Welcome to Vietnam

We are on a bus barreling its way to the heart of Hanoi's Old Quarter. The outskirts of the city are an emerald checkerboard of rice paddies, interrupted occasionally by the odd patch of corn or garden plot with all sorts of vegetable. There is not a brown spot to be seen, except for the small dirt roads that connect the fields. (Dorothy, we are not in Fresno any more!) This outlying area is still predominantly rural.


The simile is overworked, but appropriate: Hanoi is very much like a frenetic anthill of activity--even more appropriate when you see the small motor bikes laden with impossibly large cargo: a huge TV, fifty dozen eggs, teetering stacks of all manner of vegetables, large blocks of ice, and, of course, human cargo: two, sometimes, three to a bike, babies and children too, all waving in and out of the larger vehicles with what appears to be suicidal abandon. Horrendous accidents seem inevitable (although in reality they rarely happen) and the air is punctuated with the almost constant beep of truck and motorbike horns: warning, chiding, complaining, retaliating.

This, more than anything else, is my first impression of Vietnam: a dizzying blur of traffic; a cacophonous symphony of horns.