Day 82--Off the coast of China, en route to Shanghai

13 November. 22° 38’N, 116° 38’ E. Course: 065°. Speed: 15 knots.

We’re now en route to Shanghai from Hong Kong, and I’m 2 ports behind on my blog. Today and tomorrow are catch-up days . . . for many things. The three days between Saigon and Hong Kong were full of lesson prep and teaching (I’m now at those lessons that I didn’t fully prep last summer). The 2 days in Hong Kong were full of Hong Kong. And I now have 26 formal reports from my business comm. students and 28 essays from my intercultural comm. students awaiting review and grading. These 2 days at sea will also be full.

But, first things first. To continue . . .

Hanoi

A car and driver were waiting for us inside the Hanoi airport. Baggage claim was very fast, and we were on the road into the city within 20 minutes of deplaning. The 45-minute ride into Hanoi was on a 4-lane divided highway that took us past the images of Vietnam I’d expect: miles of rice paddies, farmers in the broad-brimmed “coolie hats” working the fields behind lumbering water buffalo, lush green hills in the distance, a few palms. But the highway was also lined with distinct signs of flourishing capitalism: billboards advertising consumer electronics, food, upscale clothing, and much other stuff available to the rising middle class of Vietnam.

The 4-lane highway narrowed as we got closer to the city until finally we were surrounded by motorscooters, cars, and busses all heading into the heart of Hanoi. We arrived at our hotel—the Luxor—as the sun was starting to set.

The Luxor is on a narrow, busy street in the northeast section of what’s called “the old quarter”: a section of Hanoi probably 1½- to 2 square miles in area sitting along the Red River in the northern section of the city. The quarter consists of a ganglia of very busy streets, each lined with shops selling everything from fresh fish and vegetables to cameras and watches, a bustling area of commerce. The old buildings lining the streets look as if they’ve been standing for many decades, dating well back into the French colonial period. In fact, the Frommer’s guide we used to navigate the quarter pointed us to colonial and pre-colonial buildings on every street, including one house that was several hundred years old.

What’s remarkable about the age of buildings in the quarter is that the area is bounded on the north by the Long Bien bridge. This is the bridge that, during the war, was referred to as the Paul Doumer bridge, named after, I thought, an American fighter pilot shot down during one of the first raids. In fact, it was named after a French governor general and president. The Vietnamese changed the name to Long Bien after they drove the French out in ’54, but we still referred to it by the Doumer name. The fact that we dropped so many bombs onto that bridge—and lost many airplanes and pilots doing so—without damaging the adjacent buildings is a testimony either to the precision or imprecision of our bomb-dropping accuracy 40 years ago. I’d like to believe it’s the former. I do know that raid after raid it was damaged, and raid after raid it was repaired and operating again within days.

Our first night in Hanoi, the 5 of us—Jim, Shamim, Bob, Anne, and I—walked through the quarter to get the lay of the land and to find a good restaurant. Most of the shops lining the streets are open air. Outside the shops, on the sidewalks, the proprietors sit on small plastic stools surrounding a table where they cook, eat their meals, tend to family, socialize with friends, and conduct business. The activity is continuous. Walking along the sidewalks, in fact, is like walking through an endless communal kitchen, living room, dining room, salesroom, and parking lot, the latter because the families share the sidewalk with their motorscooters—scooter after scooter after scooter. The net effect for a pedestrian is that “walking down the street” means literally that: walking on the street.

Where two streets cross, the adventure intensifies, because Hanoi—in fact, all of Vietnam—has very few traffic lights and fewer still pedestrian crosswalks. The art of crossing a street without being hit by a car or scooter requires two traits: courage and predictability. What that means is waiting for a brief break in traffic then stepping into the street and, without stopping or slowing—the most important part!—continuing to the other side at a steady, quick pace. Trust is key: we have to trust that the drivers will accurately predict where we will be as they arrive at the point where we’re crossing, then maneuver left or right to miss us. If we stop or slow down, we change the aim point. The system works. By the time we all left Vietnam, we were adept at taking a deep breath, stepping out into the streets, walking briskly across while giving ourselves up to the skills of the Vietnamese drivers. We all survived unscratched.

After a few false starts and turns, the 5 of us found a small restaurant a few blocks from the hotel. We sat at a table overlooking a courtyard and had a wonderful Vietnamese meal—spring rolls, hot and sour soup, spicy chicken and beef with soft noodles—accompanied by a decent brew. The two local beers I tried—“333” and “Tiger”—were delicious light lagers.

After dinner, we walked back to the hotel through the crowded kitchen/ diningroom/ gameroom/ communal front porches/parking lots of the locals. It seemed the entire city was on the sidewalks and streets enjoying the very warm evening.

Wednesday was our day to explore Hanoi. We started with a walk to the Long Bien bridge, at my request, because I wanted a picture of myself standing on what had been such a high-interest target for the Air Force. The bridge looks just as it does in modern pictures and just as it did in the many reconnaissance photos taken by RF-4s before and after the raids of the ‘60s and ‘70s. It’s a combination railroad/ vehicle/ pedestrian crossing of the Red River, supported by a series of graceful metal arches that seem to flow with the bridge across the river. While Jim, Bob, and Shamim waited safely on one side of Tran Nhat Duat street, Anne and I crossed and walked up the ramp to the start of the pedestrian walkway. There we stopped and took several pictures down the long span across the river. Sadly, we lost all but one picture—including one of me standing on the bridge—when my camera was stolen in Saigon. But that’s another story. I have very vivid pictures of the bridge firmly sealed in my mental album.

After visiting the Doumer/ Long Bien bridge, we resumed our walk through the Old Quarter. The Frommer’s guide led us on a fascinating walking tour through the streets of old Hanoi, past colonial-era buildings, through markets, by temples and museums—most of which we didn’t enter—and finally to a busy intersection close by the north bank of Ho Hoan Kiem Lake, where we stopped for lunch at a restaurant with a second deck overlooking the lake and traffic circle.

After lunch, we grabbed a taxi for the 10-minute ride into the business (French) section of Hanoi and to the remnants of the Ho Loa prison: the “Hanoi Hilton,” where John McCain, Robbie Risner, and several hundred other US airmen were held as POWs for as long as 9 years. Most of the original prison has been torn down, replaced by an office and shopping complex. But the Vietnamese have retained a small section as a museum, undoubtedly because they know it’s an irresistible magnet for American tourists and US dollars.

Most of the museum is dedicated to the many years during the colonial period when the prison was used by the French to hold political prisoners. The colonial sections document with pictures and displays the brutality of the prison guards in their treatment of Vietnamese “patriots” who dared to defy the French. Many of those prisoners were, of course, members of the Viet Minh, the guerrilla force headed by Ho Chi Minh that overthrew the French in ’54. During what the Vietnamese call “the American War,” the Viet Minh became the Viet Cong, the guerrilla force in the South.

Two rooms of the prison hold displays documenting the period when “American criminals” who had been shot down and captured were held in the prison from 1964 to 1973. On a video screen in one of the rooms, a 5-minute black-and-white video runs on a continuous loop showing the results of American bombing raids on Hanoi and Haiphong. In the same room are display cases holding, among other things, a flight suit, helmet, and shreds of parachute claimed to be those worn and used by John McCain, and utensils used by Robbie Risner.

The second room contains photos and artifacts testifying to the “excellent treatment” of the Americans during their “temporary detention” in the prison they “sarcastically referred to as ‘the Hanoi Hilton.’” On display are photos showing Americans playing basketball in a courtyard, preparing what was labeled as “Christmas dinner,” standing in prayer during a “regular religious service,” and smiling broadly as they chatted with guards. One photo showed John McCain supposedly being treated by a Vietnamese doctor. Of course, McCain didn’t receive any medical treatment for several years after his capture, and was beaten often, which is why, despite many operations after his return to the US, he can’t raise his arms above shoulder level today. The photo in the “church” was especially interesting because two of the Americans, standing with arms crossed and two fingers extended across their left biceps, are clearly sending a message through photo interpreters to those back home.

In all, the visit to the “Hilton” was sobering. On the one hand, I thought about the propaganda vehicle that this place of horrors had become. But after seeing the tiny cells that were the homes of the POWs for so many years, and hearing from POW reports about the brutal treatment they received, we all were humbled by what they had survived. The propaganda is crude and obvious; the reality is sobering.

After leaving the prison, we all climbed into a taxi for the ride back to the hotel. Enroute, Anne noticed that the meter was clocking off kilometers at a rate 3 to 4 times faster than warranted by our progress. This is, apparently, a common ploy used by some taxi drivers to extract more money from unwary visitors who don’t know metric measures. We ordered the driver to stop, offered him a fraction of what the meter showed, he insisted on full payment, we refused and started to exit the cab, he grabbed the back of my shirt, and a tug-of-war ensued, with the driver yanking on my shirt, and Jim and Anne pulling me by the arms out of the taxi while Bob pried the driver’s hand off the shirt. The good guys won, the driver was stiffed, and my shirt will recover.

We returned to the hotel at about 4pm. We had reservations at 7pm for a birthday-celebration dinner at “The Temple,” a Frommer-recommended restaurant in the Old Quarter. With 3 hours to spare, Jim, Anne, and I found a spa around the corner from the hotel, and we all went for 75-minute massages. Mine was shiatsu-style, which loosely translates into “find the most sensitive parts of every muscle and press hard.” My masseuse actually climbed onto my back at several points and bore her elbows into nooks and crannies that I never knew existed. To her credit, I suppose, she kept checking in to ask “you okay?” But my grunts didn’t deter her. The aftereffects were wonderful, though I’m not sure they were worth the pain. Next time I’ll probably stick with Swedish.

Wednesday night, the 5 of us had a wonderful Vietnamese-style dinner as I passed my 65-year milestone. As I’ve noted several times, becoming eligible for Medicare and Social Security—the two grand socialist programs provided by our government—while sitting in a restaurant in Hanoi, capital of a country where we lost 58,000 Americans battling the scourge of socialism/communism, is an irony both funny and tragic.

When we returned to the hotel, we learned that our early-afternoon flight Thursday to Dalat had been cancelled, and we were all now booked on a flight that wouldn’t get us to the resort until after 10pm. That news led to what I’ll remember as one of the highlight days of the voyage. But I’ll stop this now and resume tomorrow. Time to grade papers.