I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die: Hà Nội

When we left Hanoi airport, the first thing I saw was a sign for passengers with priority: “Disabled people. Decrepit people.” I stopped reading after that! It was 20 degrees C or about 68 F outside, so naturally the Vietnamese were all wearing winter jackets. 

I’ve already described what walking in Hanoi traffic is like. Being a passenger isn’t much better. As the taxi wove in and out among the motorbikes and other traffic, we noticed strange things we’d never seen before, such as barber’s chairs set up on the sidewalk. The customer sat facing away from the street, and the barber was shaving him with a straight razor. I thought, People really live on the edge here.

And that’s how I felt all the way through. Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” was on my playlist because of its acid humor about the war; but it became my theme song for Hanoi because of the traffic. The chorus (“Whoopee! We’re all gonna die”) sprang to my mind, and not infrequently to my lips, while crossing the road.

Joe McDonald wasn’t anti-military. Before his obscene tirade against the war at Woodstock, he’d served in the U.S. Navy. The song is written from the point of view of soldiers who don’t know why they’re here, and it seems to have resonated with soldiers in real life. He even heard this appreciation from a veteran of the “Hanoi Hilton.” 

The Hanoi Hilton, or what remains of the Hoa Lo Prison, was our first stop in Hanoi. Most of the museum at Hoa Lo is devoted to the Vietnamese prisoners who were held there by the French, who built the prison. 

As in Dien Bien Phu, the French captions were matter-of-fact, while the English versions contained many additional words and phrases of emotive emphasis. 

More mannequins

There are many displays about the brutal treatment of Vietnamese political prisoners, including a guillotine. There is no reason for me to doubt that Vietnamese prisoners were mistreated and executed here, but of course the story can’t stop at believability. The prisoners “always” kept their spirits up, “to their last breath.” 

Having seen all these rooms and memorials to the bravery of badly treated people, one thing is clear: The people organizing this museum know what bad treatment is. They aren’t confused about whether it is wrong or not. If they were, they’d have no reason to conceal it, or deny that it happened.

But they do. The part of the museum dedicated to U.S. prisoners of war is just a couple rooms at the back, plus some display signs that were being stacked up even as I was looking at them—so I didn’t get the full picture. They show items belonging to POWs including Everett Alvarez, Jr., the first to be shot down over North Vietnam. 

The purported personal effects of Everett Alvarez, who was a POW longer than almost anyone in American history

And, there are pictures of John McCain, though not being tortured, obviously. Senator McCain has been here and acknowledges that the display about him is false. Yet, he came repeatedly to Hanoi, to normalize relations.

I had to wonder what McCain and others see, so I looked it up later. But trying to find out what veterans think when they come here just led me down a rabbit hole of different perspectives. There are lots of pictures in the “Hanoi Hilton” of U.S. POWs appearing to enjoy themselves—which is all they did do according to the propaganda. One veteran wrote of his anger at coming here, and seeing someone in the picture playing chess, and saying he was a traitor, because he cooperated with the North Vietnamese for better treatment. 

But that led me to another veteran who excoriated John McCain as a traitor, and compared him (unfavorably) to Jane Fonda! And to another veteran who stood up for McCain, and every POW, when a certain man who is now president put him down for being captured. I suspect that point of view is the more common one, but the deeper I went, the fewer answers I had about how one could heal, or be reconciled, by coming back to Vietnam.

I know that some of the pilots bombing North Vietnam must have questioned what they were bombing, even while they followed orders. I know that the week I was born really did see the heaviest carpet bombing of the entire war in Vietnam and Cambodia. This picture is said to show a hospital bombed on 22 December 1972.

There was so much bullshit on display in these museums that I question everything; nevertheless, I know that hospitals and other civilian places were bombed. And if I had been those people, I would have wanted those planes shot down too.

I could think those things, yet still be angry at the preposterous way in which the “Hanoi Hilton” is presented, without any acknowledgment of what American prisoners really went through there. In the gift shop, ironically, there were Western newspapers on sale; I picked up a New York Times. And there, I read that Tweeter, the aforementioned president, had claimed that U.S. missile defense systems could shoot North Korean missiles out of the sky “97% of the time.”

The Times called this patently false, citing most arms control experts. The immediate calling out of a patent falsehood by Tweeter, which happens several times a day, is part of the job of a free press. This is what is missing in Hanoi. But it struck me as ironic, reading this claim on the very day I’d been angered by all the propaganda at Hoa Lo Prison. What kind of leader claims “97%” about anything, much less something as dangerous as the North Korea arms situation? Only the kind of leader we would expect North Korea—or Vietnam—to have.

And herein lies a clue, I think: Democracy, to the extent that it works, contains built-in safeguards, and one of these is a free press. The media make mistakes, but they are there to question, to call the government to account and point out lies. If a president (Nixon, say) hates the media, they are probably doing their job right. Democracies contain these vaccines against authoritarianism that authoritarian regimes have lost. (There’s a warning there.)

The one thing Hanoi had going for it was the temperatures. If it had also been hot, I don’t know how we’d have coped with the traffic. The only moments of peace were when we unexpectedly stepped into one of the French-era buildings—Our Lady of Hanoi R. C. Church, or La Badiane for a two-course lunch. A splurge, in a villa with wine, but far less than we’d have paid in France.

Some of the sights in Hanoi’s Old Quarter include Hoan Kiem Lake, which has a temple on an islet in it:

Bridge to Ngoc Son Temple

and St. Joseph Cathedral.

We were more interested in getting haircuts, as the situation had become desperate. Our last haircuts were in Mauritius, where we hadn't needed French (in fact, the women looked bewildered when we tried to speak it). In Hanoi, we found a barbershop and ten minutes later, we were out of there. I can’t speak for T., but the woman cutting my hair said only “Madame” and “Okay,” which was the only word I needed to say to her. I think it cost a dollar and a half. Not the most subtle styling ever! I'm happy though that my hair is looking a lot redder these days. People in England don't realize my hair is red, but that's their climate, not my hair.

That was something else that surprised me about Vietnam: the lack of languages. In Laos, we had a Hmong guide who spoke his native language along with Lao, English, and at least one other tribal language. In Vietnam, even in heavily traveled areas, many people know only “Hello.” I tried to speak with one of the hotel guys but he could only communicate with gestures—he noticed that I have one ear pierced once and the other twice, just like his. “Same same” was all the English that he knew! This was not the last time I observed that what Vietnamese people lack, they make up for in friendliness and helpfulness. 

We had lots more to see in Hanoi. We started with the Confucian Temple of Literature. A lot of it is reconstruction, but it was originally built in 1070. It was nice to see a reminder that Vietnam has many centuries of history, not just the last one.

Grounds of Vietnam's oldest national university

We then made our way to Lenin Park. Not because we were interested in that particular cult of personality, but because opposite it, on a street called Điện Biên Phủ (there are lots in Vietnam), is the Military History Museum. It stands out because of all the planes, helicopters, tanks, etc., many of them American or French and displayed as trophies of war.

There are halls devoted to the whole history of war in Vietnam, back to ancient times. And possibly future: the country is currently clashing with China over who “owns” certain islands in the South China Sea, or as it’s called in Vietnam, the East Sea.

Ngo Dinh Diem, first ruler of South Vietnam, with President Eisenhower

But the displays we were interested in were about the war. There were implications of torture by the “puppet regime” (“puppet” is always used in these museums to refer to the South Vietnam regime, or before that, the French colonial regime). There was also a whole hall of solidarity from the rest of the world. Most of the examples were from communist countries, but antiwar demonstrations in Canada and Australia (a belligerent) were also shown. I am sure there were people at the time, on the U.S. side, who would have agreed that protesting the war was equivalent to siding with North Vietnam. I think that’s nonsense.

By the time we reached our last stop of the day, the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, all I could think about was how bizarre it is for communism to treat its heroes this way, whether Ho or Lenin. Whatever else Ho did or thought, he lived in a stilt house and wanted a simple cremation. Not that I feel sorry for Ho Chi Minh, but this grotesque honour seems more of an ongoing indignity to a human body.

We deliberately went after the mausoleum had closed for the day.

Perhaps Canada and Australia were on our minds as we set out for The Moose & Roo, a pub promising comfort foods from those two countries. It was, after all, Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., where my family was celebrating. We missed them and thought we might get something reliably Western and delicious for a treat. Imagine our consternation when we saw that The Moose & Roo was observing American Thanksgiving (as they had Canadian the previous month) and reservations were recommended. Imagine, further, our delight when the hostess scared up two Thanksgiving dinners to spare! 

I’ve come down pretty hard on Hanoi, so I’d like to end on a high note. An overnight trip took us to Halong Bay. Like other places in Vietnam, it’s hyped to the skies, but unlike them we really did find it beautiful. We spent the night and much of the 24 hours on board the Dang Tam, a junk with an appropriate name, since our guide’s name was Tam. As in: “That dang Tam, he took us to a boring cave.”

Caves are big in this part of the world. We don't really like caves so we've avoided most of them, but back in Nong Khiaw, there was a cave in which villagers and Pathet Lao fighters (the faction that ended up in power in a communist Laos) hid out during the war. Another cave actually contained the region's bank from 1965-74.

Like inland Vietnam, the bay is in some places marred by litter, but at least not enough to spoil the view of the thousand islands. 

We spent an hour or so kayaking and then relaxed on the top deck, watching the silhouettes of the “karsts” fade next to a bright moon. 

We were with a nice international group of people, too, including a Spanish guy who spoke English with a Scottish accent! Turns out his mother is from Scotland. I’m always glad to meet people like this, with more than one passport and less than a simple answer to “Where are you from?”

We climbed to the lookout point on Ti Top Island, named for a Soviet cosmonaut. When Ghermann Titov visited the island with Ho Chi Minh in 1962, Ho decided it should be named after him, since the Soviet Union was his ally. There’s no escaping wartime history, even on the beautiful beaches of Halong Bay.

Saw a video of this song playing in a bar in Laos. Really evocative to hear in Southeast Asia 

Traveling through this part of you: Vietnam 1

The U.S. singer Nanci Griffith has toured Vietnam and Cambodia with the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.* On her first visit, she wrote the song “Traveling Through This Part Of You.” She started writing it for her ex-husband, who is a Vietnam veteran, but then realized that it was in thanks for the service of all the veterans.

I expected to think about the U.S.A.’s undeclared war in Indochina while traveling here. After all, to someone who grew up in America, “Vietnam” means a war, not a country. What I didn’t expect was to spend so much of our Vietnam travels thinking about that recent period of history. It has been a journey through my own  conflicting feelings, as I try to imagine the perspective of first one, and then another person who lived through that time. All my observations are historical imagination and I don’t think that any of them, or the sum of them, is “the truth” about the war. Wars are always complicated, this one more than most.

I’ve been listening to some of the songs, too, which is why I start with Nanci Griffith’s. Sometimes a song tells a story in a way we couldn’t otherwise cope with.

The mountain road from Phongsali Province, Laos, had striking views. When we crossed into Vietnam at Tay Trang, the road got surprisingly bad. Surprisingly, because as an economy Vietnam is substantially more developed than Laos, more at the level of Thailand. I started observing that development in the mounds of trash that seemed to be strewn everywhere in Vietnam. In poor countries, people just don’t have much to throw away.

I also noticed that motorcyclists, who are ubiquitous in Vietnam as well, were wearing helmets. In Laos hardly anyone had. The helmets, as we soon discovered, embolden Vietnamese to ride like utter maniacs. A third difference I noticed was in the language: Vietnamese is the only one in this part of the world that doesn’t have its own written script. Thanks to a French missionary, it uses a phonetic version of the Roman alphabet, which was easier to educate the masses with. So while I don’t know any Vietnamese, it was strangely comforting to see it written in letters I recognize, and be able to sound out words. Like cà phê.

Everywhere we go, the coffee gets stronger. Lao coffee was lovely, but it needed that condensed milk to make it drinkable. Vietnamese coffee is off the charts. They brew it on top of the cup and it drips down, slowly infusing the sweetened condensed milk, which is “downstairs” as one of our hosts told us. T. said it looked like upside-down Guinness. If you don’t like sugar in coffee, you need to find a French place.

And so to Dien Bien Phu, our first stop in Vietnam. Because it was at that siege, in 1954, that the First Indochina War turned in favor of the Vietnamese and led to the end of French colonial rule. If you know nothing else about Dien Bien Phu, that’s good. There is nothing else to know.

Actually, that’s me being sarcastic. It was worth visiting this small town, just to get our feet wet in a new culture—and get used to crossing the road. The motorcyclists, pedestrians, pretty much everyone who saw us shouted “Hello!” It’s their go-to English word, and that was another thing that surprised me: how little English people know. Often, they have nowhere to go after “Hello,” but they keep saying it, gamely. Or sometimes “ça va.”

I’ve made fun (I hope gently) of some Americans before for our tendency to be the loudest people in the room. Well, henceforth I am handing that baton over to the Vietnamese. They shout everything. They aren’t being rude or aggressive. It’s just that they have to be heard over the constant, and I do mean constant, cacophony of honking horns and all the other noise in their streets. You might not believe this without a picture, but in Hanoi we actually came across a large group of little kids on tiny motorized bicycles, riding around a city square. Each was equipped with a horn, and they honked these regularly, just part of turning the handlebars. Start ’em young.

You can’t go far in Dien Bien Phu without seeing this monument. It overlooks the town and the two airplanes per day that leave the airport fly right past it.

We’ve been seeing a lot of communist symbolism, in both Laos and Vietnam. I know how bad this system has been for millions of people. But before I go on, I just want to offer one thought about the hammer and sickle. Not the police states that this flag came to represent, but the original idea behind it.

That idea is the dignifying of labor. It’s a good idea, and one that has been present in capitalist societies. From the 1930s to the 1970s, in the U.S. for example, the reckless excesses of capitalism were fresh in the minds of those who lived through the Great Depression. Both Republican and Democratic administrations presided over the lessening of inequality. The prevailing idea was that ordinary working families should share in the growing prosperity of a society.

Since around the end of the Vietnam war, perhaps coincidentally, a different ideology has prevailed. The income of ordinary working men and women has become decoupled from the economic growth of a nation, and most of the gains have gone to a few people at the top. This has happened whether the president was a Republican or a Democrat. As Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson have pointed out (The Spirit Level), massive inequality is bad for societies in many ways, because it is linked to so many problems and our inability to address those problems. When inequality is not addressed, people may turn to socialism, or they may turn to Brexit and Trumpism. 

I just wanted to mention this, because it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot since the 2016 presidential primaries. Communism has offered the world some big lies, but it is also a lie that the only other possible basis for organizing human society is pure greed. There are ways of organizing our societies that reduce inequality, and we have got to find them, for the whole planet’s sake.

So much for the hammer and sickle. The other image we’ve been seeing a lot of is Ho Chi Minh.

Ho, as he’s best known by this nom de guerre, is everywhere in Vietnam. Like the king in Thailand. He’s on every bill of money, and there’s a cult of personality that I find ironic, given how communism is supposed to be about no one bowing to any superior man. We were told this, unironically, by our guide in Laos when we asked about the king. “We used to have” a king, but more than six centuries of Lao monarchy were ended in 1975. 

Before Ho Chi Minh co-founded the French communist party back in 1920, he was an admirer of the U.S., and petitioned several administrations for help in resisting colonial rule, starting with Woodrow Wilson’s. “Self-determination” of nations was an ideal of Wilson’s, and the precursor of the C.I.A. seems to have agreed, as during the Second World War it provided Ho’s Viet Minh with weapons and training. I find this fascinating, because we tend to forget that the U.S. was not always the superpower of the late twentieth century. For most of its history, it was the underdog, the colony that had stood up to the British Empire and won. 

It therefore makes sense that Ho would admire the U.S. (he lived and worked there for a while) and that the U.S. was okay with Ho as long as he was more nationalist than communist. Alas, he turned out to be quite committed to communism, so things were never going to work out. In the Cold War era priorities shifted, and Ho's letters to President Truman got the same response as from Wilson. The U.S. opposed the dire regimes of communism, but as we know, was sometimes guilty of backing dire regimes of other kinds. It is doubtful that the military dictators of Thailand would have been around long enough to commit the 1973 massacre, had they not been useful in the struggle against North Vietnam.

We visited the Museum of Dien Bien Phu Historical Victory. The ground floor was given over to a display on Võ Nguyên Giáp, the general whose name is almost as familiar as Ho’s. Giap made his name by defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu. I found the museum interesting not so much on the level of the displays as on the level of propaganda. What are these displays trying to tell us?

General Giap waiting for a train. Really

Museums in Vietnam are dreary collections of mannequins that reminded us of the fake Maasai village in Tanzania, but the story Dien Bien Phu tries to convey is that there was a single Indochina War, running from the First (when the French lost their colonies in 1954) through the Second (which ended in 1975). At every opportunity, connections between the two imperial powers—France and the U.S.A.—are made. Thus, there are pictures of tanks that we are told the U.S. supplied to the French, and pictures of Vice President Nixon who, we are told, was in Dien Bien Phu to encourage the French colonialists.

Now, I know that’s a picture of Richard Nixon, but I automatically question whether the caption is accurate, and not just because I was taught that communism was all lies. Here’s the problem with communist storytelling: They never know when to stop. You can’t blame Vietnamese communists for being proud of resisting the Japanese invasion during World War II, and resenting the French for coming back after the war and reoccupying. So far, my sympathies are with them. But then they caption everything with all these emotive words. No one in the museum ever just did something; he (or often she) was a “joyful” conscript, or “cheerful” receiving the news about Land Renovation. Really? That’s what they’re excited about?

Intriguingly, there are French captions along with the English, and they don’t match. I’m not good at French and have no idea what the Vietnamese captions say, but I can tell when words and whole phrases aren’t there. The French captions said things like “Vietnamese soldiers received reeducation in the countryside.” The English would say “Our soldiers liberate…” The our, constantly present in the English captions, was absent in French. I began to wonder who translated these and why this proprietary, emotive version was particularly being aimed at English readers.

The other message of the Dien Bien Phu Museum is that the French were fops. There are displays of wine bottles and of the French commander’s bathtub, found in a trench. The implication is clearly that the Vietnamese were men of the people, hardily bathing in cold streams, as Southeast Asians do. Again, like other parts of the story, it’s true as far as it goes.

General Christian de Castries's tub

I wonder what French visitors make of this museum. On the way, one of them started speaking to me; he saw my Kilimanjaro T-shirt and asked about my climb. Turns out he climbed it too. I told him I almost made it and he credited me with reaching Stella Point, although I had to admit it was only 5,200 meters. I was just glad to be able to have the conversation in French!

We returned to our guesthouse to the constant accompaniment of honks and “Hello!” A gal in a grocery store, who spoke no more English than that, gave us bananas for free (this happens a lot in Vietnam). A little boy in a pho shop played with a butcher knife while we ate the noodle soup. Then back at the guesthouse, the proprietor’s toddler kept offering T. his favorite toy to play with. “Lovely,” she said, “a full box of matches.” 

We’d originally intended to travel overland the whole time we were in Asia, but we couldn’t face more than eleven hours in a bus to Hanoi. So we took the midday flight on Vietnam Airlines.

Crew in conical hats, Dien Bien Phu airport

That was where I discovered that the emotive “joyfully” thing is not just propaganda. The safety video on the plane showed passengers looking over the safety instruction card in the seat pocket in front of them, like all airlines’ safety videos do. But in the Vietnamese one, the passengers are exclaiming to one another in ecstasy, while the flight attendant looks on with, er, attendant joy. You have never seen anyone do anything with more enthusiasm than actors reading a safety card in the Vietnam Airlines video.

So yes, there are moments of humor, and discovery, such as the brown robes on Vietnamese monks (a different form of Buddhism from the one in which orange robes are worn). And there are moments, like when I was walking in Laotian jungle or missing my American family at Thanksgiving, that I couldn’t help but think about those young men who were sent over here. Boys, really, the age of my cousin who is a freshman. Treated, then and thereafter, as if their lives were expendable. 

More from Hanoi.

*“Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF) is dedicated to global security through programs that support and promote justice and freedom, as well as reduce the worldwide threat posed by war and conflict. Their Campaign for a Landmine Free World is VVAF’s public outreach program that addresses the international landmine tragedy.” 

An interlude: Hong Kong

Our plan was to go around Southeast Asia by land, but you know what they say about plans. We ended up taking a couple of hops on Vietnam Airlines. The number one reason was that a friend of ours lives in Hong Kong, and invited us to stay. I’ve always wanted to visit Hong Kong, particularly as we know someone living there, and it seemed unlikely that we would ever be “passing by” nearer than north Vietnam.

Hong Kong represented a stepping back. From our travels in southeast Asia and into a world that was more familiar. As strange as it sounds, Hong Kong seems as British as it is Chinese, not least because we were visiting Watty, whom we’ve met up with when she lived in London. There were English place names, English stores, and English prices!

So while we were traveling to Hong Kong and back, I thought a lot about the contrasts with what we’ve been doing for the past six months. It’s too early for me to write about Vietnam, because I haven’t made up my mind about the country yet. In fact, part of this stepping back has been me examining my reactions to certain things, feelings that have sometimes surprised me.

Did you ever spend months at a time not seeing a single familiar place or anyone you knew, not even a passing acquaintance, except for one other person? It isn’t natural. T. and I adore each other, but come on. There have been plenty of challenging days and I haven’t really written about that, which is fine. We have gotten better about handling this particular kind of stress. But I want to acknowledge it at least, because otherwise, it might sound as if we’ve been on one endless vacation. 

Having a “holiday” in Hong Kong, seeing a familiar face, just emphasized this for me. Our local friend showed us around and took all the work out of it. I know how ridiculous it sounds to call traveling “work,” but there are aspects of other countries that I don’t like, or that clash with my values. Of course, no one wants to see pictures of litter, disregard for animal welfare, social control, or corruption! So I’m balancing the picture I paint here with photographs of Hong Kong, a place I loved.

Watty's map of where we went to in Hong Kong

When you’re in a culture, you have to understand the reasons things are the way they are, and whether you can affect the system or not. A mild example from my own culture is tipping. In North America, unlike in the rest of the world, tipping wait staff is mandatory. They are taxed on the basis that they receive a standard percentage tip, whether customers give them those tips or not; and as I understand it, their employers don't even have to pay minimum wage. This changes the meaning of “tips,” which people around the world understand to mean a voluntary extra payment to reward especially good service. The problem is that if you visit North America, it’s not fair to register your protest at this system—ridiculous though it is—by failing to tip individual servers properly, because it is not their fault.

Cantonese restaurant full of locals. Thanks for ordering, Watty!

So I think back to the occasion in Tanzania when we were stopped and searched at gunpoint by military personnel. I still feel detached from that experience, even though it is over and I should be feeling outrage—having done nothing wrong and not being given any explanation. Maybe it’s because I didn’t really feel that I was in danger, or felt that my behavior would ensure I wasn’t in danger. But I think it’s really because I am not a citizen of Tanzania and for all I know, Tanzanians are stopped and searched like this all the time. Certainly, constant police checkpoints are a fact of life there. Mostly they don’t affect visitors; they affect drivers, who have to pay a “tax.” I think I’m not outraged because I was just visiting the way Tanzanians live.

Victoria Harbour from "the Peak" viewpoint. The depth of the harbor contributed to Hong Kong's importance in international trade, when it was a British colony and still today.

It is much less dramatic when, driving near the U.S. border with Mexico, we’re required to stop and asked questions about our citizenship. But that I find outrageous! Why? Because I am a U.S. citizen driving near—but not crossing—an international border, and damned if I’m going to carry my “papers” around in my own country. I have never actually had to produce proof of my citizenship, but isn’t that likely to be a privilege of how I look, or sound, or what my name is?

I'd had no idea there were so many walking trails in Hong Kong. 3/4 of it is countryside!

My being stopped and searched in Tanzania was a one-time thing (I hope). There are young African-American men who are repeatedly stopped, and even endangered, perhaps because some other young black man has been reported to have done something, or for even less of a reason. And I know that during the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland many ordinary citizens were hassled in this way, by police or the armed forces. I know what they were looking for; the fact remains that for these ordinary citizens, not wrongdoers, it’s not only unjust, but it affects the community’s relationship with the force, which becomes antagonistic rather than there to help people. 

Northern Chinese for lunch today. Yum!

So the fact that the Tanzanian soldiers might have been conducting an exercise, or might really have been looking for something or someone, does not excuse them. They were treating ordinary people unfairly, and we let them, because they could. If I’m stopped and searched, or asked for a bribe, it’s a one-off for me, just an annoyance in a country I will soon leave. But for whole populations, and citizens in our own countries, this type of unfairness is an everyday hassle, not a novelty at all.

Cruising the harbor over to the Kowloon side. The Kowloon peninsula is still part of the "Special Administrative Region" of Hong Kong, but we can now say we went to the mainland of China.

Another thing that is significantly different in other countries is the expectation of safety. In Laos, for instance, nearly everyone rides motorbikes, sometimes with their whole family aboard, and rarely with anyone wearing a helmet. We constantly saw children, babies, and adults in all sorts of combinations zooming through traffic, where one slip or bump in the road could wipe out an entire family. Probably the most outrageous of countless examples was the mom who had a baby strapped to her back, facing backwards, and a child facing forwards behind the baby. While she drove, they were playing pat-a-cake!

I understand that mopeds are what Laotians can afford and that this is their culture, but that doesn't make it any safer. Unfortunately, I can’t do anything about the safety of these children. All we can do for our own is walk very carefully, and avoid ever getting on a motorcycle ourselves.

Dragon boats, village of Sai Kung, New Territories. The "New Territories" are the parts of Hong Kong that were built, or rather occupied, later.

It was such a relief to walk around Hong Kong, because we had just flown from Hanoi. I have really never seen anything like driving in Vietnam, especially its capital. Traffic is mostly motorbikes and they go wherever they want to. I mean as many abreast as is physically possible; I mean the wrong way down a one-way street or a “lane”; I mean on the sidewalk if they feel like it. Might means right. The smaller vehicle yields to the bigger, and pedestrians have no rights. In fact, we have no sidewalks, because if they’re not actually being driven on, they’re full of parked motorbikes.

Yet another delicious meal--family-style restaurant that hasn't changed in our friend's memory

Of course, there is a system, another one I can do nothing about. As much as I hate it, the system is that you just keep walking. They all seem to be driving straight at you, but they aren’t. They’re driving around you, and if you just keep walking, around you they will go. There’s also zero margin for error, so heaven forbid you should slip, trip, or lose your balance. On one occasion T. actually had to help a motorcyclist up who’d lost his! 

Here again, I don’t like this and I don’t think it’s safe, but I’m just visiting the way Vietnamese people live. I didn’t want to stay in Hanoi, nor did I have to. That’s another of my many privileges. 

The cable car that goes on forever, Lantau Island

At the end of the day, though, I think that travel makes me realize how much people have in common. As T. said back in Hungary: “People all over the world hold a baby the same.” At least for me, I'm more idealistic the more I see of the world, not less. Sitting at home with the TV (fun as I remember that being) can make you worry about all the bad things that happen in the world. Traveling among so many people makes me aware of how many of them are nice, and how things go right most of the time.

Triple Lanterns Cafe, Tai O. Photo by Watty