Reflections on the Way to Halong Bay

Monday morning we were picked up at our hotel at 8:00 am to set out for Halong Bay. It was a 3½ hour van ride northeast of Hanoi through three different provinces of Vietnam. Traveling with our group were people from Germany, Switzerland, France and New Zealand.  Many of them were taking 3-month “holidays” backpacking all over Asia.

The drive through the countryside was a nice way to get an overview of different Vietnamese life styles. Almost immediately after leaving Hanoi, we were driving through rice paddies.  Even the center space in the on/off ramp to the highway was a rice paddy.  I think that they’re at a point in the season where they’re just maintaining the fields. The planting is finished and it’s not yet time to harvest.  From what I could see, the people who were working were using more traditional methods – simple hoes, not a lot of machinery, very labor intensive. It makes me wonder how they can sell rice so cheap in the supermarket when you think about how much man power goes into growing and harvesting the rice.

At first, we were in what I would call an interstate. It was a toll road (sorry – no EZ Pass) but there were women on the side of the road selling baguette-style bread out of baskets. I’ve been surprised by how much bread we’ve seen being sold.  I don’t remember that in China.  It must be one of the few things the Vietnamese retained from their French colonial period.

There were lots of things that stood out while we were on our drive. First, there are small cemeteries that pop up in the middle of rice paddies.  It appears that they are above-ground burials. They are comprised of a brick or stone rectangle about three feet tall with a mound of dirt protruding from the top. I found it odd that people would bury their dead in the middle of the place where they were planting food. I don’t know enough about the way in which the human body decomposes to know if it could contaminate the food.

We passed several sprawling factories, probably where they make much of the clothing that is imported into the US. They’re sort of in the middle of nowhere.  Each one has an ATM machine out front.  We also passed the Vietnam/Canada Vocational School. I’m not quite sure what goes on there but it was a huge complex.

The small “villages” also pop up in amongst the rice paddies much like the cemeteries.  They remind me of the way Grassy Sound used to look driving into North Wildwood.  They are completely surrounded by the water they use to flood the fields.  One even had a water buffalo grazing in the back yard.  There were chickens for sale on the side of the road and at one point I saw a man carrying a rather large, slaughtered pig on the back of his “moto”.

In other areas we passed through small towns with sidewalks and traffic lights.  We hit a traffic jam in one town.  It was just like sitting in traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway.  At the center of the traffic jam, Vietnamese police were attempting to direct traffic.  I have decided that they are not any better at directing traffic than US cops.

Halfway through our trip, we stopped at a rest stop much like South of the Boarder on 95 but without the billboards telling you that you were getting close and no fire works for sale.

It’s hard for me to tell which buildings are under construction going up and which ones are being torn down. So many of the structures appear to be in some stage of completion. I’ve seen absolutely beautiful houses right next to vacant structures full of trash.  In that respect, I guess it’s really not much different from the areas of Philadelphia that are undergoing gentrification.

I would be curious to know how heavily the areas we passed were bombed during the war.  It really wasn’t that long ago that the war ended and a country this poor probably doesn’t have the capital to re-build as quickly as a country like the US.

We passed two areas of construction for which the signs on the fences surrounding the sites led me to believe that they were going to be the equivalent of US mixed-purpose, planned community.

As we got closer to Halong Bay, we passed a train – half passenger cars, high freight cars, and not moving very fast.

Another thing that struck me as odd when we were driving is the way in which “merchandise” stands are arranged.  We drove through one area that must have had a dozen pineapple stands, one right after another.  Each one was arranged the same way – four shelves of whole pineapples on the bottom, bags of cut pineapples hanging from the top.  Another area we went through was the same thing except with bananas.  Even in Hanoi at the markets on “shoe street,” each booth had the same exact display.  It seems like it would be better business if they mixed things up a bit.