TRAVELER MISFORTUNE, Chapter 9: Transportation & Christine the happiest encounter

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The transport, the most common one here, is the scooter, as I said. Everybody has one. And they use it in more many ways that you can ever imagine. This small bike on gas has place for 4 or even 5 persons. The whole family can be transported on it! Successfully!


And beside the bunch of people riding it, you can see that a whole different world can be transported with it! Even a big refrigerator that somehow manage to stay on the back of a small scooter in a strange equilibrium… And sometimes you can see chicken being transported, or a whole pork...




The image of Vietnam changed when I met Christine.
Good people are to be meet in the most common places. Along the time I made friends in bus, pharmacy, supermarket... me and Christine met in a DVD shop.


She was talking about her sick dog and she was looking for treatment. I thought she was a tourist and I told her that maybe the best is to get in touch with the French Embassy. We started to talk and I found out that she was living there, she’s half French, half Vietnamese and from that day on, we sow each other every day!


I am proud to say that I have a good friend in Hanoi, she showed me another face of the town, she invited me and Fid at her place - a kind of traditional Vietnamese house but in a good way, not at all narrow, very big living room (as we would never get to have in Paris!), few floors, lots of dogs…


Thanks to her I found good places to buy pearls, real ones, cause here you can also have real stuff for still same small prices; I discovered corners that I never knew about, shops to buy everything you want, that I couldn’t discover by myself. Suddenly my staying in Vietnam became vary pleasant!


I found a good place to do some sport, there was also a swimming pool, in the afternoons I was seeing Christine… and evenings were reserved to my husband. So life was so good!
Having a good friend can be the secret ingredient of a happy life, did you know that?


I started to use a motorbike every time I went out, there were always a few at the corner of my street, I knew now the prices so no matter what they were asking I couldn’t be fooled, and the driver was smiling like a kid caught doing something bad when asking for a price and found out that I was giving him just the half.
I started to feel at home in Hanoi, it was very hard to say goodbye, especially to Christine, who even very beautiful, never let me take pictures of her.


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TRAVELER MISFORTUNE, Chapter 2: The gnashing

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After the scooters-flood and the tube-houses, I noticed the noise! A terrible noise! A continuous, loud, disturbing noise! The annoying noise of horns!

All drivers love to horn; ALL THE TIME!

When they overcome a car - they horn, when they overcome a scooter - they horn; when they don’t want to overcome anyone at all- they horn; when they are about to cross an intersection - they horn 200 meters before to announce their triumphal arrival !

Everybody seems to be able to drive only if they use the stupid horn !
It must be attached to the engine and probably as soon as it is released, you get no more gas, or something...
And this happens starting with six in the morning till about eleven in the evening.

And above all this horning, there are other sounds forming a kind of a street-orchestra with no harmonics.
The street-sellers, the ones selling popcorn for example, they have their own sound – more exactly their own way of making noise: a cute&loud song like “Lambada”, or carols, or “Oh, Su-sa-na, oh, don't you cry for me”... At a point, doesn't even matter if you are a Susana or not, all you feel like doing is crying OUT LOUD!

The ones who want to drive you around on their taxi-bikes, they also have a recognizable, specific loud sound/noise of their own. And a bell ringing is the sound/noise that let people know the garbage will be lifted.


But as an ultimate sound-stress torturing formula is this: on the pillars at the corners of the streets there are megaphones that announce the news; it is a loud-robot-female voice that talks in the same rhythm for 15 minutes… Every morning, every afternoon, every evening!

What can I say?! Since we are here, every single evening we have a headache!

After 2 months, the time we are supposed to stay here, it'll be very easy for anyone to make our deepest wish come true: silence… just a plain-big-sacred silence!

The thing is that the “good rooms” in the hotels are always facing the street and no matter how courageous and ready to experience it all you might think you are, I'm telling you, you do not want to experience this bad ones...

I looked one whole day for another hotel, on a little hidden street maybe, more silent, but they are all the same.
They are all the same as the noise is concerned, but I noticed that sometimes the bathroom is different: there is no bathtub or shower like we're use to have in a bathroom; there is just a long wire that comes out from the sink faucet serving as the shower itself.
So you can take the shower seated on the toilet if you want.

(Who am I kidding?! I had a shower like that for a few years when I was a student and living in the campus. And it was good, and fun! And I was always clean!)

The receptionist always assures you that there is hot water. Which makes me think that this is not so usual, otherwise it wouldn’t be mentioned, right? One more thing to make sure of when getting in a Vietnamese hotel then! Good to know!

All this noise-mess sounds to me just like a radio that never gets to catch hold of a channel. A perpetual unpleasant gnashing and if you know the sound, imagine how it must be to hear it all day...

I counted once in a morning, as I woke up at six, the longest moment of silence between horns: the record was 10 seconds.
We will move from this hotel! That's a must!

The apartment that we somehow managed to rent it is fortunately on a side street and the silence between horns could give you sometimes a holiday of about 20 seconds… which we know now, it is goooood !

And the bedroom is great: weekends we can sleep late if we close all the windows and doors!

If in China I was going blind in amazement, here I am definitely going deaf!




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TRAVELER MISFORTUNE: Chapter 1

One thing I learnt while traveling is that the traveler's misfortune is actually his very Fortune!
And so - but certainly not by envy - I deeply complain the “five star hotel” traveler that knows only the best and can't enjoy the fun-struggling in places that feels like other planets; he for sure is poor in his richness and has nothing to laugh about thinking at his journeys – admitting that the laughing happens long after the misfortune did.

This is an old post, the only I wrote in English at the time, in 2004, while we were in Vietnam for two months.
I should probably mention that the trip previous to the one in Vietnam was in China - the first Asian territory I discovered - that made me feel both, traveling back in time and landing on a completely different planet.

Chapter 1: Gooooood Mooooorning Vietnaaaaam !

Humid air, sauna sensation, very indiscreet looks, sounds of voices that make no sense - déjà vu. The Asian adventure continue!

The first things that I noticed once out from the airport, were the scooters that are all over the place, like a furious, threatening flood.

Here is the Dynasty of Scooters! The taxi had to make quite smart moves to be able to drive between them, considering that they run all over the place in chaos.

Very soon I noticed that, like in China, the one rule when driving is No Rules.
And even more, here, not even the poor police man from the intersections – real reminder of the “respect behind the wheel” for the Chinese driver - does not succeed in changing a single thing and he’s totally disregarded!


Here, if you want to cross the road, just cross the f... road !!! Don't think about it, don't look around, don't hesitate! The others will (eventually) avoid you!
But if you even think of hesitating... well... the no-rules-drivers smell it, detect it, sense it; they start zigzagging the road and in the best case scenario you will be so scared that you will never-ever cross the road and you'll spend the night or even your life there, on the border of the road; in the worse case scenario... you might become a nice-smooth carpet for the scooters – but not for long though, cause being so many, in a few minuets you'll be dust on hundreds of wheels, it'll be like you've never ever been there!

Otherwise it is not so dangerous ; just frightening... and scary!!! ...
(And did I say it's really, really scary?)

Than I noticed the buildings: very narrow, tall, painted just on the front wall, usually with very strong colours (dark blue, pink, orange, green, violet).

The side walls of the house, in case other houses are not attached to it, are painted only if there have windows ; usually there aren’t, so the side walls stay unpainted and the house gets an unfinished look.

I read that a law was saying that the buildings can’t be larger than three meters; so imagine how weird they seem when there is nothing around, just the narrow house like a one-side-colored-tube in a middle of a field.

Sometimes the house can face a cemetery and this is no problem for the locals.

And sometimes tombs can be seen in a middle of a rice field. Which is strange to me knowing that rice is growing in swampy-lands ... But it seems that this is the habit for the poor people that can’t afford to buy a piece of land just to bury someone.

Somehow, the feeling is that the time stopped about fifty years ago.