Vietnam 2008

From Hanoi airport to Hanoi central, I saw two accidents. Imagine a family of four could sit comfortably on a single motorbike--baby in the front of the father (driver), another child, and then the mother at the back--going the speed of any car or bus. Imagine a motorbike driver with 7 bottles (think giant Arrowhead) of water! Imagine talking on the cell phone while driving a motorbike!! Now pull back wider and imagine plenty of honking and all the motorbikes in the world on the same road with cars and buses. Well, there was a traffic jam, and by the time I got to take a look, two women lied on the side of the road, about 10 feet apart, one dead. The other one moved a little in a pool of blood. Plenty of folks just stood around to look. The other accident was a truck blocking multiple lanes with the front totally smashed. When we got to town around rush hour with a million motorbikes, cars, and buses, our tour guide thought it a marvelous idea for each of us to ride a pedicab to see this hub. The pedicab sits the passenger in the front with the driver behind. Imagine forging onto the herds of cars and bikes and street people; it was a wild ride and I inhaled a pound of dust and exhaust fume, but I felt incredibly alive and calm!! In the morning I saw the Ho Chi Minh memorial; it was a nice square, perhaps not as grand as the Red Square or Tianmen Square, but impressive too. In the afternoon, I did the unthinkable, I crossed an intersection in Hanoi and was not killed. As we stepped out from our exquisite dining experience back onto the wild sidewalk, a very thin man with nothing on his brown skin but a tattered pair of shorts stood looking on people eating noodles al fresco. As soon as one stood up to walk away, he grabbed the leftover and ran to the opposite side of the street. Seconds later he came back, returned the emptied bowl, snapped up a piece of scrap on the ground into his mouth, and quickly dissolved into the crowd.

Today I'm in the middle section of Vietnam, a city called "Hue." Here I'm in a beautiful hotel after another great dinner--I'm being fed like a thanksgiving turkey 3 meals a day. Tourists are well taken care of as we carefully step over muddy pools and cracked roads into our 5-star hotels. I asked the tour guide how he slept last night; he said he found a local inn where he rented a bed, but he was kept awake because the ceiling dripped rain water most of the night. It is late evening, my 10 travel companions have bid me good night. I am in the hotel lobby making use of the free internet. About 10 feet from me is a band in the bar playing romantic Shubert sonatas.