Hanoi In Three Visits
By: Evan Ingalls
Tags: Travel Writing, Travel, Việt Nam, Hanoi, Vietnam

Hải Phòng City Museum

Our first destination outside of Hanoi was the fairly large but sleepy city of Haiphong (Hải Phòng). It has a population of over 2 million, making it the third largest city in Vietnam, but it felt, at least where we were, like it could have been a town of 50,000. The streets were not jammed with motorbikes the way they had been in Hanoi, and there was little in the way of tourist attractions (and none of the accompanying hustle). Life seemed to have geared down several notches.

We checked in to the clean and bright Hotel Bảo Anh in the evening (what a lovely change—a bright, windowed room that was big enough to walk around in!), and distributed literally all of our belongings on the bed, already feeling like we had over packed. After accounting for all of our items, finding we’d already lost a few, and choosing to get rid of a few more, we went out to wander the streets.

Haiphong’s French design is easy to spot

As we passed shops and restaurants, patrons and purveyors alike sitting outside, we experienced something surprising. It was the phrase “Xin chào!” (pronounced “sin jào")—meaning “hello”—and it was directed at us! We looked up to see smiles. Maybe it was just a particularly friendly resident with nothing better to do? It happened again. More smiles. We said it ourselves to some folks we passed, and received the same pleasantries back. It was no fluke: we were interacting much differently with the residents of Vietnam’s 3rd-largest city than we had with those of its 2nd-largest. These residents were, in fact, interacting with us! It was exciting. We were all smiles! This is what we had come traveling for, we thought. This is the kind of positive interaction with people halfway across the globe that you just can’t have by sitting in your kitchen. You can only have it by being out there. THIS is traveling!

But then…what did that make our time in Hanoi? Not traveling? Not worth it? Not a real experience? Is the worth of your travel dependent on the friendliness of the people? If you are not connecting to a place, or not having a good time, are you not really traveling? Isn’t all travel equally valid, since you are experiencing life wherever you are? Is that not the point of real travel—to see life in another place as it really is, not just as we wish it to be? But then...if it is all equally valid and real, why does it feel so much better to walk down the street in Haiphong than it does to walk down the street in Hanoi?

This is one of travel's magic tricks: it challenges your assumptions, but it does it so subtly that you believe you are challenging them yourself. You find yourself examining some aspect of the world that you had not considered before, or holding something out in front of you in a new light, and all of a sudden you are reassessing your framework for viewing the world. We didn't know why Haiphong felt so much better to us, or why it was comfortable to be paid attention to (or uncomfortable not to). But now we were aware. Now what to do with that awareness?

Night, it seems, is the best time to wander the streets in Haiphong, as the whole town comes out to sit together in sidewalk cafes and restaurants and enjoy being alive. We had enjoyed strolling a number of blocks before we approached a wide, multi-street intersection and saw in the middle, instead of rushing cars, a circle of motorbikes and people. We filtered in among them and saw what the spectacle was they had assembled for—a lion dance!

It was Tết Trung Thu, the mid-autumn harvest festival. Many cultures have harvest festivals, and the Vietnamese are apparently no exception. Here it is the harvest of rice that is being celebrated. There's a solid week of festivities leading up to the festival day, with many celebratory activities. Performances put on, special sweets sold in decorative sidewalk tents, and the most buzzed-about activity: the lion dance. We had seen them in Hanoi—teenage boys jumping around in flowy lion costumes and trying to solicit donations from passersby. But they hadn’t been much to write home about.

Here the skill level was much higher. There were two teams of dancers, and they really knew what they were doing. They shook and swerved under their costumes, several men to a lion, and truly made the costumes look like living animals. They could leap from the ground onto each other's shoulders, causing the lions to rear into the air fantastically. They jumped over each other and onto platforms; they made the lions breathe fire and sowed the ground with firecrackers. They had unabashedly turned a city intersection into a performance space, and attracted a crowd as they set up their act. Many of the spectators were families, the kids perched on the motorbike seats to see over the crowd, or down in front on the pavement. The parents kept their headlights on to make a sort of ring of spotlights on the impromptu stage. The lion figures jumped and whirled. Children squealed. It was a vision of fantasy and imagination, and of pure joy.