HANOI'S OLD QUARTER

As the rain begins to fall hard outside the small grimy restaurant located down a small side alley in Hanoi's Old Quarter, elderly women selling cheap plastic coats hit the streets, hoping to benefit from those tourists with only a day or two to see the delights of the Vietnamese capital and who are therefore in a hurry to keep moving.

The rest of us, mostly residents and a few relaxed visitors, smile knowingly at one another, order another iced coffee and wait out the obligatory 30 minutes or so that the daily afternoon showers last in Hanoi, before returning to the now-glistening streets and beautiful architecture of one of the most atmospheric capitals in Asia.

Hanoi may have been the on-again, off-again capital of Vietnam since 1010 AD, but much of its visible appeal arises from the 50 years it was the capital of French Indochina in the first half of the 20th century and the blending of cultures that occurred at that time.

The French may have left a bitter legacy of heavy-handed governance and an unwillingness to see the end of their colonial rule without bloodshed, but in cultural terms the French gifted the country — especially Hanoi — with striking churches and cathedrals, a vibrant café scene and many of the buildings that to this day form the city’s Old Quarter – a warren of 36 alleyways that is the heart of Hanoi life and has been since the 13th century. Some of the older buildings remain as they were, including some exquisite guildhalls and temples, but many were either replaced by French-style buildings or have been strongly influenced in subsequent renovations. Despite this, the layout of the old streets remains. The old quarter also boasts the city’s largest market, the temples and other major tourist sites.

Once humming with the trades the streets are named after – Blacksmith Street (Lo Ren), Incense Street (Hang Huong), Pickled Fish Street (Hang Mam) and Coffin Street (Lo Su) to name but a few, the cramped winding alleyways are where residents and tourists alike stroll around in the evening, relax with friends and dine on fresh Vietnamese food, all among streets towered over by the peeling paint of the pillars and window frames of French villas.

Arriving by bus from the Chinese border for what would be a four-day stay, the crowded and tightly packed streets of outer Hanoi are abuzz as I enter the city in the early afternoon sun, reminding me of what I used to love about the country, while the roads themselves swarm with motorbikes and scooters that were — and still are — a ubiquitous feature of most Vietnamese cities.

Part of Hanoi’s charm is in this sense of disorder, and in the pockets of calm you stumble across all over the capital, where the sound of traffic is just a distant murmur. Walking down Hang Bac (Silversmith Street) in the center of the Old Quarter on my first day, I detour down many of these out-of-the-way lanes, where curious locals glance up as I step around the piles of vegetables strewn in front of them that they are peeling for nearby restaurants. Others smile and take a drag of their cigarettes, waiting patiently for the foreigner to go by.

Outside these oases the noise of the city is a constant companion and it can be disorientating during those brief moments when you are walking down a street and unexpected silence arrives, before vanishing just as quickly. These moments rarely occur in the Old Quarter of Hanoi, where commerce is king and where foot traffic, street hawkers and bikes jostle down the same narrow winding streets well into the night: crossing roads in Hanoi is an art form, and more than once I tensed up as a motorbike passed itches in front of me.

Before long I am once again lost in the maze of colonial architecture and street stalls at the heart of the city.

“Bananas, want bananas?” asks one old lady, heavily laden with fruit hanging in baskets attached to poles around her shoulders. “Lacquer bowls, lacquer bowls”, “T-shirts”, “authentic Vietnamese food”, shout others nearby.

Waking up in the morning on my first full day back in the city, I start to remember the subtle tweaks on French imports that enhance Hanoi life. In the square around the striking neo-Gothic St Joseph’s Cathedral, first opened for worship in the 1880s, swanky urbanites sit under the sun, drinking coffee and chain-smoking. Only, rather than fancy Parisian brands, they are smoking cheap Vietnamese cigarettes and drinking thick but delicious Vietnamese iced coffees that remain black even after milk has been added.

Vietnamese breakfasts are simple affairs, generally comprising a French baguette stuffed with an omelette and meat, bought from old women on the streets for less than a dollar. Evening meals are the main social time and the restaurants and bars around Hang Bac Street are filled with loud voices and hungry customers. I fill my time with eating, drinking coffee and endless walking.

The buildings of the Old Quarter are often camouflaged with workaday ground floors so it occasionally comes as a shock when my eyes rise from the knockoff T-shirt stores to the two- or three-story buildings towering above me. The elegant facades, with wooden shutters, elaborate wrought iron and balconies often overflowing with plants, seem to hark back to colonial times.

On the south-east side of Hoan Kiem Lake, the beautifully preserved opera house and renovated Hotel Metropole epitomise this time of foreign rule when Hanoi was the Paris of Vietnam and a playground for colonists rich in the rice, rubber and opium trades.

While the colonial-era buildings, with their overhanging bay windows and high, sloping roofs, are a key part of the character of the area, the ornate Vietnamese tube houses, which seem like they have been squashed in a vice (the legacy of a taxation policy that focused on the width of property fronts and led to the thin but deep building style) are equally important to Hanoi’s Old Quarter. On Ma May and neighboring streets, it’s possible to visit some of the larger wooden structures, which, despite their deceptively small entrances, extend several rooms backwards and would have been the homes and places of work for generations of Vietnamese traders, artisans and businessmen.

Nowadays few tourists even attempt to venture far outside the Old Quarter’s safe boundaries except on their arrival and exit, and when they head out on trips to nearby destinations.

I force myself to leave the comforts of the cafés to make the short pilgrimage to Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum, a large tranquil park complex a few kilometers away which houses a stark Soviet-era building where I go to pay my respects to the embalmed body of the man who more than any defeated the American and Southern Vietnamese forces in the Vietnam War. I am not alone. Thousands of Vietnamese school children stand patiently in line to see their main revolutionary hero and first president, who died in 1969.

Later I take the ten-minute lakeside stroll to Hoa Lo Prison, otherwise known as the Hanoi Hilton where Senator John McCain and others where held for years as prisoners of war. The former prison has seen better days, with half of the complex destroyed to make way for a towering high rise, but the bare cells and models of Vietnamese prisoners chained up in long rows during the French rule — as well as the guillotine on display — is a sobering reminder of a painful 20th century the country endured.

Back in the Old Quarter, the pace of the city quickens as the day goes on, and relaxing afternoons turn into lively evenings as restaurants explode into the streets, with large woks of fried rice and small plastic tables and chairs jammed full of hungry or thirsty residents and foreigners. Small stalls appear at the corner of Ta Hien and Luong Ngoc Quyen, where people cluster around for drinks, enjoying themselves in an al fresco way that I am sure the French would still approve.

Days pass and, as I get ready to hop on a bus to leave the city, I remember what a friend of mine who had lived in the city once told me – that after moving away from Hanoi he wrote a lot less poetry; the city just sort of forced him to write. I had been too busy relaxing to write, but I could certainly understand his nostalgia for the place.