I’ve wussed out. I write to you from Bangkok, where I fled two days ago after losing myself in Hanoi. I’m not alone. I’ve been exchanging emails with fellow losers and have counted two comments about arriving in (and leaving) Hanoi. April said “I really had enough of Vietnam as well, they are fucking crazy and I cannot believe I managed to get out of the place alive.” Meanwhile, Olivier wrote to me and said “Ouais ben, je viens juste d’arriver a Hanoi .. and I only want one thing .. get the hell out … as I was telling you before, I’m just totally bored of vietnam …”
Nothing wrong with Hanoi per se, it just comes at the wrong end of 2000 km overland. It’s a bit like Ho Chi Minh City, a lot colder, just as charmless. It’s got the pitfalls of a big city with very few of the benefits. There was some lovely beer. A lot of the folk were terrific. A lot of them were less terrific. I was sick of saying “no … because NO …” and paying up to 20 times face value for stuff. The food in Vietnam was some of the best I’ve ever had anywhere. A lot of places had taken both chicken and egg off the menu (I don’t know which one came off first.) Vietnamese pork is unlike any I’ve eaten anywhere else. Ditto the tea, although more than a pot can be a strong laxative. Ditto the coffee - world-beating. I bought a percolator. Unsure of what to match with the pearls I bought, I picked up a tea-set. Apparently I should have been looking for a twinset, but I don’t know what a twinset looks like.
Also had to invest in a new bag to lug around my new toys. Rather like the Buddha, perhaps the shell-embossed chopsticks and matching case will be less exciting in the cold light of day. Vietnam also had some great pith helmets, but I persuaded myself I could do without them (and am now regretting it.)
So nothing funny has happened, nothing to make you chuckle. I got detained at a bank in Hanoi for suspected fraudulent use of travellers’ cheques. The teller was convinced the signature on my passport was different to the one I was supplying. So they took photocopies of my passport, visa, plane ticket, driving license and made me sit down in a back room and write out my signature 20 times, twice for each cheque. Having taken note of where I was staying and satisfied themselves that I am me, they let me go with a cheery “please come back soon!”
I took a taxi to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum to look at the old man’s body. The cabbie stiffed me with a rigged meter and when I got there it was shut, so I walked around the outside and then got stiffed again on the way back five minutes later. Good job I cashed the cheques, I suppose.
