, communist statutes, the Hoan Kiem Lake and happy, smiling people. This blend of communism and capitalism is hard to figure out but strangely I feel more comfortable with the Vietnamese today than I did with Americans when I returned from my Vietnamese tour in the army forty years ago. Go figure.
