A Country of a Thousand Faces

Hanoi

We leave the hotel and are immediately catapulted into the chaos of the old quarter. On the pavements street vendors, with the typical conical straw hats on their heads and their shoulder-pole baskets, set up improvised stalls, blocking the passage of pedestrians. Add to that the parked scooters and bicycles and the shop counters, and walking becomes truly impossible. Yet if you want to experience the essence of a last, still authentic corner of Indochina, a real step back in time, you have to wander through this labyrinth of streets and alleys that is the old quarter. Away from the crowded, lively streets of the centre is the Temple of Literature, founded in 1070. It is a rare example of Vietnamese architecture.

In Ba Dinh square, on the other hand, is the most important pilgrimage destination in all of Vietnam, namely the austere Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, which dominates the great square — empty and ghostly — from the top of its staircase, with a large Vietnamese flag flying at its centre. Every evening, at the theatre, you can watch the water puppet show. Leaving Hanoi without having seen this fantastic artistic expression, typically and uniquely Vietnamese, would be a crime.

Montagnards – Flower H'mong

The train for Lao Cai departs from Hanoi station at 10:00 pm and takes the whole night to cover the 340 km of the route. The tracks follow the course of the Red River and wind along steep slopes. The train proceeds at a very, very slow pace. This is the region of the montagnards, a term coined at the time of French rule that has survived to this day and indicates the ethnic groups (more than 50) living in northern Vietnam, close to the border with China and Laos. From Lao Cai, another 2h30' by off-road vehicle is needed to reach Can Cau, the main reason for coming all the way down here. Every Saturday morning one of the most exotic markets in Vietnam is set up. Such is its scenic setting, in the midst of an unparalleled ring of mountains, and because it is organised by the Flower H'mong ethnic group, whose women are famous for their striking multicoloured clothing.

They wear skirts and aprons embroidered with floral patterns, a cylindrical headdress, and show off silver necklaces, earrings and bracelets. In the bargaining, money isn't always needed; the ancient custom of bartering still survives. Red chillies, rice spirit and tobacco are the best-selling goods. Among the stalls wander teenagers who with us would be high-school girls and here, instead, are already mature mothers carrying their babies on their backs in a kind of pouch. A four-hour trek to the village of Ban Pho, in the surroundings of Bac Ha, lets you immerse yourself in the social reality and observe the lifestyle of the Flower H'mong. Among the hills echo the ancient, rural sounds of people working in the fields. They grow rice, wheat and also opium. They are very hospitable, and seeing you arrive — along roads rarely trodden by tourists — they will invite you into their homes.

At the end of the day people leave the fields and return home with a full basket on their backs. The Sunday market of Bac Ha, the main one in the area, is stormed from early morning. In front of the shops and stalls the vendors have breakfast eating pho bo, rice noodles in broth. In the area reserved for trading animals, besides chickens, pigs and water buffalo, the puppies stand out, whose meat is considered a delicacy. The market is bustling, but not frantic.

The magical Vietnamese landscapes

From the mountains you come back down to the plain, this time using the paved road no. 70 and no longer the railway, to admire the classic landscapes that most identify Vietnam: the Perfume Pagoda and Tam Coc. Reaching the bottom of the valley, you cross intensely cultivated fields where hundreds of people work on a patch of land, elbow to elbow: men busy guiding a rudimentary ox-drawn plough and women intent on raking the field. They are farmers paid by the state. Arriving at My Duc, a branch off the main road leads to Chùa Huo'ng, from where, in a sampan — a narrow, low rowing boat similar to a canoe — you set off for the Perfume Pagoda, going up an arm of the Song Day river, amid a spectacular rocky landscape. The boatmen are strictly women, since the Vietnamese government has reserved this work for families who lost fathers, husbands or sons killed in war.

After about 2 hours you leave the boat and begin the path that leads to the top of the mountain. Along the climb you pass other pagodas, but it's the Buddhist altar on the summit that is the holiest place as well as the most beautiful, since it lies in an enormous cavern reached after descending a long staircase... Now that the sampans, on the way back, let themselves drift, but only just, in the faint current, the martyr women row effortlessly and on the river conversations pass from one boat to another. You can hear the sounds of this strange language of monosyllables floating in the air. Before Tam Coc, a short detour leads to Cuc Phuong park, inaugurated by Ho Chi Minh himself in 1963, the last uncontaminated area left in Vietnam, where wild flora and fauna have been miraculously preserved.

Following an 8 km circuit you feel the thrill of venturing into a lush tropical forest, gripped by the suffocating humidity and the incredible sounds of the jungle. And if you really don't get to see the gibbons — endemic monkeys at risk of extinction — you can observe them at the Primate Rescue Centre, where once rescued they are treated and prepared to return to their natural environment. At Tam Coc you follow, now again in a sampan, wrapped in an unequalled view, the winding course, this time, of the Ngo Dong river, which now and then disappears beneath the large greenish mounds that are the landscape feature of the place. Everywhere impressive rocky spires rise from the ground, apparently impassable, but you pass them by sailing underneath in the boat. Here the sampans are propelled in a curious way: the women, half reclining, work the oars with their feet.

Along the road to Halong City the minibus crosses endless expanses of rice dotted with a thousand colours. Those are the colours of the clothes of the women busy with the harvest, with the characteristic conical hat on their heads.

Halong Bay

In the bay geology has run wild, creating a surreal marine landscape made up of thousands of limestone pinnacles emerging from the emerald waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. The view, unique in the world, seems the work of an enchantment. By renting a boat, besides the chance to visit stunning caves, relax in the sun and take endless swims in the warm waters of the Chinese Sea, as you make your way deeper into exploring the bay you come across genuine floating villages. As you approach them the boat slows down to pass through them safely. The children don't play in the street, but in the water. The taxis aren't cars, but boats. The houses, the school, the petrol station — everything floats. In Titop Island bay the moon is an almost perfect circle above us; in this lost world it seems impossible that barely 31 years ago a terrible war was being fought.