Hanoi: Day 6

I wish I could tell you that we’ve taken advantage of every second of being here. But for one full afternoon, Aaron and I stayed in our room at Cocoon Inn and watched Rick and Morty. I don’t regret it, but I am properly ashamed. As our time in Hanoi draws to a close, we’re exhausted. Hanoi is a lot. Walking is a high-stakes obstacle course involving dozens of moving vehicles. People approach you on every corner practically shoving their wares into your face, following you as you tell them no. And then there’s the barbecued, whole animals (I won’t list which animals, because it is genuinely, gratuitously upsetting) that will just be right there next to you when you least expect them. It’s a lot. It’s a whole lot. And we were drained. We were sick of dodging scooters that seemed indifferent to our mortality, we were sick of saying no over and over to panhandlers and peddlers, we were sick of food with fish sauce and chili and meats that were not processed until they were unrecognizable as meat. We needed to rest and watch cartoons, and we needed to do it for several, lazy, useless hours. And then we needed pizza. 

Pizza 4 P’s is a kind of expensive, kind of fancy, totally worth it restaurant. Sometimes, especially after a couple of weeks of eating some very pungent foods, you just need pizza. It was the only place we’ve been to on this whole trip that had a wait, so I’m guessing we’re not the only westerners that needed a break. Our pizza was a classic, Italian-style pie topped with chorizo and salami on one side, and four types of mushrooms on the other. In any circumstances, it would have been delicious, but it really hit the spot for us. I don’t know if it was one of the best meals on the trip, or if it was just stars aligning at the right time in the right place, but this pizza was perfect. We followed it with some respectable panna cotta and fruit sorbet, then walked home and watched more Rick and Morty until we fell asleep. It wasn’t an adventurous day, it wasn’t a memorable day, but it was a vacation day. 

Besides, the next morning more than made up for it. We were picked up early by Ethnic Travel for our tour of the Red River Delta. The Red River is one of the largest rivers in Vietnam, running from Yunnan in China through Hanoi and out to the Gulf of Tonkin. Several beautiful towns and provinces surround the area south of Hanoi, above where the river lets out. We were set to visit Binh Minh province and Trang An, both known for their magnificent, towering, limestone karsts. The van trip took 2.5 hours, with a stop for us to buy some overpriced The North Fake (not a typo; they claim to be North Face, but they’re not fooling anyone) jackets. The weather had turned cool and a little rainy, so we didn’t mind shelling out some cash for a jacket that could keep us from being miserable on our entirely outdoor itinerary. The van dropped us at a walking trail with our guide, Yin. Yin told us about Vietnamese culture as we walked, and asked us a bit about American culture as well. What did we eat for breakfast? What did they feed their dogs? (Rice and meat.) What fruits were available in our markets? What eggs were available in theirs? (Duck, goose, chicken, and quail.) When did we get married? When did they get married? (18ish.) It was nice having an exchange, rather than just the one-sided explanation you would expect from a guide. The path was flat. It meandered through karsts and rice paddies, finally ending up next to a canal.

The canal was our next stop. We were taking a rowboat down its green waters. We got in before we realized Yin was not coming with us. He was leaving us in the care of the boat’s rower, an older-looking Vietnamese woman. She spoke French fluently and English not at all. I was too busy looking at the canal and its many fuchsia water lilies to notice the most interesting thing about her, though. Aaron clued me in; she rowed the oars with her feet, pushing them forward with the pads, then pulling back with her toes. We rowed leisurely past houses with a picturesque, old-world look. We rowed through tall, reedy grasses and under a Japanese-influenced dam gate. We rowed until the narrow canal opened into a wide river, filled with ducks and shaded by giant karsts. 

We came to the end of our journey at one of these limestone behemoths– or at least, that’s what I thought. Our rower (row-ess?) was trying to tell us something in French. I looked from her to the karst in front of us, trying to figure out what she wanted. Why was she pulling out a headlamp? Wait, was she rowing us into that pitch-black hole in the karst formation? Would we even fit? We ducked our heads as she pushed through, continuing down the river that wove through the cave. 

Inside, the lone light came from her headlamp. Hitting the water, it reflected the stalactites and crevasses of the cavern’s roof. We were floating through an eerie mirror-world, ourselves at the center of its perfect, horizontal symmetry. I was torn between gawking at the cave’s welled walls and looking out for potential concussions, but I managed. We rowed through two of these limestone caves and both times it was thrilling, spooky, and unforgettable. 

The second cave birthed us into an edenic cove, slowly revealed to us as we traversed from our dark wonderland. The cove was walled on all sides by limestone thrusting from the earth, blanketed in lush, green growth. Sun gilded the grass. The air was still as stone. The water was glass. The quiet gathered around us like mist– palpable, soft. Everything, at once, felt exactly as it should be. No atom in the universe was misplaced. I took Aaron’s hand, inhaled the silence that smelled like sea-grass, and felt the sweet sting of tears welling in my eyes.

I don’t know how long we stayed there– it was somewhere between 10 minutes and an hour. Eventually, our rower began to take us back through the cave from whence we came. Before we could enter the karst’s cavity, though, the silence of our paradise was pierced. A chittering ruckus was coming from the top of the rock formation. A troop of monkeys had intruded into our natural temple. We stayed a few minutes more to watch them leap from branches and cling to vines, then returned the same way we came. 

For lunch, Yin took us to the house of a local family. It had two rooms, constructed of concrete, in addition to an outhouse. One room had two matress-less beds flanking a coffee table with a few chairs around it. Behind the table, centered in the room, was a fruiting mandarin tree. These trees are for Tết, traditionally symbolizing prosperity and luck because of their fecundity. The second room was a bare-bones kitchen. Outside they had a garden, appointed more plentifully than their indoors– with fruiting trees and flowering shrubs. This is where we took our lunch. The matriarch of the family brought us dishes until no more would fit on the table: buttered, slow-cooked cabbage, banana blossom salad, fried rice paper rolls filled with pork and seafood, glass noodles in broth, some sausages I was told were “only for Vietnamese people,” (fair enough; my stomach was too sensitive right now anyway), fried fish, stir-fried chicken, and glazed tofu. We capped it all off with a cup of green tea, patting our bellies satisfactorily, ready for the next part of our day.