Hanoi is the first city I’ve been to that I immediately fell in love with. After spending five weeks in westernized Singapore, Hanoi felt like the authentic alien experience I was looking for. After arriving from our quick three-hour flight, we ran into the street desperate to hail a cab as fast as possible. We had only five hours to spend in the city before our sleeper bus to Phong Nha. We hopped into a city shuttle, listening in on a very energetic driver screaming on his phone for the entire thirty-minute ride to the city.
The first obvious observation in Hanoi is that there are no traffic laws. And I mean none. We were dumbfounded when we saw a six-year-old boy play a real life game of frogger, standing in the middle of the street as motorbikes and vans whipped past him while he inched forward as often as he could. We told ourselves there was no way in hell we were doing that… Fast forward five minutes later as we searched for a clear cut opportunity to cross the street, we realized we too would have to play frogger. In one of the more terrifying moments of my life, we somehow managed to cross the street (and only lost a couple guys!). After we collected ourselves, it was clear that a couple of my friends were turned off by the experience. However, it was here where I felt that first rush of joy for Vietnam; a city unlike anything I’ve experienced in the safe streets of countries I’ve traveled to in the past. This was what I was looking for.
The next obvious step for a recent arrival to Hanoi is to find some local street food, grab a miniature red stool, and enjoy the sights with a cold beer (as Anthony Bourdain told me in Parts Unknown). I led my friends to the first red stool I could find, and ordered off the pictures on the vendor’s menu. I had absolutely no idea what I just ordered, but that made me all the more excited. What I received was a delicious container of sticky rice noodles, pork jerky, local herbs and spices, and quail’s egg. I devoured it in a hurry, eager to eat my way through Vietnam as quickly as possible in our short time we had left.
The next dish we needed to come across was the legendary Pho, a national obsession that all travelers must try if they care about their dignity. We walked into a tiny restaurant with two friendly waiters cheering on the Venezuela – Uruguay game. I made a quick mental connection that the two socialist countries probably had an affinity for one another, and outwardly cheered on Venezuela to the waiter’s delight. We drank beers with his staff as we were served a steaming hot bowl of pork, rice noodle, spicy broth, and lime. While the food was fantastic, I’ll have the memory of talking to the incredibly friendly staff as the more lasting part of the experience.
Whenever I travel, I always find my most favorite moments came from talking to the locals. Despite any breathtaking sights I see or foods I try, nothing can beat the feeling of talking to people who are so different from myself. After the Pho, we spent the better part of the afternoon chatting up the locals in the gorgeous public park along Sword lake. Easily my favorite part of the day, we met a handful of interesting and strange locals who had a ton to say despite their (very) broken English. One man introduced himself by placing a dead squirrel on the floor and trying to tell us it had just fallen from a tree overhead. We asked him about his shirt, which had huge marijuana leaves plastered all over it. We spent some time talking about the differences in drug culture between our two countries. We also met two students eager to practice their English with tourists, and they came prepared with worksheets and notebooks to jot down our interaction. To my right was an older man offering me a free smoke, and even though I politely declined, he was still inquisitive about what we were planning on doing during our stay in Hanoi.
After chatting up the locals, we made our way to a sleeper bus that would take us from Hanoi to Phong Nha. We were off to explore the world’s largest cave system and experience rural Vietnam.
