Spring festival vacation snuck up upon me, and soon after my final class I met with Tori at the train station and we were off to guangzhou.  from there, after being stared at eating dinner, we boarded a night train to Nanning, our final stop in China.  We passed the day as any Chinese would: following our stomachs from one meal to the next.  It was a delightful precursor to boarding for Hanoi, our first stop on the grand adventure tour, 2010.  We slunk over the border in the dark of night, passports stamped and awoke to early morning Hanoi, already revved up before the sun had yet to break the horizon.  Good morning, Vietnam.

For any I’ve not already informed, I love Hanoi.  The old quarter of the city is the perfect mix of narrow, illogical streets blending together, corners stuffed with shops and cafes, the hustle of people, of movement, of life at any hour.  It is a lively city, and one that can easily be enjoyed from one of the aforementioned cafes sipping a beer or iced drink. If there is a vision of my retirement years to be had, it is in the cafe culture of Hanoi.  But that was a later venture, as first Tori and I had business to attend to.

My sister, it would seem, had yet to visit the embalmed corpse of our beloved Uncle Ho, despite his mausoleum standing as a monument to concrete and Communism.  So we went, and saw the man himself.  Regardless of political bent, Ho Chi Minh is one of the 20th century’s more fascinating people. His repose fits well with the benevolent cartoon depicted across the nation’s propaganda, and he doesn’t seem to inspire emotions of the same caliber as Chairman Mao.

The succeeding day we took one of the organized trips up to the Perfume Pagoda. This meant a van ride then an hour in a quiet row canoe going upriver, past some of the karst landscape of the region and farmers at work irrigating rice fields. Loved it.  Our rower lady spoke no English and the only others were a Vietnamese couple, so the peace was disturbed only by Tori’s voice, a running theme thus far to my life.

Upon debarking, we wound up the hill to the peak, where the pagoda is.  The entire route is being overcome with bamboo and metal sheet shops in preparation for the onslaught of Buddhist believers during Tet in February.  For now though it was quiet and pleasant.  The pagoda itself is actually a shrine in a cave, a lovely setting though not what I’d initially envisioned.  Guess China taught me a different meaning for pagoda.

The final day of Hanoi was saved for cafe-crawling, moving from one to the next, ordering beer or iced tea as the urge struck.  We managed to sneak in time for lunch as well, watching the world pass by on the streets below.  This is my favorite way to savor Hanoi, and we left reluctantly at dusk, clambering on a full night bus to be deposited sadistically alone in Vinh at 2am.  Our goal was to make the Lao border and overnight in Savannakhet.  Achieving this became a minor epic in itself, a story for another day.