Hanoi, January 24, 2010

It's 6 AM and I have been awake for hours.

Walking the streets of Hanoi feels much like what I'd imagine white water rafting down a concrete river would be.  You are tossed and turned in all directions.  Motorbikes carrying every age driver imagineable weave and jerk and cross like surging rapids and you are left to navigate all this to simply cross the street.  It's maddening and exhilarating all in one and the storefronts and vendors and honking and smells blend together to let you know you're not in Kansas anymore.

Last night the fevered pitch was still going long after the makeshift restaurants with their boiling hot pots had served their last bowl of noodles to the locals gathered in circles on miniature plastic stools.  Next to a trashed out souvenir store is an exquisite art gallery.   Next to that a cheap t-shirt shop with mannequins that look like characters from Steven King's Children of the Corn.  Two storefronts down is an eclectic urban coffeehouse where tourists and local's voices bounce off the concrete floors and walls.  Look outside the window and women balance bamboo poles across their shoulder blades with scales tied to each end carrying everything from cheap plastic children's toys to unplucked chickens.  It's a mash up of old and new, modern and ancient customs.

After sitting and meditating in the quiet of my room, I head down to breakfast before meeting up with the rest as we climb into the mini-van with Trang and our driver.

First stop is the granite mausoleum housing the embalmed body of Hồ Chí Minh, where the Vietnamese solicited this preservation technique from the Russian's who've done the same with Lenin for his celebrated tomb in Moscow.   Hồ Chí Minh.is their papa - affectionately called Uncle Ho by all - their saviour, their first appointed President - having liberated them from the French in the 40's and whose attempts to do the same with the United States were curtailed by his death in 1969.  You are stripped of all camera's, phones and bags and ordered to march two by two into the maze of corridors.  You may not stop the flow nor should you talk.  When you enter into the curved room where the body is housed, guards in every corner surround the crpyt in solemn attention.  This is one attraction where you are immersed with locals who travel from all over the country to pay their respects.  Opened only a few hours on select days, we exit the structure and walk the palace grounds.

Across Hanoi, we explore the original grounds of the first school in Vietnam to teach and study the philosophies of Confucius.  Whether correctly attributed to him or not, the addage,  "Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart," feels appropriate today.  Most of the buildings have been rebuilt to match the scale and detail of what is believed to be the original.  Little remains here from historical life dating back over a thousand years.  Whether destroyed by war or time, Vietnam does not set a priority in preserving architecture.

We eat lunch at a friend of Trang's, whose restaurant lines a busy Hanoi intersection.  She thinks that our youngest traveler, Sara, would be an ideal match for her son named Casper who is studying abroad in Finland.  We tease Sara mercilessly for the rest of the day.  OK, I tease her.

Boarding the mini-van for the three hours to Halang Bay, several continue to marvel how all the traffic seems to give organized chaos a whole new meaning. No one really pays attention to lanes, including our driver as we pass and honk and move out of the city and into the continuous scenic movie of industry, farming, and Vietnamese life.  Things turn sober when we come upon an actual fatality along the side of the road.  A man and his motorbike lay lifeless on the side as locals gather around him.  Without anything covering his body, we creep along through the slowed traffic, witness to his mortality.  It becomes quiet after that until we reach our destination of HaLong City ~ known for the majestic HaLong Bay, a geological wonder vying to be placed on the registry for one of the Natural Wonders of the World.

Checking in to The Royal, a whitewashed hotel complex with conclaves of rooms across meticulous gardens, I stand on my balcony overlooking the bay.  Enormous jagged rocks, many in the shape of monstrous kitchen mitts,  rise out of the water.  Tomorrow we take a large tourist boat and go out there to get a bird's eye view. 

I sit on my balcony and watch night take over.  I am overcome by the enormous feelings of how the timing of my life escaped the common practice of being drafted for war.  Here I sit in solitude staring out at the bay - the polar opposite of countless others forced to be here under circumstances that paint humanity at it's worst.