Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Merch
pictures and videos from my final days in Hà Nội
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Here’s the last set of images from my recent trip to Vietnam. To see photos, videos, and some explanations from the first few days in the capital city Hà Nội; a homestay by Sông Lô (the Lo River) in Hà Giang, the country’s northernmost province bordering China; and a two-day motorbike ride on the famous Hà Giang loop, you can start at the beginning of the series here.
This set includes a visit to the Ho Chi Minh homestead along with lots of scenes from the streets, shops, and food. Enjoy!
After the exciting and soul-stabilizing three-day trip to Hà Giang and the sleeper bus back to Hà Nội, I was back in my room at the Chic Boutique about 4am Tuesday. It’s hard for me to believe that was two about weeks ago as I sit down to post the rest of these photos. I had three days left to enjoy the city, keep eating, and do some shopping.
My first night back in the city, I was able to intersect with my old friend Dirk, who now splits his time between Jacksonville and Bangkok and was in town doing some research for a class on Vietnamese women’s history. We got some food at Thao’s Pub right across from my hotel, and downloaded our recent lives while walking around the Old Quarter. We eventually stopped in a nice European-style bar where the staff were gearing up for a crowd that would show up after well after Dirk and I were both in bed.
One morning, I headed a few km west of the Old Quarter to see the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum and presidential homestead and walk through the botanical gardens. I wasn’t nearly as concerned about the condition of his preserved remains as my picture suggests, but it was about to start raining and this was my second failed attempt to get inside during the very limited hours. Next time.
Around the side of the big mausoleum building, you can pay about $1.75 USD to enter the presidential homestead and gardens. There’s not a lot to see (the Ho Chi Minh Museum is a separate place nearby I would like to visit on another trip), but I was surprised to see a collection of Uncle Ho’s classic cars on display. The top center picture below shows the small house where Ho Chi Minh lived for a few years in the 1950s; behind that is the koi pond and orchard.
Much of the city is crowded with people going every which way, and the sidewalks are littered. But the area all around the presidential complex is fastidiously groomed, and guards on every corner promptly blow their whistles to keep people on the expected paths.
Wandering around a great city for days produces, as I assume is much the same for most people, a rather busy series of vacillations between revelations and intentions of a very personal sort and however many minor flickers of stupidity can fit in the space. Mostly, I crush down both variations without sharing, but a few phrases that popped into my head would not be quiet.
Ho Chi Merch
Right outside the rather serious and closely monitored presidential compound, I walked through an area clogged with souvenirs, ice cream freezers, and fake traditional-style wood carvings and cheap jewelry made in China.
The Things They Carried
I was going to use this terrible and self-consciously dark Tim O’Brien pun for a separate post of all the things being transported through the streets day and night by bicycle, motorcycle, and cart, but I’m too lazy to dig for all the pictures and will put only a few here. This phrase does feel a bridge too far, but I’ll leave it here anyway for those who know and hope it’s okay.
North Fake
On the first day we met at the hostel in Hà Giang, one super enthusiastic guy noticed that I sometimes say silly things and insisted on practicing his pronunciation with me repeatedly until the word “pun” sounded a bit less like “bun.” It’s a hard transition. Here he is when we crossed paths the next day at one of the many scenic snack bars cranking music along the road.
After hearing from my driver Thanh about how much he likes the admittedly fake North Face pants he wears on the rides, I was happy to deliver the most obvious pun to the other driver: North Fake. I guess that’s really all I gave back to the country, but I did try to be a good guest.
Back in Hà Nội, I bought a North Fake backpack to hold all the new stuff I accumulated over ten days, along with some up of those pants for my sons to take on their trip to the Pacific Northwest next month.
Viet-bong
Another troubling but inescapably catchy phrase was planted in my head by my friend Benoit. As I shared in the posts from Hà Giang, bongs are all over the place. These sold for $8-$20 USD.
Here are some scenes from my strolls around the city in the final days.
Since there is good food every few yards, and since motorcycle taxis are available simply by making eye contact, there’s really no need, as a traveller, to have a plan or keep track of where you are or even what time it is in this extremely safe capitol city. It suited me perfectly.
One kind of deliciously melancholy day, I didn’t really do anything but walk with my thoughts and indulge in some of the creative French-Vietnamese pastries that caught my eye. Yes, I sometimes eat multiple pastries in the same day when I’m in a city with special bakeries. It’s okay. Eventually it was nap time, so I stood still for just a minute until I was swooped up by a Grab taxi and taken back to my hotel. I loved this city so much that day. Here’s about 30 seconds’ worth of my ride through some less congested areas than the Old Quarter where I spent most of my time.
Passing outside the botanical gardens:
A beautiful section of the city—these arching trees make the streets so lovely even in the heat and frequent rain of July:
On my final night, I shopped for some things I meant to bring home as I walked down towards Hoan Kiem Lake, which is closed off for a weekend street market starting every Thursday evening.
After getting an overview of coffee and tea varieties from a small shop along the way, I bought two packs of lotus tea and several bags each of the Vietnamese dark roast called Blue Mountain and the special variety called Weasel, which is potentially an extraordinarily expensive product created from beans collected after they being partially digested and excreted by wild palm civits. The beans have a sweeter and milder flavor due to the natural fermentation.
At $6 for a 100 gram bag, I can be sure my purchase is free from the animal cruelties that have developed to maintain this global delicacy; Hà Nội coffee vendors recreate the fermentation effect chemically without the harm or the cost of capturing and farming civets. This was another “fake” I was glad to buy. He also threw in a bag of Kopi Luwak, described as a combination of Arabica and Robusto beans given the Weasel treatment. Finally, I was pre-admonished not to store the beans in the freezer “like Americans think they should do” (guilty!). So my quick dip into the coffee shop was yet another leisurely, friendly, conversational, and 100% enjoyable experience with Vietnamese service.
A few blocks down, I also bought a beautiful hand-tailored linen skirt from a woman who has been running a private shop for twenty years following her father’s forty year tenure in the same location. I would have bought some of the really interesting pants she had as well, but my generously proportioned American butt was not fitting into them. She tried to make me feel better by saying that the women from another country I won’t name here have even bigger butts than mine these days!
With that reassurance in my pocket, I stopped at another outrageous bakery and bought some artisanal Vietnamese chocolates, matcha-dipped cashews, and candied dragonfruit.
After taking in the environment at Hoan Kiem Lake for a while and digesting the fact that my trip was over, I decided to take one of the red bicycle taxis back to my hotel. It was something I had never done because I like to stop and look at everything. This time-lapse video shows my one-mile ride. It was about 10pm on a weeknight, so the streets were not very crowded.
Back in the hotel, up the spiral stairs to room 308, and one more look out the window:
After some sleep, I woke up determined to get another good Hà Nội experience to sustain my memory. Before my 8:30 car pickup for the airport, I walked around the immediate area one more time. I had a small bowl of phở bò from a street stand and of course an egg coffee. One of the young people working the coffee shop made a pretty good and very timely joke about Trump when he realized I was American—I won’t repeat it here. His co-worker was a little nervous about it until I assured them it’s okay—he’s our greatest public ass, and we all make fun of him.
When I came to Vietnam in 2019 with my family, we were surprised to hear so many positive comments and enthusiasm for Trump. The failed and foreshortened “Hanoi Summit” between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jung Un had occurred less than two weeks earlier—tattered banners still hung in the streets, and unsold souvenirs clogged the shopfronts. We brought back a pretty weird t-shirt showing both men’s faces. Trump’s popularity in Vietnam seemed to be at least in part a reaction against Obama for failing to sufficiently push back on China’s aggressions in the South China Sea. Trump was going to be the strongman and fix everything. Just like he would get North Korea to disarm—though he didn’t even last until lunch on the first day of the summit.
Here’s a somewhat inscrutable but satisfyingly absurd t-shirt I brought home from this trip. My sample size is certainly limited, but this time it felt like Vietnam’s public narrative about the true character and worth of this former “‘leader’ of the ‘free world’” has changed quite a lot. I didn’t encounter anyone who seemed to be a Trump fan or any assumption that a sane American would like him either. Let’s hope we can say the same for ourselves in November.
