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Vietnam By Train: Ahoy Hanoi!

All week long our roving correspondent Claire Duffett will be sending back her travel reports from Vietnam. Any questions or suggestions? Let us know and we'll have Claire answer them for you.

The seasoned—and spoiled—traveler often complains of desensitization. After viewing a few world wonders, everything becomes banal. So when an amazing place comes along, particularly one without a ton of hype, it restores a traveler’s basic belief that there are places in the world worth seeking out and crossing great distances to experience.

For me, that place is Hanoi. When I traveled the length of the country last month, I started in the capital, and it exceeded all expectations. Sure, its inhabitants say the city was even better 10 years ago, but it's still great and I don't risk sanctions by my home country now for visiting it.

Perhaps you’ve heard the city is quaint, with vendors lining narrow streets, selling bowls of steaming pho and two-cent glasses of ice-cold local beer. I promise—it’s more charming than the image in your mind right now. And even if people have mentioned that the country, while economically liberalized, remains staunchly communist, you can’t conceptualize the ubiquity of political propaganda—with posters, flags, and Ho Chi Minh’s face virtually everywhere.

Even if someone told you Hanoi’s dotted with lakes surrounded by parks with giant, looming trees and well-kept promenades, you can’t imagine how green the city truly is. In Asia, the “pave paradise, put up a parking lot” ethos is often an unironic way of life. Historic buildings are demolished and replaced with high rises; lakes filled and parks razed to make way for new developments. In Vietnam, a country that spent most of the last century at war, it’s amazing that its centuries-old architecture—and trees—somehow managed to survive.

Our only warning is that once in Hanoi, you might be met with a strong and sudden urge to never leave. However, if you stick around for only a few days, here are a few Best Ofs in town.

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Tags: Amazing-Race-10 / Amazing Race Maps / Hanoi / Vietnam / Ulaanbaatar / Mongolia / → All Tags

Amazing Race 10: "This Race Is Like Childbirth"

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Chasing Racers is back, with a brand new Amazing Race 10 mashup. This map will update the morning after every new episode. Send along tips, rumors, gossip, locations and spoilers to our map editors, become a member and comment on the stories below, and add to the Jaunted-Flickr photo pool to get in on the fray. Enjoy.

Not only is "this race like childbirth", according to Lyn and Karlyn, but also, at times, watching this race is like childbirth--um, or what we assume childbirth might be like--c'mon people, spice it up.

In any event, we're already down to nine teams, and this week they dash from Ulaanbaatar to Hanoi, on a million-dollar race around the world. Last week, we kept our eyes on creepy Petey and bemoaned the loss of the cheerleading duo of Kellie and Jamie. This week, it's all Duke and Lauren, as Rob and Kimberly keep their bickering under the radar.

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Tags: Vietnam / tourist attractions / → All Tags

Ho Chi Minh Escapes from Madame Tussaud's

Looking-at-old-preserved-dead-guys tourism doesn't top our list of things we like to do on vacation, but sometimes we just can't help ourselves. Take a visit to Hanoi in Vietnam, for example: A solemn trip to Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum is a natural part of your stay. "Uncle Ho" is on display inside a deep dark granite building, modeled after Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow.

Do time your visit carefully, though. For a month each year, the old guy disappears somewhere for "maintenance". He does make it back every time, despite the fact that he actually wanted to be cremated. He must be pretty unimpressed that his body has been getting touched up every year since 1969. We found the old fellow looking a bit like he's long dead. Guess that's because he is.

[Image via pluripotent/Flickr]

Related stories:
From This Small Cottage [Bangkok Post]
Fast Food and Jeans in Hanoi [Jaunted]

Tags: Food / Food Porn / Restaurants / Vietnam / Hanoi / → All Tags

Get Pho for Your Money

Sticky Rice did some pho sampling in Hanoi the other day. This is important information--there aren't going to be very many cold nights left before summer begins, and we're not the biggest fans of steaming bowls of soup in the summer. Then again, none of those places deliver from Hanoi to Manhattan anyway, so we're stuck drooling from afar.

Nonetheless, he comes away pretty impressed; the beef broth stock is tasty, and the strips of beef--so thin that they are cooked by the heat of the broth--are only briefly stirred, but not too rare. It's topped with chili and lime--just like the peanuts at Trader Joe's!

American soups need more raw meat cooking in the soup while you're eating it; that's the clear conclusion to be drawn here.

Related Stories:
·   Famous Pho [Stickyrice]

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Fast Food and Jeans Belong to the World

It can be easy to visit a new, "exotic" place and be bothered by all the stuff that seems inauthentic to you. Why are all the locals wearing blue jeans? Don't they have some colorful, non-Western clothes to wear? And why are they drinking those Cokes and eating all those burgers and KFC? For you (and us), Dreaming of Dreaming of Hanoi has a few choice words:

I can't stand foreigners who visit Hanoi and complain about the new restaurants that serve non-Vietnamese food (I have heard it too often lately). Excuse me? People have a right to eat whatever they want. A growing number of Vietnamese can afford to eat out and you think it's your right to decide that they should stick to traditional Vietnamese dishes because an upscale Italian restaurant ruins your idea of what Vietnam "should be," doesn't quite meet up to those "exotic" standards you were expecting?

I am equally annoyed by foreigners who claim to "love" Hanoi and insist that anyone who enjoys the modernities of life there--restaurants, bars, hotels, and swimming pools, is not truly "experiencing" the country, or is somehow being immoral. I think it's the opposite. To the locals and those who call it home, Hanoi is all of the things that now constitute it; it's constantly growing and changing.

Ironically, it is the distinguishing characteristic of the type of expat/tourist I talk of to want to have the "authentic" experience, while avoiding anything they feel might "ruin" it. . . . They go to Asia to find the simplicity and serenity that they feel has been lost at home, so they get angry when others there live a modern lifestyle. . .  People exist and live and grow and strive for their own sake, not for yours. Do not go overseas and treat the places you see and the people you meet as if their only purpose in life is to "spice up" your world and make your travels more interesting. . . .

Image: McDonald's grand opening in Bangalore, India

Related Stories:
·   The Exit Sign [Dreaming of Hanoi]
·   Civilizations Other Than Our Own [Antidote to Burnout, via Carl Parkes]