Surviving Hanoi’s crazy traffic

SARAH FIFE 

 

 

IT was dark and rainy when we arrived at Hanoi airport. Jon and Norah, our travelling buddies that we met in Beijing, had organized a hotel room for us in Hanoi.

So after waiting on the airport shuttle which idled in the parking lot for well over an hour waiting to fill up, we finally trundled into Hanoi sometime around 10pm. The shuttle dropped us off a good two kilometres from our hotel, so we got an impromptu introduction to this rainy city as we trudged and skidded our way to the hotel.

The first thing that hit us about Hanoi was that it was just as filthy as Beijing. The sidewalks were a mess (both grimy and in a great state of disrepair) and seemed to be more intended for motorbike parking than for pedestrian traffic.

 

The second thing that hit us about Hanoi, luckily only figuratively, was the traffic.¬†Hanoi’s traffic feels more like a motor cross race track. Statistically, they say that Hanoi’s population is about 6 million people, but nearly 4 million motorbikes.

And they are everywhere, in a never-ending horde that pays no heed to traffic laws or, in some cases, the laws of physics. Vietnam is the country where the things that you learned in kindergarten may inadvertently get you killed.
Here, I specifically mean looking both ways before you cross the street.

The best way to cross the street in Hanoi, we discovered, is to pick a spot on the opposite side of the street, focus on it, count to three, and then walk slowly out into the road without looking into the traffic. Trust me, looking at the oncoming traffic only makes it worse. If you proceed at a constant pace, the drivers will act like a stream of water, moving effortlessly around you as you make your way across. The key is to maintain a zen-like state of tranquillity and not alter your pace or act all skittish like a typical tourist might and try to jump out of the way of any of the on-coming traffic.

Those kinds of shenanigans will likely land you in the hospital. Yes, crossing the street is an art form in Vietnam, and one that you are wise to master early in your visit. So anyway, by the time we made it to our hotel, we had successfully crossed the street a half-dozen times and were feeling quite pleased with ourselves. And our mood only further improved when we saw Jon and Norah waiting for us in the lobby of the hotel.

They’d been in Hanoi a few days already, and had become friends with the hotel owner, Ha, and the night manager, a charming bloke named Dung.¬†The hotel was brilliant, a modern-looking little place that was a far cry from the bed-bug infested dump we had to deal with in Laos.

Hanoi was already turning out to be a great place. Then we woke up the next day and had to deal with the true chaos that is Vietnam’s second biggest city.¬†We spent the day wandering around the town, practicing our Vietnamese, which consisted entirely of “khong” and “khong, cam uhrn”, which means “no” and “no thank you”.¬†With all the touts that came at us as we walked down the streets, that’s all we needed. And the touts here don’t lose any points for ingenuity.
My favourite is the “walking bookstore”, which is a guy who is lugging around a sizable pile of books crammed into an over-sized shoebox, trying to sell them to tourists.

There is usually a good selection of Lonely Planets, at least one copy of The Quiet American, and several books about the war (which, logically, they refer to as the American War, rather than the Vietnam War). The real kicker is that these books (which sell at about $4 a pop) are all photocopies that have been bound to look like the real thing. Pretty ingenious bit of entrepreneurship, if you ask me.

About a week ago I would have agreed as well except that, having loved Bill Bryson’s “Down Under”, I picked up a copy of “Notes from a Small Island” only to crack it open and find that the inside of the book contained none other than “Down Under.”¬†Other touts include women carrying bamboo poles over their shoulders from the ends of which hang baskets of bananas or pineapples.¬†If you tell them you don’t want any, they try to thrust the bamboo contraption onto your shoulder, ostensibly for a photo-op, and then guilt you into buying something.

We also encountered numerous men offering rides on motorbikes or cyclos, the usual conversation opener being: “Cyclo?¬† Where are you going?”¬†One guy asked if we wanted to go to the market and, when we replied that we did not, asked if we wanted to go to the moon.¬†Well, yes, I would like to go but probably not in a contraption that looks like a wheelchair with a chain-smoker peddling me along.

Even after some seriously strong coffee, we were fully exhausted from a combination of repeated rebuffing of the hawkers and using nerves of steel to cross the roads.¬†Hanoi had started to lose its shimmer for us, but we weren’t concerned because we know that it would serve as a great home base for some short trips around northern Vietnam.