02 May 2024

 

Hanoi

We offer a wide choice of cheap flights to Hanoi together with Hanoi hotels, tours and self-drive itineraries.

Hanoi's new dawn

A once war ravaged city stirs from a deep sleep - and David May finds it lively, charming and rejuventaed.

Hanoi, Vietnam - Bicycles in Hanoi Hanoi, Vietnam - Street sellers of the Old Quarter Hanoi - Hanoi

1 Bicycles in Hanoi 2 Street sellers of the Old Quarter 3 Hanoi

IT COULD BE ANY OLD luxury bar in South East Asia but it’s the music that makes Le Club so unforgettable.

Just a stone’s throw from the Red River, Miss Nhu, sitting bolt upright at an old piano beside her clarinetist Mr Tam, ushers in cocktail hour with a stiff and squeaky rendition of Johann Strauss’s classic Blue Danube.

Behind the lovely French-colonial lobby of the century-old building that now houses the Sofitel Metropole Hotel, Le Club Bar is a downtown magnet for business people, diplomats and motley expatriates who inhabit the rabbit-warren recesses of Hanoi, capital of former North Vietnam, now capital of the United Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

For most people over 40 the image of North Vietnam is still hazy monochromes of the lumbering B52s that dropped 7 million tons of their deadly hardware on it, of its wispy-bearded leader Ho Chi Minh, gazing benignly from a hundred billboards inspiring his pith-helmeted foot-soldiers to scurry down the dangerous southerly trail that bore his name and of beaming actress Jane Fonda draped over an anti-aircraft gun that was aimed at other Americans.



NOW, AFTER LITTLE MORE than 25 years, the few visible scars of Vietnam’s most recent and most horrific battle are confined to the country’s war museums, to the stoic survivors of some clearly terrible injuries and to a few remaining unfilled bomb craters in the farms and rice paddies that surround Hanoi’s Noi Bai International Airport. Although the tourism infrastructure is still being developed in Vietnam and provincial travel can be a bit of an adventure at times, the rewards more than compensate for some occasional discomfort.

Founded in 1010 AD and regarded as Vietnam’s greenest and most beautiful city, Hanoi has a comfortable lived-in feeling and that decayed old-world charm of French colonial architecture.

This is still inexpensive Asia as it used to be before great commercial and financial ant-heaps grew up on every city corner smothering the quaint old buildings, before concentrated shopping centres drove artisans and merchants


from colourful little shops in crowded alleys and where diesel delivery vans displaced the bobbing balanced baskets that dangled from the shoulder poles of the ubiquitous “coolies”.

But Hanoi has the feel of a city stirring from a deep sleep. After years of post-war depression, the city is coming alive with new cafes, hotels, restaurants, the popular karaoke bars and even “hostess” bars called bia om, with private rooms for the lovelorn.



BICYLCLES, MOTORCYCLES, PEDICABS (cyclos) and a growing number of cars vie for space on Hanoi’s wide boulevards, where the only obvious traffic regulation is to blast the horn as loudly and as often as possible for no apparent reason or result and where crossing the road, even at marked zones, can be a footslogger’s nightmare.

There are reputedly 5 million motorcycles Vietnam, a country of 88 million people and the number of bicycles is impossible to count. Most of them, surely, are in Hanoi.

Hoan Kiem Lake, just south of the Old Quarter, is surrounded by a girdle of green parklands. At dawn these parks come alive with Hanoians of all ages exercising in unison as if to some ethereal, unheard command.

Even the streets and any other unoccupied spaces become open air gyms with people jogging, stretching, walking, practising tai-chi, writhing through a host of unrecognisable callisthenics and playing badminton on any available footpath.



THE FOOTPATHS THAT LINE Hanoi's broad avenues were once peppered with personal air raid shelters - vertical concrete pipes with lids and just big enough to shield one person.

Now they bristle with an army of hustlers pushing postcards, old coins, Swiss Army knives, postage stamps, cheap paperbacks about the war and shoe-shines, even if you’re wearing Nike Airs. Despite a dozen “No thank yous”, they still brush them vigorously as you try to walk away.

Near the Dong Xuan State Market by the Red River, men squatting on the footpath sell caviar, fine French wines and champagnes and Russian vodka, all at ridiculously low prices.


The real shopping in Hanoi happens in the Old Quarter, a confusing jumble of narrow and colourful alleys, restaurants and merchant stalls where whole streets are often devoted to selling one type of commodity.

There is one that sells just paper products, others that specialise in beaten metal, silks, shoes, noodle shops, funeral equipment, clothes and lacquerware.



IN THIS NEW WELTER of private enterprise, vendors sell everything from noodles and rice to green imitation army pith helmets complete with red stars.

They tout T-shirts with regulation portraits of Ho Chi Minh along with others emblazoned with “GOOD MORNING VIETNAM!” To complete the irony, you can buy them, and just about anything else in Vietnam, with American dollars.

Just down the road, staff are busy at one of Hanoi’s most popular nightclubs stacking Coca-Cola into the fridges, American cigarettes into the vending machines and American dollars into the till for another night’s rage. It’s called Apocalypse Now.

This article was published in the September 2003 DialAFlight magazine and all information was correct at time of going to print.

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