Two Sweaty Weeks in Vietnam - Part 1

Thinking it would be a nice change of scenery from the late autumn gloom and leaflessness of late October in Vermont, I signed up for a tour of Vietnam. Indeed it was a change of scenery, sure enough. I might go so far as to suggest culture shock. We arrived in Hanoi 12 days ago, and I can't actually explain why I thought it would be pleasantly cool and bugless, especially after I groped around Google and found some weather information which all agreed that Very Hot would be the norm for October, but there we were after 30 hours of air travel, groggy and stumbling, with our glasses fogged over in the 100% humidity of the middle of the night, being met by our tour guide and dragged off to our beds in a barely living condition.
As it happens, Hanoi has embraced air conditioning with a convert's fervor and our room was refrigerated to Arctic. Which was just as well, since the beds were equipped with down comforters suitable for use in polar conditions. This trend continued as we made our way from Hanoi south through Danang and points south, hitting, along the way, all the temples and ruins and sites of war and mayhem from the tenth century to the present. All of these are discussed in considerable detail in great numbers of guidebooks, so I will skip over all that and just mention the things that they don't tell you in the guidebooks.
The first thing to overwhelm the unsuspecting tourist is the numbers of motor scooters everywhere, countrywide. In Hanoi they go everywhere, sidewalks, alleys, in any direction on the roadways. They emerge from peoples' houses and shops and interstices between street vendors. Most houses have a ramp out to the sidewalk so that the family scooter can be brought in at night and parked in the livingroom. They are used for all forms of transport – cargo, family outings, commuting. Occasionally a mobile haystack may appear on the highway with driver barely visible under the load. Other cargo might be many sacks of grain, or stacks of boxes, or lumber or crated chickens. Anything you can get a bungee cord around. In terms of family outings, the largest number of people I saw on a single scooter was Mom, Dad and the 3 kids. Typically riders sit side-saddle and are perfectly relaxed, chatting on their phones or buffing their nails. At rush hour the rippling flow of scooters is like the mighty Mekong in flood.
Many of the riders, especially the girls, wear masks that cover, at a bare minimum, their faces from their eyes down. Some cover their foreheads and necks as well, and very often a cotton jacket with a neck up to the earlobes and specially constructed sleeves that extend to cover their hands. This is to prevent the sun from getting at them and sullying the perfect whiteness of their tender young flesh in a similar stab at maidenly beauty as those sleek young coeds who poach themselves on the beach so they can dazzle the viewing public with their golden tan.
The second thing to catch the eye, after the scooter swarms, is the overhead wires. In certain areas of the city, any city, but especially Hanoi, wires are strung in swags from pole to pole, and on certain poles there are one to many coils of spare wire so that it would be possible to add to one swag or another. It was never made clear what the nature of these wires was, whether telephone, electric, or merely bizarre ornamentation, but I would guess that if ever Vietnam ran into an embarrassing shortage of copper, they could easily harvest a year or two's worth from the streets of Hanoi alone.
Then there are the vendors who are everywhere selling anything from scooter tires to chicken parts, but those of us who are clearly tourists most commonly attract those offering Buddha statues, jewelry made in China, clever little carved pigs, fans, post cards, straw hats, flyblown fruit, faux-silk scarfs, spoons made from buffalo horns, chop sticks made from bamboo, and in very upscale areas bags of coffee made from weasel manure.
There are several popular vending techniques: First, as soon as you spot a creature that looks like it might be American, you snatch up the first object that comes to hand and thrust it in the face of the mark, shouting “Madame! Madame!” When the mark moves on politely shaking their head and murmuring “No thank you,” you repeat the attempt, perhaps with the same item in a different color. Continue this until the mark has moved off into the territory of the next vendor.
Technique No. 2 cuts in when the the hook is set and the victim has actually bought something, 2 scarves, say. So they have handed over the money and picked up their treasures and are about to leave when the vendor blocks the exit with a flamboyant display of more scarves. It is not clear whether they imagine that every passing tourist aspires to own more scarves than Imelda Marcos has shoes, or if we look so much alike to them they think this is a new person in need of neckwear.
The third technique is popular when there are great numbers of vendors hawking the identical line of junk. In this case, if the tourist manages to fight their way past the first one or two vendors and finds something at the third, the owners of the first two will stand at the elbow of the thoughtless purchaser, tears gathered at the corners of their eyes, pathetically offering whatever it was that had just been bought from the triumphant number 3.
In the more upscale establishments, those prosperous merchants with an actual roof, and doors, the potential buyer is closely followed around by a helpful employee who will try to guilt you into buying stuff by unfolding everything in the place, taking things down from the top shelf, pulling stuff out of drawers and so forth whether or not the customer has shown the slightest interest in any of it.
To add interest to the shopping experience, the local currency, the Dong, is worth about 20,000 to the US dollar. The main problem with this is getting the order of magnitude right. If you offer a 10,000 note for something worth 100,000, it is a sure bet that the shop keeper will point out your error. If your error is in the other direction, however, it may go undetected. Of course, US currency is always welcome and there is almost nothing in the country that cannot be had for One Dolla. It would seem that the vending public imagines that all white tourists arrive in Vietnam with a large suitcase full of small US bills. In any case, keeping track of all those extraneous zeros is monstrously difficult and is responsible for much of the widespread “I can't think what I spent that $100 on” anxiety.
In case I failed to mention it, it is very hot in Saigon. Pay no mind to the residents who will tell you that it is cool and pleasant. 90 degrees is not cool and pleasant.
Further observations anon...