Highlights of our first week in Hanoi

Wednesday, July 6th — The Famous Vietnamese Water Puppets
The Hanoi Water Puppet theater is located near the banks of the Hoan Kiem Lake, a very romantic little lake with benches, shady trees (lots of weeping willows) and great sidewalk cafes all around it. It takes about 30-40 minutes to walk all the way around the lake. According to Carly’s guide book, there are huge ancient water tortoises that live in the water too. One extra large tortoise is carefully preserved in a glass display box in the pagoda at the center of the lake, which can only be reached by crossing a pretty, arching red bridge and paying a 3000 dong toll (US$ .20) He is the spirit of the lake and the star of a fifteenth-century Hanoi legend in which an Vietnamese king rows across the lake to announce his victory against an invading army and the tortoise appears to ask for his sword back, which the king borrowed from him for that particular battle. Surrounding the lake is a very, very beautiful and old neighborhood called The Old Quarter, which houses most of Hanoi’s touristy silk and souvenir shops and hotels.

Carly and Erin and I tried to guess what the water puppets were all about before we arrived at the theater. At first we thought they were like marionettes, attached with string from above the stage. Boy were we wrong! The puppets were little fishermen, women with baskets, fish, ducks, boats, dragons, etc. made from very colorful and elaborately carved wood and attached to long poles. The puppeteers were out of the audience’s sight behind a beautiful red facade of a pagoda and grass mats which hung down like curtains. This whole backdrop sat in a pool of water. The puppets would ‘enter’ the water stage by being pushed through the grass mat curtains on their poles. Because the poles were under the water, the audience could only see the puppets.

The best part of the show was the fantastic traditional Vietnamese music, performed by a troupe of eight musicians who played old-school Asian instruments (such as a wooden flute; a zither; a sort of upright violin-like instrument; something that we decided looked like chopstick castonets; something that looked like an ancient banjo; and big drums, among others) to narrate the puppet stories. Two women (one old and one young) sang heartbreakingly beautiful songs, wearing traditional costume and holding big red fans. Each song was a new puppet story. We really couldn’t understand it all because it was in Vietnamese, but we really loved the way the puppeteers made those puppets move and dance in the water! Much color, splashing and excitement! Most of the stories were really funny and some were sad! Apparently, water puppetry was invented long ago in the Vietnamese countryside as a form of ‘rice paddy entertainment’. (I guess they used to do this stuff in the rice fields way back when there was no television. Haha.) We had bought 2nd-class tickets to the show, which meant we sat 4 or 5 rows back from the stage with a whole busload of Chinese senior citizens who thought the puppets were a real hoot. They spent the entire show wearing toothless grins. We also received paper fans as souvenirs. It was awesome!

Saturday, July 9th — The Perfume Pagoda
Yesterday we went on a tour of the ancient Perfume Pagoda! We were picked up at our hotel by a fancy 15-passenger tour bus and driven two hours outside of town with about ten other foreigners and a young Vietnamese guide. I loved the ride in the bus! We journeyed down a bumpy country road and out of the windows watched hundreds of farmers –men and women– wading into the water with their pantlegs rolled up, planting little bunches of rice plants. Tiny children sat on water buffalo and swatted them with long sticks. We saw one little boy chasing a brown cow down the edge of a rice field while holding onto the cow’s tail and a women riding a bicycle with her baby in the front basket.

We arrived at a small town on a river filled with lily pads and lotus flowers. There we boarded three little red metal boats (4-5 passengers each) with one sweaty man each to row us far down the river, for about 1 hour, to the foot of a forest-covered mountain. Our journey in the rowboat, aside from the heat and sun, was extremely quiet and pleasant. We used umbrellas to shade us and watched fishermen cast nets and haul up long rattan fish baskets from among the rushes.

Our mountain ascent was very hot and sweaty and took a little over an hour. I had to stop and drink sugar cane juice along the way and fan myself. The juice was so cold and good — squeezed fresh right into my glass by a mechanical press. The trek boasted some dramatic views of the mountains and hills of the northern Vietnamese countryside, with lush green forest and tropical foliage as far as the eye could see. Finally we reached the top and passed under the arches of a very old stone gate with Chinese characters carved into it.

What we saw next was breathtaking: an incredibly long, wide stone staircase that led down into a great cave in the center of the mountain. Clouds of incense smoke floated out of the darkness and up into the late afternoon sunlight that glinted through the trees. Far below, from the inside of the cave, a monk was singing an sad, eerie song. The change in temperature was very dramatic as we descended the stairs. The outer section of the cave was as big as a cathedral but had cold, dripping stalagtites and families of bats flying in and out of it. Careful not to slip on the guano, we stepped further down into the cave by following its candle-lit stone staircases. At the bottom we visited a beautiful red and gold shrine and found a group of monks kneeling in meditation. The Perfume Pagoda is over 2000 years old! On the way back down the mountain, we stopped at a little mountainside restaurant. The tour included a huge lunch of watercress, tofu, beef, omelette and rice before our journey back to Hanoi by rowboat and bus.

My first week of work at the Center for Sustainable Community Development (S-CODE) has been very good, and I love the six people I work with: four Vietnamese women, one Vietnamese man named Dr. Long (the director) and one Australian intern — a 24-year old girl named Pip. (Pip came with Carly, Erin and me to the Perfume Pagoda!) I am working on a big project right now, a consultancy proposal for a Gender, HIV and Anti-Trafficking Prevention Program from the Asian Development Bank. Wish me luck, because I have a deadline of Friday by 5 PM!

More adventures coming soon…