The flight to Hanoi was on a small 66-seater ATR72 plane with just two propellers. It always feels a bit unnerving when you’re so used to flying everywhere on huge planes. With the little planes, you feel every bump and the right-hand propeller was right next to my window; it felt a little too close to my head! After landing safely, phew, it was a slightly more sober ride in a flashy car into Hanoi, although as soon as we hit the city our driver indulged in the Vietnamese style of zigzagging about through the heavy traffic.
The Gondola Hotel turned about to be very nice; far nicer than the last place, thank goodness. When we stepped out of the hotel to stretch our legs, the staff were concerned that we weren’t wearing warm enough clothes. It is a lot cooler in Hanoi and we really could have done with a jumper when the sun went down, but it was still about 19°C or 20°C, and most westerners were still in shorts and t-shirts, despite some of the locals being in ski jackets! We ambled around the Old Quarter of Hanoi and tried to orientate ourselves. It is laid out in a fascinating way and is a hive of activity. The original lay-out consisted of all the shops in each street selling the same goods. So there was Bat Su selling china bowls, Cho Gao selling rice, Hang Non selling hats, Hang Quat selling fans, Hang Bac was for silversmiths and Hang Ruoi sold clam worms…not sure what you do with them…. and so the list goes on. It’s a bit more muddled up now, but there are many streets that still sell mainly one item. We found one street that seemed to be mostly selling sunglasses, another was only shoes, another was bags and one that sold mainly just baby clothes. One shop was displaying dresses that would have been every transvestite’s dream and it was quirkily situated next to a shop selling some sort of engines and motors; an interesting mix, obviously not along the lines of the original lay-out. All the traders are out on the street trying to sell you something or coax you into their shops. One old man who tried to sell Rodney something on the street, looked surprised when he received the very British answer “not today thank you”, not sure where Rodney pulled that comment from…..
Mid-afternoon we decide to have a Thai meal, just for something different, and the meal was so big we couldn’t eat anything else for the rest of the day. At 5pm we sat down in the Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre opposite Hoan Kiem Lake. There were eight stories and we were given a programme written in English which explained what each story was about. The musicians were set to one side of the ‘stage’ and they played a mixed array of instruments, some of which we have never seen before, and the music was hauntingly lovely. It is a skill that originated in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, but in the theatre the stage is a square pond of water, about 8 metres wide and about 0.75 metres deep. A bamboo screen was hung at the rear of the pond to hide the puppeteers. The puppets seemed to float on the water but were attached to a long bamboo pole which was operated from behind the screen.
The first story involved a very colourful water dragon swooshing about in the pond. He met a fairy, which as Rodney said, looked more like a colourful swan. Apparently, they fell in love, got married, laid a big white egg which cracked open and gave birth to 100 Vietnamese children, the start of the Vietnamese race. There weren’t actually 100 puppet children, more like 20, but they leapt about like fish in the water and two of them could actually do somersaults! It was all very sweet and the wooden puppets which averaged about 40cms high, looked lovely and colourful dancing around on the water. The whole show only lasted about 50 minutes and at the end all of the puppeteers appeared from behind the screen and that’s how we knew how deep the water was.
Still full from our large lunch we passed on dinner, wandered the streets a bit more and then opted for an early night before our next adventure tomorrow.
