Tour of duty

I stand on the curb and wait for the traffic to pass, and wait some more, until it feels like I could spend the rest of my life lingering on the edge of this small street in Vietnam's capital.

There are no lights, no crosswalks, no stop signs. Just an interminable growl of passing motorbikes, nearly all beeping their high-pitched horns. I'm with a scrum of tourists in something of a pedestrian's purgatory, stranded in front of a parade that won't end.

It takes a few days to learn the proper road-crossing etiquette: barrel ahead (even if death seems probable), don't stop, and never retreat. The bikers, who have de facto right of way, expect human roadblocks, but they expect them to move forward. Stopping or changing direction tends to throw off their high-speed, instantaneous adjustments.

How to avoid becoming road kill was one of many lessons learned on a spontaneous trip to Vietnam. My girlfriend and I had come on a whim from Hong Kong when we realized it was only a two-hour flight to Hanoi. We had only vague ideas of what to expect, beyond cinematic visions of communist peasants in conical straw hats spouting quotations from Ho Chi Minh.

On the road from the airport, we find a flat, Midwestern landscape marked more by factories and skinny, regal-looking homes than by rice paddies. Old signs bearing government propaganda fade next to flashy billboards advertising mobile phones. Merchants pack narrow sidewalks, hawking everything from socks and roses to shoelaces and warm baguettes.

We spend the day taking in a millennium of history in the Old Quarter, a densely packed district of "tunnel" houses (built tall and slender to avoid real estate taxes), murky lakes lined with willow trees, and everything from low-rent hotels to street-side noodle bars to stores selling lacquerware — all catering to the thousands of foreign tourists who now visit Hanoi every year.

We devour a US$3 spread of noodles, vegetables, fried rice, and fruit juice. We pass rickshaw peddlers, sidestep motorbikers selling rides, and ignore touts pushing "massages" and forged copies of Lonely Planet guides. We watch a water-puppet show, a bizarre poolside opera with fireworks and ear-splitting arias.

After an exhausting day struggling to pronounce xin chao (hello) and cam on (thank you), we return to our three-star hotel — relatively expensive at US$40 a night — and collapse. As soon as we shut the door, we realize our mistake of having chosen a room just a few floors above the street. The din of the pollution-choked city fills our sleepless dreams with bright green waters, the placid sea we saw in all the windows of Hanoi's many travel agencies.

So, in the morning, we slurp a breakfast of steaming noodle soup, lug our backpacks into the street, and find a van headed to Halong Bay, the tourist industry's most aggressively advertised slice of paradise.

It's a three-hour ride over flat farmland and potholed roads. We make a mandatory stop at a shop hawking crafts said to be made by victims of Agent Orange, a defoliant US forces used in the war. We arrive at a port where swarms of tourists are loaded and unloaded from an armada of sampans.

Our boat is a large, wood-paneled vessel with a dragon's head carved into the bow. It's a floating restaurant, with sleeping cabins and a crew dressed in white. We board and sit for the first of a succession of three-course meals, variations of shrimp, tofu, rice, french fries, and watermelon, all washed down with Tiger beer.