We arrive in Hanoi after roughly twenty hours of travel. I suffer from some sort of undiagnosed, acute neurological disorder which makes flying very difficult for me. Consciousness is essentially just a self-contained conversation, but my little conversation is fundamentally antagonistic and weird and not ever very pleasant. One day the weight of choice will overwhelm me so completely that the reasonable part of me will be effectively suffocated and I will hurt someone. My fear was that this would most likely occur on a trans-Pacific flight and that I would be shot by Sky Marshals. If I were a Sky Marshal I would not know what to do with me and would probably shoot me too.
I suppose I could’ve taken a bus somewhere. Busses are nice because they can be pulled over in the event of emergency. I once rode the bus from Los Angeles to Honduras. It took about six months. Some busses were fine and showed films like Hudson Hawk. Others were full of thieves and heat and cockroaches and were not so fine. But I am tired of the places that busses go to. Thus, a twenty-hour flight, to Taipei and then to Hanoi. And as it turns out, I was just fine.
A man stands waiting for me with a rectangular placard that reads:
Pal
Gen
Tile
We drop our things at the hotel and begin drinking immediately. The streets are buzzing and dense with motorcycles; they merge and intersect lawlessly, like schools of fish. The only way to cross the street is to close your eyes and simply step from the curb; the organism will work its way around you, like blood cells parting at an arterial delta. By five o’clock I cannot see straight. We retire to the hotel and sleep for ten hours.
We wake around four A.M. to a typhoon. The sun comes up and we make our way through curtains of rain without any particular destination in mind. The boulevards of the Old Quarter are enchanting; the Parisian influence is apparent in the tight vertical corridors canopied by ornate balconies and trees. We had some pho, followed by some bia. Pho and bia work wonders toward diminishing phobia(s). I then received an exceptional massage from a very attractive and very young woman; she must have weighed around ninety pounds and looked of about fifteen years but had the hands of a lumberjack. Thank god she did not ask to jack me off.
The rain let up and we took in a presentation of Hanoi’s famed Water Puppet Theater. The little drama seemed typical of most Asian mythologies: magical tortoises, pelican courtship rituals, the quotidian struggles of lonely fisherman, and so on. As the performance is given several times daily, one might excuse the performers, particularly the musicians, for a notable lack of fervor; they might as well have been chewing gum. I will say that it was charming and rather well-executed. But these things bore me. I yawned and thought of Spinoza, of why there are things rather than no things. Afterward, Jasmin and I shared several drinks at a number of bars along Hoan Kiem Lake, and I probably bored her with a host of additional condemnations of water puppetry, string theory, monogamy, and so on.
Woke around eight A.M. Saturday, not particularly hungover but far from steady. I then learned that it was to be Culture Day, that sort of itinerary that is the sole construction of wives, the sort of day that is devoted exclusively to visiting places and things that you ought to care about, but somehow do not. I concede to reason and agree that, yes; a single day in which we imbibe a bit more history than alcohol would benefit both the mind and the liver.
An hour later we arrive at the Ho Chi Minh Museum and Mausoleum. Sadly, we are told that his preserved corpse is presently not on display; each year, Uncle Minh’s Cadaver is shipped off to Mother Russia for maintenance. Ordinarily, one is able stand in line with reverent Vietnamese and file past the glass-encased carcass through a little pylon-concourse of uniformed guards. It is a thoroughly macabre and senseless ritual and I love such things. Despite this colossal disappointment, the museum installations were wonderful, and far more sophisticated than I’d imagined.
After a bowl of pho we take a rickshaw to the Temple of Literature; the grounds were attractive, and I’ll not bore you with the history of the place. Far more noteworthy is the man Duon who accosted us upon our exit from the temple. Duon convinces us in spare but coherent English that three people can indeed ride comfortably on a single motorbike, and that he’d safely deposit us at our hotel. It was easier than it looked and turned out to be one of the great euphorias of my life. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
While on route to the Nam Hai Hotel, Duon mentions that we might like to better familiarize ourselves with the hill tribe cultures before traveling to Sapa by visiting the Museum of Ethnology; we agree, and glean a bit of the exhibits in under an hour while Duon waits outside. After buying us lunch (he would not allow me to pay), he insists that we go drinking at one of his favorite bia hoy spots. It is roughly noon.
After six or seven beers each I summon the temerity to ask Duon if he is capable of driving effectively. Duon answers that it is no problem. He says that a few days ago he accompanied a tourist girl from Alaska, and that they drank in excess of twenty beers each before straddling his Honda and rolling off to drink even more. I am familiar with the alcoholic prowess of the Alaskans; the cold gives one license to obtain this sort of expertise without guilt. And the Vietnamese, while corporeally a diminutive people, seem somehow no less indefatigable in their ability to drink steadily from breakfast ‘til sundown. Duon further explains that there exists no legal drinking age in Vietnam, and then boasts of his three-year-old son’s affinity for two or three beers in the evening. I’m not making this up.
A man asks for a high-five and grabs my cock in the restroom urinal, and I laugh it off and think of drunken toddlers. We agree to keep on drinking, as long as we can hold out, and Duon informs me that on the Internet there is a video of a man having sex with a cricket.
Sapa, Vietnam
10/08/07
