We arrived in Hà Nội on Wednesday afternoon, 31 October, after traveling for about 22 hours (16 from Houston to Taipei via a route which took us north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska before heading south along the Japan Sea, followed by a layover and the final leg). After a shower and a brief rest, we headed out for an odd stage production which used local musicians, dancing, singing, and acrobatics to tell the story of local rice farmers; it was interesting in an odd sort of way, but exhaustion was settling in, so we were glad the show was relatively short, and we followed it with a welcome dinner back at our old-town hotel (The Hotel Marvellous!).

Thursday we headed out early for a tour of the city. Hà Nội is a thriving metropolitan area of nearly eight million residents living in a mix of traditional and contemporary neighborhoods. A cyclo tour (the local name for a bicycle-driven rickshaw) through the Old Town and the French Quarter gave us an intimate, street-level view of these bustling traditional neighborhoods; the photos provide a sense of the environment.

Compared to Delhi, Hà Nội has similar traffic patterns dominated by the ubiquitous motor scooters which zip everywhere, but Hà Nội is much quieter because the Vietnamese drivers are less inclined to perpetual honking. The air is filled with exhaust, but doesn’t seem to be as polluted as in India, and the streets are definitely cleaner. The only way to describe the traffic is “organized chaos,” everyone weaving about, managing to avoid one another by subtle movements and changing speeds while almost never coming to a stop. Crossing streets is ever an adventure as we step gingerly into the flow of traffic, moving steadily forward as bikes, scooters, and cars negotiate their way around us.

After the cyclo tour, we visited the very interesting Ethnology Museum which featured exhibits on many of the indigenous groups native to Viet Nam, the Hoi Chi Minh Mausoleum and the surrounding complex of buildings from the time when the French dominated the country, and the Temple of Literature before ending our day with a water puppet show (a Vietnamese tradition dating back to the 11th century in the Red River Delta) in which puppets, controlled from below, are made to appear to dance on water.