Riding in from the airport we can already feel a palatable difference from the southern half of the country and here.  Gone are billboards and neon signs blinking CocaCola and Samsung.  In their places are bookshelves of houses stacked upon each other, and the frequent motor scooter dealership.  The entrepreneurial spirit of the south is replaced by one rooted in something more collective here.  Although not as populous as Ho Chi Min city, Hanoi feels twice as dense.  Narrow streets, and compact intersections leave little room for error.  A careless foot or elbow dangled off the sidewalk is pretty much guaranteed a scuff. There’s no shortage of things to see, places to explore and foods to try, but it’ll have to wait.  As quickly as we arrived, we’re headed for the train station boarding an overnight train for the most northern part of the country on the border with China.   

We settled into our bunks and turned out the lights as the old train trundled out of the station and rocked against the rails as it picked up speed.  We stared in silence as other peoples lives flashed past us.  An old woman carrying fruit in baskets dangling from a wooden pole balanced on her shoulder; kids playing in the river beneath a bridge;  a toothless old man; families at dinner, on the sidewalk, on a balcony, squatting and scrunched together on those colorful children’s stools.  At some point we swayed to sleep and woke the next morning for the hour ride up snarling mountain roads to Sapa town.  A day later we met Jane, our homestay guide in the town center and along with the rest of our group, started the muddy slog through the streets and up an uneven overgrown footpath into the surrounding mountains.   Four foot something and dressed in traditional colorful Muong fabrics, Jane set a quick pace through the wet misty air and would intermittently proffer stories of what life was like back in the mountains while we neurotically checked our shoes and socks for leeches.  Every twenty minutes we’d pass through another village; a cluster of wood beam and corrugated sheet metal huts tucked into the mountainside.  Happy barefoot kids ran past us playing a game rolling a tire with a stick while a girl no older than seven walked a few minutes behind them whipping a water buffalo along the road.  “Where you going?” they would yell after us, a local version of “how are you?”  A man on a motorbike dragged a 30 foot wood beam that he’d carried form town to improve his house.  We trudged through the ridges of rice paddies careful not to slip off the slippery edges in the on again off again rain.  That afternoon as we crossed over a stream and down into a valley where we arrived at our homestay.  A full extended family milled in and out of the house throughout the afternoon.  The house itself consisted of of wood fire in the kitchen, and low dining table in the room next to it.  The grandmother sat stirring a pot for that evening’s meal while the grandfather napped on a cot in the corner of the kitchen.  A ladder led to the exposed upstairs where mosquito nets and mildly musty sleeping bags were laid out for the six of us. Dogs, cats, and chickens freely roamed in and out of the house.  A pig was kept in a shed just off the cement porch.   Later that night, after several pots of tea and games of uno, we shared an authentic meal, in an equally authentic home, part of a world completely different in just about every way from our own.  As we walked back towards town the next day, past more villages and more rice paddies through which children were walking to school, we wrestled with the juxtaposition that although this is increasingly one of the more common tourist treks (after Ha Long bay) hawked in the tour agencies in Hanoi; and while the locals seem entirely accustomed to seeing all sorts of foreigners pass through their village snapping pictures like they would from the deck of a tour bus; visiting here is not a theme park ride, or pleasure cruise, its a true experience, if only for a brief moment, of a way of life wholly and completely different from the one we know.  It’s difficult, and isolated, and simple in a beautiful way.  It’s the type of excursion that will make you question what you really need to live.

We left Sapa on the overnight train back to Hanoi, where we hopped over a few tracks to catch another local train for a two hour ride south to the small city of Nimn Binh.  There are only two real reasons for a visitor to come here; the temples and the Ha Long Bay alternative of Tam Coc.  And while both reasons are spectacular, the part we’ll remember most will be bouncing down dirt roads on a rented scooter, surrounded by nothing but countryside and knowing that the only way to truly see Vietnam is from the back of a scooter. At sunset each night we’d jolt down the dirt road and onto the main street into town where we’d purse our mouths shut and close our visors against a torrent of insects, inhaling the cooling night air and waving hello at the goats and water buffalo watching us whizz by.  On our last morning we stole ourselves from the heat and raced the sun up the steps to the top of the Mua Caves for an early morning photo atop the spiked back of the dragon overlooking the valley below.  The view from the top was yet another a reminder that we are indeed very, very far from home. 

Back in the capital city we enjoyed the next few days playing chicken with oncoming scooter traffic, while searching for a suitable seat to feast on street cart made Banh Mi’s.  We zig zagged every street in the old quarter, circled the lake, and practiced our English with young students on assignment to engage in conversation to speak with foreigners.  One one afternoon we arrived five minutes early at an address which didn’t seem to exist in search of a mythical meal.  A shopkeeper pantomimed scooping chopsticks from a bowl and jerked his thumb down a dingy ally.  We stepped over puddles and ducked exposed electrical wires up a staircase to the living room of a family home.  Positive we’d gone the wrong direction we turned around and were promptly ushered back around by a grandma with little grasp of English.  We joined her husband in the family room. He had gotten a head start on their homemade happy water but wasted no time in insisting we join him in a shot, and then another, of whisky infused rice liquor.  At this point one of us was ready to make a break for it, before two strangers assured us that this was their second visit to one of the most unassuming and best meals they’d ever had.  What followed transcends the words and pixels on this page, but can only be described as the sort of thing that demolishes any preconceptions we may have ever held; a bowl of pho that will gloriously stain our memories forever.   

That last morning at our favorite art studio turned cafe we sat sipping orange tea and waiting out the morning thunderstorm rattling against the shutters.  Vietnam is like this; full of tranquil hidden nooks and crannies shuttered against the mayhem and mania of her streets; full of rooftop patios where we can listen to a guitar player strum to the ironies of life in tune with the pitter patter of the rain on the rooftop.  The Vietnam you want to see though; that’s the one in the small towns, some hours train ride from the cities.  It’s the one taken in from behind the visor of a helmet on the seat of scooter surrounded by a thousand other people on scooters melting into the dystopia.  Lost in chaos, melting, melting, into the landscape, swallowing bugs and smiling larger than life the whole time.