Then we started looking at flights. They all stopped in HCMC for heinous 6+ hour layovers before continuing on to Bali. We decided it would be easier, and more fun, to burn a few days of our Airbnb, fly to HCMC for those days, and take a nice, direct flight to Bali. Three days in HCMC would be a rushed, tourist cadence, but we figured we’d have more fun than if we’d skipped it entirely.

So… maybe?

The thing is, we’re not at all used to the tourist cadence. Our slow travel lifestyle has us staying in a location for from 1-3 months, so we’re used to taking our time to learn a place. We don’t have any muscle memory associated with the guerrilla rhythm of hitting a place hard and fast to squeeze the juice out in a few days and move on.

It’s not like we haven’t had successful short jaunts. We spent three days in Lan Ha Bay, for example, but we had boat trips scheduled for two of those days, and toured a couple of local caves on the third day. We had an itinerary, so it worked.

We hit HCMC with nothing more than a vague idea. It’s one of those places with so much going on, it’s not immediately obvious what you’d triage down to for a three day visit. Chinatown seemed like it would be fun, and there were a couple of good looking museums. Other than that, our “plan” was to walk the city and see what it had to offer.

Which, as a practical matter, meant that we just kind of wandered aimlessly for three days. We did go to Chinatown, and we did go to the History Museum, but HCMC is a big capital-style city (I know Hà Nội is the actual capital, but HCMC has a more capital city vibe – like NYC vs. DC), and it wanted a plan that we hadn’t prepared. Still, more fun that a six hour layover at the HCMC airport.

Chinatown

HCMC’s Chinatown, Chợ Lớn, was not at all what we were expecting. Because, you know, ignorant. I was expecting it to look like a US Chinatown, which is stupid, since I’m well aware that the entire Chinatown esthetic had been dreamed up as a marketing ploy by a pair of white US architects who had never been to China. So HCMC’s Chinatown looked just like the rest of HCMC.

The other confounding factor is that Vietnam, due to history and proximity, is closer to China culturally than any other country. So when we went to Chợ Lớn’s main market, Bình Tây, we couldn’t tell the difference between the Chinese products and what was on offer at Bến Thành, HCMC’s main market. Again, ignorance, but Vietnam already has a lot of Chinese products, so the untrained eye really couldn’t tell the difference. Bình Tây and Bến Thành looked pretty much the same to us.

This was Bình Tây, the Chợ Lớn market:

And this was Bến Thành, HCMC’s regular market:

Obviously a little different in layout and overall design, but not much to pick between them as one being quintessentially Vietnamese and the other being hardcore Chinese. If you swapped the photos, no one would know.

After Bình Tây we walked around randomly hoping to see some of Chợ Lớn’s history, as it dates back to the 17th century, but no luck. Maybe if we’d done more research and planned everything out we’d have known where to go look, but as it was, Chợ Lớn was kind of a bust for us.

Ho Chi Minh City Museum of History

We also got to the history museum. Which I only have a few pictures from, because, honestly, museum fatigue. In our ten weeks in Vietnam it felt like we’d visited scores of museums, and at some point they just become a blur. Especially, because the Vietnamese forms share a number of design elements with the Angkor-era carving we saw in Cambodia. That’s a lot of time looking at art with a common underlying framework. I’m looking forward to Indonesia, where Bali and Java have distinct artistic traditions.

These Cham sculptures are from the 12th-13th centuries. The first two were building supports for a tower that collapsed before it was completed. They’re in such fine condition because they were buried in the resulting rubble, which protected them from erosion.

Unsurprisingly, Dorothy found beautiful garments.

Aimless Wandering

As promised, the rest of our stay in HCMC was completely random. We had post cards to send, so we went to the main Post Office, which was in District 1, where we were staying.

We had one dinner at a one star Michelin restaurant, Mặn Mòi, which also boasted high-style architecture.

Another dinner was at the Bến Nghé Street Food restaurant, a food court style arrangement with over 50 stalls. We could even have had tacos. Which we didn’t.

Randomly walking the streets we saw…

Random topiary.

Random electrical lighting objects.

A random Indian temple.

We even went to a typical pagoda, the Ngọc Hoàng, not far from our hotel. And tried really hard to care. But temple fatigue is real, like museum fatigue. Despite being stuck there in a torrential downpour, we just couldn’t get into it. Time to leave Vietnam.

But it did have a few treats. You still have to keep your eyes open, no matter what, or you’ll miss some tucked away morsel of wow. Not OK.

For some reason, we thought this table of offering votives was really beautiful.

I’ll leave you with the most HCMC thing about HCMC: Traffic.

That, by the way, was a street we never crossed. Normally we’d draft behind an auntie, but not even the locals were crossing that street.

Should we have skipped HCMC and just flown directly to Bali from Đà Nẵng? I still think we were better off this way, but note-to-self for the future, we should only do short visits if we’ve done our homework and have a clue how we’re going to spend the time.

Our sleeper bus was the most modern, tricked out sleeper we took. It was especially comfortable when we finally figured out that you could raise the seat backs, and not have to spend the whole trip supine.

We picked a hotel literally across the street from the Citadel and a five minute walk from the Antiquities Museum, so we were well situated to make the most of our brief time in Huế.

The hotel was surprisingly luxe. The first surprise was that it was hidden behind an unprepossessing facade down an alley, and the second was that it was only $35/night. That that’s a splurge is how this whole adventure works.

The Museum of Royal Antiquities

We debussed, checked in, got lunch, and walked to the Antiquities Museum. We planned on spending the next full day at the Citadel, so we wanted to make sure we didn’t miss the Museum.

As its name implies, the museum specializes in Nguyễn era artifacts, serving as a satellite to the Citadel across the street. And like a lot of museums we’ve seen around the world, this site’s building was as much a part of the display as its holdings. Long An Palace was built in 1845, early in the Nguyễn empire. It was destroyed in 1885 by, wait for it… French soldiers, and then rebuilt and restored in 1909 on its current site, just outside the Citadel.

The Palace was used as a resting place for the Emperor to refresh and recharge after official ceremonies, and it is ridiculously, painfully beautiful.

Even more astounding is the interior. The space is majestic and regal, and it was impossible not to feel just a little bit unworthy inside, like we were transgressing a boundary we shouldn’t have crossed, like we didn’t belong. The peek behind the imperial curtain was thrilling.

The collection of imperial artifacts, however, is every bit the match for the space in which they’re displayed. The collection stands up to the Palace itself, in its glimpse into a life of incalculable luxury and splendor. “It’s good be king” is a joke, but it’s not a joke here. The Museum of Royal Antiquities reminded me of nothing so much as Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, in its window into an opulence unfettered by constraints of money or propriety.

The artifacts are exceptionally well selected but, shall we say, lightly curated. If there was date information at all, it was no more precise than the century. Sometimes materials were listed, often not. The whole approach to provenance seems to be, “We found these in the Citadel. Now shut up and enjoy them.”

Okay. I can do both.

This piece had the most thorough provenance, unsurprisingly, as it’s a National Treasure. It’s the tiny throne of Emperor Duy Tân, who was seven years old when he was invested in 1907 by the French, who had just conveniently had his father declared insane. His reign lasted ten years before the French deposed him for not being as docile as hoped. Specifically, by trying to lead a rebellion against them.

He wound up leading a fascinating life, including working as an officer of the Free French, battling the Vichy regime. But the pictures of him as Boy King are haunting. There was an altar room to him in the Citadel, but no pictures were permitted. I scraped this from his Wikipedia page, where he’s giving off a distinct blink-twice-if-you’re-unsafe-at-home vibe. As all of the photos of him at that age do. Kudos to him for pulling a real life out of this twisted shit.

And of course, Dorothy found textiles. It’s what she do.

Unfortunately, none of the Imperial gowns were properly dated. They were all noted as between 1802 and 1945, the dates of the Nguyễn dynasty itself, with no more precise attributions offered.

Outside the Long An Palace, a smaller building housed artifacts from the Champa kingdom, dating from the 10th to 12th centuries. It was a small collection, distinguished by the incredible physical integrity of the artifacts. It’s hard to believe sandstone sculptures have lasted this long and look so good.

The Imperial Citadel

The Imperial Citadel, as all good citadels must be, is surrounded by a moat, with gates on all four sides.

The Citadel is also known as the Imperial City, because it’s both. As a citadel it boasted a six mile long moat around its entire perimeter and almost seven foot thick ramparts. And as a city, its almost four square miles held not only the emperor’s family, but also the mandarins and functionaries necessary to keep the wheels of the empire properly lubricated.

Here’s the main gate, Ngọ Môn, as well as a couple of the side gates.

It was hot the day we visited, over 90 degrees, but worse was the humidity. The air felt gelid, as if you had to physically part it to move forward. We noticed little trams driving about the grounds and accosted the first empty one we saw. The driver said it would cost ₫400,000, or about $16 USD, for the two of us to be driven around for an hour. That sounded simultaneously like highway robbery and salvation, so we hopped aboard. She drove us to the highlights, stopped while we explored, and dropped us off an hour later, to the minute, at the gate closest to our hotel. Worth every penny.

Among the many, many palaces in the Citadel, Kiến Trung truly stood out. It’s a modern (completed in 2023) recreation of a 1923 structure that was destroyed by the Viet Minh during the resistance to French occupation in 1947. So… authentic? ish? But beautiful and ridiculous all at once, as its exterior is extravagantly mosaicked. I’m glad we came after its completion.

Here’s a news item about the restoration from 2023, before the work was complete.

In fact, restoration at the Citadel is an ongoing process. It’s part historical site, part tourist attraction, and part archeological dig.

Another standout was the Thái Hòa Palace, the Palace of Supreme Harmony. Built in 1805 at the dawn of the Nguyễn dynasty, it was one of the very first buildings in the Imperial Citadel. Its grand scale, both inside and out, hints at its uses, as it was the site of official state functions. From coronations to New Years to the emperor’s birthday, any ceremony of note was staged at Thái Hòa.

The Queen Mother had a private residence, with its own lovely grounds.

The Citadel also has its own theater, the Duyệt Thị Đường, dating back to 1826. It’s still in use today.

The Thế Miếu Temple holds the 9 Dynastic Urns. They were completed in 1835 and are considered the most valuable bronze artifacts in Vietnam. Each one depicts a specific emperor and different geographic and cultural components of the country, representing both the continuity of the Nguyễn dynasty and the richness of the country as a whole.

The Citadel offers up treasures pretty much wherever you look, both indoors and outdoors.

Out And About

Aside from the Museum and the Citadel, we did get outside and see a few things.

In retrospect, we didn’t give ourselves enough time in Huế. We hit the Citadel and the Museum, as planned, but there was so much else of interest that we didn’t have time to see.

There are seven mausoleums for Nguyễn era emperors ringing the city, each more over the top than the last, and we weren’t able to visit a single one. There’s the Perfume River, so named for the delicate aroma caused by upstream orchards dropping their flowers into the river in the fall. We saw it, but didn’t have time for a boat trip. We missed the stunning Bạch Mã National Park. There’s more than one wiggy pagoda. We could have spent a week in Huế, but didn’t. Our loss.

But what we were able to do was more than enough to make the trip worthwhile. The Imperial Citadel and the Museum of Royal Antiquities were plenty rewarding.

While the Champa kingdom goes all the way back to the 2nd century, Mỹ Sơn dates from the 4th to the 13th centuries. Still, take that, 12th century Angkor Wat. On the other hand, Angkor Wat wasn’t blown to bits by the US in the Vietnam War (or the American War, as it’s called here). Many of the temples, including the largest one, were destroyed in a single week’s bombing in 1969. But the Taliban were barbarians for destroying Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas. Thank goodness we’ve permanently conquered The Moral High Ground.

That history is one of the reasons we took a tour group to Mỹ Sơn, despite our profound distaste for them. When we were doing the research for the trip one of the admonitions we’d read was to make sure to stay on the paths, as there were still unexploded bombs in the area. Okey doke. Maybe a guide isn’t such a bad idea.

The setting is beautiful, with the jungle kept barely at bay. It reminds me of Tikal’s eerie jungle/ruins vibe, or Ta Prohm’s Lara Croft stage set.

I especially enjoyed the entrance sign. While I know the first part as, “Take only memories, leave only footprints,” this was my first exposure to the warning not to kill. It’s like when you check into a hotel and on the dos-and-donts list is a restriction on having monkeys in your room. You just have to wonder what happened that made that warning necessary.

The ravages of the American attack were everywhere to be seen. In bullet-pocked walls, bomb fragments, and even in recovered American bombs.

The American attacks on Mỹ Sơn came to life most vividly through our tour guide, who had been working for the Americans in South Vietnam as an interpreter. This was a notable exception to the rule about listening to Grandda’s war stories. We didn’t want them over so we could go back to our video games, we wanted him to go on and on and on. I wasn’t expecting a living link to that history.

He told harrowing stories of coming into Mỹ Sơn after the bombings, with colleagues blown apart by bombs that hadn’t gone off on impact. Sadly, either his English or his memory, or both, were a little faulty, as we couldn’t quite follow his post-war chronology. Either he or his brother spent eight years in prison for collaborating with the Americans. Either he or his brother were taken to the US before returning to Vietnam. Which may or may not have been when he or his brother was imprisoned.

The specifics mattered less than the general arc, which was that the American fucking lasted long after they left. As colonialism do.

But the what was left of the buildings was splendid. Unless noted, these are all from the 7th-9th centuries. They show their age, in all senses.

Due to sheer age, and the odd bomb, many of the facade sculptures are in poor condition. But there’s more than enough left to grasp how much character the carvings have, and how splendid this must have been in its time. These all date from the 7th-9th centuries.

While I’m not a big fan of tours, this one came with a Malaysian family currently living in Sri Lanka. On the one hand. we had the opportunity to discuss those locations for future travel, which was helpful and informative. On the other hand, I was kidnapped.

Stockholm Syndrome, plain and simple.

There is absolutely no documentary evidence that I picked up the little terrorist and carried her. Those are unsubstantiated rumors, and I refuse to lend them credence by stooping to refute them.

Cloth Shops

We had read before coming to Hội Án that it was renowned for its custom tailoring shops, but that foreknowledge didn’t prepare us by half for the reality. I counted 15 tailors, cloth shops in the local parlance, on a random single block in the Old Town. Estimates tag the number of cloth shops in Hội Án at 400-500.

So we’re clear, these are not alteration shops, which is what tailor means in the US now. These are craftsmen who make custom fit clothes to order. You go in, pick a silhouette, pick fabric, get measured, and specify details. This was exactly Dorothy’s model for her shop, Bespoke, except she was one-of-one in St. Louis, not one-of-500. Bespoke felt so much on an island, it was weird to come to a place with literally hundreds of similar shops.

While they are most densely concentrated in the Old Town, there are cloth shops in every neighborhood in Hội Án. They come in all sizes, from Walmarts to MiniMarts.

The store displays featured eye-melting designs to capture attention, but I didn’t see anyone walking around in the fancy clothes. I did see lots of couples and families in outfits made with the same fabric, which is… a look. It’s pretty clear people come from far and wide to have clothes made here.

I bought two cuts of fabric in Hà Nội, which I brought to our neighborhood cloth shop to have made into shirts. The cost for making a shirt from my fabric in the Old Town was VND 700,000, about $27 USD. It was only VND 300,000 from our neighbors, a little more than $11. It was delivered, perfectly executed, the next day. I had them make both shirts and two pair of pull-on linen pants. I know I have Dorothy on staff, but she has plenty lined up for her return home. No need to pile on, at those prices.

Leather Shops

Like the cloth shops, the leather shops range in size from Mega to Mini. They are ubiquitous, Hội Án’s second most common shop, after the cloth shops. Also like the cloth shops, but less immediately obvious, most of the leather shops are make-to-order. You can buy off the rack, but you can also specify sizes, features, and finishes for shoes, bags, purses…

Neither of us craved leather, so we didn’t indulge. But there were some truly vivid colors on offer, so there was at least some temptation. If I’d seen any exotic leather I might have tipped over, but we wound up empty handed.

Pottery

Terracotta pottery is a big deal here. Thanh Hà Pottery Village is pretty much nothing but, and even features the Thanh Hà Terracotta Park, which is an oddly named museum. There’s an admission to get into the pottery village, which is not unusual. Monetizing high value tourist locations just makes sense.

The village had large public installations and small shops. Truthfully, while the terracotta was beautiful, it didn’t sing to us. We were ceramics sluts all throughout Mexico and North Africa, but it’s so hard to bring that stuff back safely. So, (almost) no terracotta for us.

The museum is called a Terracotta Park for a reason. The grounds, which are beautiful on their own account, are generously appointed with terracotta sculptures, most of them scale model (although not, I think, all to a consistent scale) reproductions of famous buildings. For reasons unarticulated.

The inside-the-museum part of the museum featured massive reliefs, made for the site, as well as more traditional sculptures.

This is one of my favorite restroom signs ever. So very straightforward.

Of course, we did pick up one bowl on our trip to the Pottery Village, from the museum gift shop. It’s not our fault. It was very brightly colored.

Ceramics

On the whole, we found Hội Án, as we did the rest of Vietnam, a little light on ceramics. For our taste. But like Siem Reap, we located one shop, outside the Old Town and in our neighborhood, whose aesthetic resonated. That’s all it takes.

We picked up a few things at Thành Thị Pottery, but kept thinking about what we’d left behind, so we went back in our final week to complicate our packout. Which desperately needed more ceramics.

And… loot!

Embroidery

We saw some examples of embroidered paintings in both Hà Nội and Bắc Hà, but nothing like what we’ve seen here. We found two shops here working at a similar level, and the delicacy and precision of the work was breathtaking. We had neither the space nor the budget for a larger piece, which made us very sad, but we love the piece we were able to pick up.

And while the logical explanation is that these were the result of some combination of fairies and ritual sacrifice, we saw ladies sewing them onsite. Weird.

Bamboo

This wasn’t a thing so much as a guy. His workshop, Taboo Bamboo, is outside the city center, about 15 minutes from our apartment. He does the thing here where you can make a souvenir for yourself with professional guidance, but we’re way more interested in what the hands of a master can accomplish than the awkward, pale shadow we’d be able to grunt out.

This may have been the most impressive thing we’ve seen in all of Vietnam. His major pieces were four feet, six feet, eight feet long, and longer. Yet they were designed and built with the compulsive attention you’d lavish on a miniature. The contrast between the massive scale and the obsessive detail was mind-blowing.

The large pieces were incredible, and it was gutting to know that we could never get one home. But we certainly enjoyed their company while we were there.

Maybe we couldn’t have the major piece we craved, but he had smaller pieces that we’d be able to wedge into luggage. We came away with this guy, maybe 7″ long. What could possibly go wrong?

Coconut Paper

We stumbled across this little shop just a few blocks from our apartment on an evening stroll. It presents as a lantern shop, even so far as offering workshops where you can make your own souvenir lantern. These places are like kudzu in the Old Town, all hawking the same cheap, manufactured tourist goods. But, like the ceramics shop, you sometimes have to get out of the tourist area to find the gold.

I’ll confess that I was captivated by the ubiquitous silk lanterns (because I am very shallow). We have ecru rice paper lanterns in our Chicago apartment, and I thought a handful of the Vietnamese lanterns would be an upgrade. Dorothy disabused me of this notion, pointing out that the lanterns were one of the only places the eye could rest in our space, and that the apartment didn’t really need more color.

Thankfully, we found Dé Lantana. While they offered some of the traditional silk lanterns, mostly they used them as armature for their handmade coconut papers. Some of those papers just had coconut fibers as texture, but others had patterns from organic to geometric, and even portraiture.

We’ll make our own pendants by wrapping the paper over a plastic tube. They’ll be beautiful and loaded with terroir, without being gaudy and cheap. Everyone wins.

Random Acts Of Art

Quilling

Well, here’s a thing we didn’t even know existed. Quilling, or paper filigree, involves cutting, rolling, and gluing paper to make what amounts to 3D collage. We stopped at the Happy Smile Quilling shop and were beguiled. Craftsmen were quilling right before our eyes, and were delighted to stop and explain what they were doing. For our part, we were delighted to leave with one of their pieces.

Woodworking

There weren’t dozens of these woodworkers, but they were a recurring motif. You could hear their hammers striking chisels from around the corner, so they were easy to find.

Graphic Design

I usually include a selection of signage and graphic design in the Crafts posts, but the pickings seemed slim here. Still, I’m happy to offer up a tasty package of Fullo Blastos.

Hội An is right on the beach, to which we’ve made multiple trips, and our Airbnb has a pool, which we use at least daily. But there’s also excellent, accessible (to old people) snorkeling nearby, so we took a speedboat ride out to the Chàm Islands, part of a UNESCO-recognized biosphere reserve.

The Chàm ruled Vietnam and Cambodia in the pre-Angkor/Khmer period. The eight Chàm Islands were part of Champa territory, and were occupied by the Chàm as long as 3,000 years ago. Most of the tours stopped on the big island, Hòn Lão, at Bãi Làng village. That stop includes a tour of an old pagoda, a visit to the Ancient Well, where locals begged for mates, and a visit to an authentic local market.

Color us jaded, but we opted for a boat with an extra snorkeling stop instead of a Local Color walking tour. Stopping at Bãi Làng to register with the authorities confirmed our choice, as there were hordes of people debarking for the ground-based tour. About 3,000 people visit the islands every day, which is a cruise ship’s load, and it looked just like that, as all the boats arrive at about the same time in the morning. This was the scene on the mainland dock, as everyone queued up for their boats.

Our tour skipped the Bãi Làng scrum, and also focussed the snorkeling on smaller, more out of the way islands. We weren’t the only boat at our two dive spots, but there were only one or two besides us. We had plenty of underwater runway.

Our first stop was about the fish. There was a definite feeling of swimming in an aquarium, which is the very best part of reef snorkeling. The water offered an initial shock of cold, but warmed up really fast (unlike the heart-stopping water of Lan Ha Bay). We were in the water for about 45 minutes at each of our two stops, and we were warm the entire time.

Our second stop was more about the coral formations than it was the fish.

And that took us to our final stop, Bãi Ông beach on Cù Lao Chàm island. We got a surprisingly good lunch at the beachside cafe and enjoyed a couple of hours of swimming and lazing. There were even showers and changing rooms available before we hopped back on our speedboat for the mainland.

This outing didn’t really provide an opportunity for cutting cultural commentary, which I know is why y’all are here. Being in warm water is good, snorkeling is fun, and reef snorkeling is magical. Not a lot more to say.

Also, I Kickstarted an underwater case for my phone, and this was my first time using it in the field. I’m pretty happy with the results, and it will stay with us as part of our regular kit. This will not be our last underwater adventure. Promise.

We’re being more flexible now, acknowledging that some locations don’t warrant a full ten weeks. We spent four weeks in Siem Reap in Cambodia, soaking up the Angkor-era ruins, and that was just right. We were afraid four weeks would feel like a rushed tourist cadence, but Siem Reap was fine.

We’re also now splitting time between locations, rather than having a home base for the full ten weeks. We’re ten weeks in Vietnam, but six of those were in Hà Nội before hitting Hội An for the final four weeks. Again, that’s felt pretty good. Enough time to sink into both locations without feeling rushed, and a broader view of Vietnam than we’d get if we were ten weeks in Hà Nội with the occasional junket.

In fact, we’re cutting our Hội An trip short to add three full days in Ho Chi Minh City/Sài Gòn before we leave for Indonesia. Even three days in HCMC will be more entertaining than missing it entirely. Then we’re pulling the same stunt in Indonesia, starting with four weeks in Amed, a quiet Bali beach town (of which there are few), followed by six weeks in Yogyakarta on Java before heading back to the US.

Hội An has been a lovely antidote to Hà Nội’s Sturm und Drang. Six weeks in the Old Quarter was much like being a BB in a can, and Hội An’s more relaxed vibe is welcome. Even the “crowds” in Hội An’s Old Town are a joke, after Hà Nội.

For a change, we’re not staying in the Old Town. We’re about a fifteen minute walk away, but that’s enough distance to put us in a more quiet, residential neighborhood. There are still plenty of goods and services, without the jangle of Old Town and its proliferation of souvenir shops. We’re out where people live.

Our Airbnb is a little four story, eight room hotel-style accommodation, but each one bedroom unit has a workable kitchen and a washer/dryer, which is always an appreciated amenity. More importantly, it has an elevator you can take to the fourth floor for a short flight of stairs to the rooftop pool. It is hot here, high 80s – low 90s, and I’ll confess that there are days when we visit the pool more than once. We have even gone to the beach and then returned to go to the pool. I’m not proud, but neither will I apologize. It’s easy to lean into your weakness when it involves a pool.

It is also tropically humid here. We couldn’t figure out why the weather report kept saying it was raining when it wasn’t. Then we checked the humidity. 84% humidity is rain.

The beach is a little far to walk, but it’s a fast, cheap taxi (10 minutes, about $3.50 with a generous tip), and the beach clubs are practically free. We can sit under a palapa all day, swim as much as we like in the deliciously warm water, and use their showers and changing rooms for the cost of renting a towel. They’re 20,000 VND each, or about $1.50 for the two of us. It’s good to be king.

The walkable part of the neighborhood offers plenty. We have our very own lotus pond right around the corner, plenty of restaurant options, and a choice of mercados.

There’s a mercado about ten minutes from us, and the big central mercado on the edge of Old Town is about a fifteen minute walk. There’s a variety of mini marts of various sizes and distinctions, but no real supermercado or hypermarché. We’re about forty minutes from Đà Nẵng, a much bigger city, and all the big supermarkets are there.

Less than a block from our apartment is our own personal sweets shop, Trà Sữa Nọng. Trà Sữa is milk tea, and we’re pretty sure Nọng means wattles, which makes sense based on the branding.

What we are certain of is that milk tea is a delicious treat.

Old Town

Hội An’s Old Town is like most of the old quarters or Medinas we’ve visited: a thick crust of turista atop a foundation of very old buildings, old being a relative term based on location. Here, old goes back as far as the 1600s.

The Old Town itself, strung with traditional Vietnamese silk lanterns, is intentionally charming.

Gaudily lit boats ply the Thu Bồn River, while riverside vendors offer tourists floating candles that, released into the river, grant wishes. Here are the boats at dock.

The boats were lit up like pinball machines, so a lantern boat ride seemed compulsory.

The combination of low light and a fast moving boat led to some great effects.

Shops all over the district offer the silk lanterns, adding to the storybook nighttime ambiance. It all adds up to a UNESCO World Heritage Cute designation, richly deserved.

My favorite feature of Old Town, though, is the pedicabs. For some reason they have neither horns nor bells, so the drivers holler “Beep, Beep” as they make their way through the pedestrian scrum. Charming.

Old Town is also home to some very old and completely ridiculous structures. Here’s the Quan Công Temple, dating from 1653. Obviously its contents aren’t that old, but the building itself is graceful and beautiful.

Quan Công also hosted a gallery featuring the beautiful watercolor and ink work of local artist Ngo Duc Chi. We were beguiled, despite officially owning enough things.

Hội Quán Quảng Triệu, the Cantonese Assembly Hall, fell on the ridiculous side of the ledger. It featured a massive outdoor fountain of entwined dragons and wiggy 3D reliefs all over the interior.

I am providing no commentary on the reliefs because commentary is neither necessary nor possible. There’s nothing to say. They speak, eloquently, for themselves.

And no Assembly Hall would be complete without horses and dragons.

While those two spots were major, there were plenty of old buildings and houses dotted about Old Town, offering up beauty, mystery, and entertainment, if you just kept your eyes open.

Of course, Old Town is more than just silk lanterns and old buildings. It’s also…

I leave you with this last, indelible image of Hội An’s Old Town. Just across the Thu Bồn River, via a short pedestrian bridge, Hội An’s Night Market offers up a welter of restaurants, bars, shops, street vendors, and Hội An’s most iconic structure: The Mr. Bean Bar.

You’re welcome.

Where We Didn’t Go

We took side trips to Mỹ Sơn and Huế, but there were also places we intentionally avoided. Like Sa Pa, there were places near Hội An that were high on the Instagram & selfie tours and a little too too for our taste. Primarily, that meant avoiding the Ba Na Hills.

You know it from this iconic (scraped) image:

This is, obviously, not some local expression of support for the God Of Big Hands. This was built for tourists. And, thus, isn’t particularly interesting.

But that’s not all Ba Na Hills has to offer. There’s also, unaccountably, this: French Village.

To be fair, this is a 19th century artifact of French colonialism, not a modern theme park. On the other hand, it’s a modern theme park now. With bumper cars, a wax museum, and a mini-train, among other amenities, French Village is, more than anything, an eloquent fuck you from the Vietnamese to the French. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. And we’re turning your precious chateaux into EPCOT Center, motherfuckers.”

Even so. Pass.

One of the appealing things about Sa Pa is that the Mountain Hmong town of Cat Cat Village sits right at the edge of the city. We chose the Cat Cat Hills Resort & Spa, which is right above the village, maybe a fifteen minute walk away. We picked it for its convenience, but it was uncharacteristic for us as it was a swanky resort, which is not our style. But for two nights we splurged, made easier by the fact that splurging was only $70/night.

The views from the hotel were spectacular, no matter which direction you looked.

The rice paddy was full of frogs, and the chorus at night was impressive. Here’s some soundtrack for you as you read.

Cat Cat Village

I’m sorry to report that the Cat Cat Village experience was underwhelming. We had read that it was a little touristy, but that undersold the reality by a fair margin. It was 100% touristy, like an EPCOT outpost.

Cat Cat was touted as a living Hmong village. The occupants ran shops with Hmong knickknacks, but there were also supposed to be makers within the village. So while we expected most of it would be tourist souvenirs, we also figured there would be treasures amongst the dross, like any Medina or central market.

Nope. Not a treasure to be found. 100% tourist crap. Our first tipoff should have been the approach. The walk to Cat Cat was pavéd with shops offering rentals of cheaply made Hmong outfits, so you could cosplay Hmong village life while touring Cat Cat and flooding Instagram.

There was an entrance fee to get into the village, which isn’t unusual here for tourist-focused locations. Mostly they’re in the 50k-100k Dong range ($2-$4 USD), but Cat Cat was a hefty 150k Dong/person, about $6.

You have to walk down the valley to get to the entrance, and then the village itself is further down the valley, down a winding set of stone stairs.

And that’s what there is. Just a whole bunch of stalls, manned by Hmong in traditional dress, all selling basically the same stuff. Like Colonial Williamsburg, with less give-a-fuck.

It’s fine that Cat Cat was a fail, as the tail end of this trip will be the Sunday market in Bắc Hà, which will be awash in traditional Hmong textiles and clothes. In the meantime, the views from Cat Cat are worth the visit, even if the shops are full of junk.

Thankfully, Sa Pa had more to offer than just Cat Cat Village. There were natural splendors a short ride from our hotel.

Love Waterfall

Day One was our brief Cat Cat visit (and an evening trip to the hotel’s spa for massages). Day Two we spent viewing nature. As much by car as possible.

I’ll confess that there are a handful of things I find so inherently amazing that I don’t require spectacular examples of their ilk to be awed in their presence. Fireworks. Caves. Waterfalls. Girls. They are my dancing bears, and even their most modest instances are guaranteed to set my heart aflutter.

The pictures I’d seen of Love Waterfall, however, strongly suggested that this bear could dance. On top of that, you can’t swing a cat in Sa Pa without hitting a magnificent vista, so we made Love Waterfall our first stop.

The money shots.

Obviously, still photos can’t do a waterfall justice, so…

The only negative about the experience was the distance. We’re up a mile high, going down into the valley and back up, a two mile roundtrip. I suppose the best kinds of fun do leave you panting, but still.

Heaven Gate

Heaven Gate is two schizophrenic attractions in one place. The first is the Heaven Gate itself, a breathtaking, panoramic view of the mountains from a mile-and-a-half up.

The other is O Quy Ho Fairy Valley, a weird collection of cheesy sculptures that you reach by a little train. It seems to be a specifically Vietnam thing, where they don’t trust you to be amazed by the natural beauty, so they slather these awesome locations with a treacly theme park fondant.

But even Heaven Gate wasn’t immune, as we discovered when we reached the peak. The gate itself was pretty cool.

But that clearly wasn’t going to be adequate for the short attention span tourists. So there was also this:

The lack of trust in visitors isn’t a Sa Pa thing. It’s a Vietnam thing. Tons of sites that should be more than enough on their own have been tarted up like a painted lady. It’s baffling.

Our final stop was supposed to be Silver Waterfall, but after two full miles at Love Waterfall and whatever we clocked going up and down Heaven Gate, we had nothing left in the tank. Which is sad, because it looked amazing from the road. But also, a long way off.

Places We Didn’t Go

Vietnam has a number of hot tourist destinations that have been designed to be hot tourist destinations. They’re larded up with constructs meant to induce Instagasms, totally obscuring whatever natural beauty prompted the Disneying in the first place. Sa Pa also has Moana, much like Fairy Valley, and we conscientiously objected. Despite being only about a half an hour walk from our hotel, it was a hard no. Here’s some scraped proof, from a travel site.

We also passed on visiting Fansipan, the roof of Indochina (so named because it’s Indochina’s highest peak). Not because it was overtly touristy, like Moana, but because the way to get there involved a suspension of disbelief neither of us could muster. Sa Pa itself is a full mile up, but the peak of Fansipan is a tick shy of two miles. Nearly the entire mile of that difference is negotiated by cable car.

No. Fucking. Way.

Seriously. I’ve had to be rescued from the tops of pyramids twice. No fucking way.

You’ll be unsurprised to learn that we also opted out of the Glass Bridge.

What is with these people?

Thankfully, Love Waterfall was swell, and we had Bắc Hà to look forward to.

Bắc Hà

The van we took to Sa Pa from Hà Nội was nice. New, comfortable, and full but not crowded. The van we took from Sa Pa to Bắc Hà was none of those things.

It was old, janky, and overstuffed. We left for our three hour drive with every seat taken and then stopped repeatedly to pick up additional passengers. We were in the back row, a four seat bench with another couple. At one stop the driver gestured for us to squeeze together so a fifth person could sit in the four seats and we all refused. Dorothy stood up, turned around, pointed at her butt, and said “Fat American ass.” Sadly, it was lost on them.

But we finally got to Bắc Hà, checked into our hotel, and had the evening to wander about. The market was the next day, with a reputed 5:00 AM start and a late morning finish. No way were we getting out by 5, but we made breakfast by seven and had plenty of time for the market. Our bus back to Hà Nội was at 3, so there was no time pressure.

Like many villages everywhere, Bắc Hà completely transforms on its weekly market day. Stalls take over the whole town, and vendors set up on the street wherever there’s room. People come from all over, and while we’d read that there was a strong tourist presence in the market, Bắc Hà is pretty out of the way. There were other Westerners for sure, but the overwhelming number of attendees were local.

But we’d come for the textiles and clothes. We’d read that the market was split into local and tourist goods, and that was true, but not how you’d expect. The locals favored inexpensive synthetic fabrics, while the tourists were drawn to natural fibers and antique pieces. We found the local clothes in outdoor stalls and the tourist products, the good stuff, in an enclosed space called the Brocade Market. Both were interesting, but we were drawn to the Brocade Market. We’re never attracted to the tourist goods, but that whole formula was flipped on its head in Bắc Hà.

The Brocade Market was the payoff, and made the whole trip to Sa Pa worth it. We could have spent hours there… and did.

Fun over, time to head out, where we stopped at this beautiful governor’s mansion on the way to pick up our luggage and head to the bus station.

The bus station offered up signage explaining the bus system’s dos and don’ts, which included this admonition:

It translates as: Refuse to transport wild animals. I certainly do, and I was relieved to learn that others would be following my lead. Although I’m not at all clear as to how they got a pangolin to model for them.

Our ride back to Hà Nội was a sleeper bus, so we were sure to get our own seats and not have freelancers squeezing in. It was comfortable, but weird to be unable to sit up. We had a seven hour scheduled run, and I’d planned on writing, but all I could really do was lay back and read.

Inexplicably, our seven hour trip to Hà Nội was over, somehow, in five hours. When we finally stopped I had to be told we were in Hà Nội, as I thought we were still hours out.

It’s worth noting that we could have done this whole circuit as a tour. Transport arranged, hotels booked, guides to walk us about and explain the quaint local customs. And, to be fair, the couple of group activities we’ve enjoyed on our travels have generally provided amiable companionship.

But we really don’t like being on someone else’s agenda, and the hassle of making all of our own arrangements and negotiating transport seem modest compared to the benefits. We’ll do tours where it’s impossible to make our own arrangements, like Hạ Long Bay, but otherwise I suspect we’ll stick to our rugged individualism.

I know you expect no less of us. Who wants to read about our experiences on packaged tours?

Embroidery, Weaving, & Textiles

This may be the least surprising of Vietnam’s wonders. They’ve been doing this for centuries, and it shows. First up is Tailor Cát, a shop specializing in extravagantly embroidered modern versions of traditional áo dài and blouses. We learned, by the way, that áo dài is pronounced ow zye. The hard D is the letter Ð.

Embroidery

Would you be surprised to learn that Dorothy bought an embroidered piece? They recut the armscye to fit and had it ready the next day.

Tailor Cát was not the only high end embroidery shop.

Embroidered paintings are also a thing here. We saw more spectacular examples in Hội An, but these smaller pieces were all over the souvenir shops.

Totes

Another manifestation of the weaving heritage shows up in tote bags, one of Dorothy’s favorite forms of weaving. She has harvested woven totes at every one of our stops, adding up to quite the international collection.

Fabric Markets

Hà Nội, no surprise, also boasts several robust textile markets. One was just around the corner from our apartment in the Old Quarter, but the big one, Chợ Hom, was a short cab ride south.

Vạn Phúc Silk Village

Making traditional Vietnamese dinners for us (twice!) apparently wasn’t enough for our host An and her daughter An Binh. They also docented us on a trip just south of Hà Nói to the Vạn Phúc Silk Village. We probably wouldn’t have gone without them, but even if we’d found it, the experience would have been much the poorer for not having our ridiculously adorable hosts to guide us.

The whole range was on display in Vạn Phúc, from weaving on vintage Jacquard looms to fabric by the meter to finished goods. This was an absolute highlight of our stay, and we almost missed it. This was our next-to-last day in Hà Nói.

The shops were full. And the village was full of shops. Over 1,000 households in Vạn Phúc are involved in some part of the silk production process. It felt like we visited all of them, but I suspect we fell short.

Those of you who have been following us know that we rarely post pictures of ourselves. That’s a reflection of the fact that we rarely take photos of ourselves. At any given location, we are absolutely guaranteed to be the least interesting thing there. Other people, however, seem to find us fascinating.

But I’ve saved the best for last. As delightful as the setting was, as spectacular as the offerings were, the highlight was seeing vintage Jacquard looms in operation.

Joseph Marie Jacquard invented, in 1804, a method for using punch cards to control a loom, automating the weaving process and initiating a Cambrian Explosion of textile complexity, spawning designs that were inconceivable by hand.

More than that, it is widely acknowledged as the first computer, and was one of the forebears of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. The first electronic computer, ENIAC, was programmed by Jacquard-inspired punch cards. My college statistics class in the 70s required writing a program with punch cards. The Jacquard Loom is the OG.

I have no idea the precise vintage of the looms in Vạn Phúc. I’m sure they don’t date to 1804. But these were old fucking looms. Seeing a room full of them in action was like stepping into a time machine. A mill in Jacquard’s time would have looked much like the room we were in.

Every so often on this journey we have been in places that offered a hallucinatory stereo vision, where past and present coexist and can be viewed in the same frame. That’s a mind-blowing, double-rainbow experience, and Vạn Phúc’s Jacquard looms offered it up in spades.

Here they are, as they are meant to be, in action.

There’s a wooden paddle at each end that slams the shuttle back to the other side once a weft row is complete.

You can clearly see the intricacy and delicacy of the brocade. It’s just astonishing that this level of complexity is possible with 200+ year old technology. Like sending people to the moon with sub-iPhone computing power.

Ceramics

We have reliably gobbled up ceramics on every one of our stops. Mexico, Cuba, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey… They’ve all had some take on ceramics so seductive we’ve had to tamp down our acquisitiveness. We’ve safely muled home a lot of heavy, breakable specimens, but there’s only so much we can do.

The good news in Southeast Asia, I suppose, is that we haven’t been truly beguiled by the local ceramics. We did find one shop in Cambodia that had things that spoke to us, but for the most part we found the pieces either too utilitarian or too subtle for our clown car aesthetic. Same for Vietnam. Maybe Hội An will have something tempting, but we’re leaving Hà Nội completely bereft of pottery.

I know this stuff is objectively beautiful, but there’s too strong a flavor of turn-of-the-(last)-century Chinoiserie for me to overcome.

Mandalas

One of the delights of staying someplace for an extended period is getting past the tourist shops. There are always treasures, but they’re hard to find on a tight schedule. Wander around aimlessly long enough, though, and you’ll stumble on something amazing.

Just so with these insanely beautiful hand-painted mandalas. Specifically, these are Thangka mandalas, most often associated with Nepali Buddhism, but also made by Vietnamese monks.

Lacquerware

Lacquerware is another major art form here. Unfortunately, the options ranged from exceedingly expensive fine art offerings to cheap tourist ware. There weren’t a lot of attractive options in the affordable middle. We would up with a few lacquered coconut shell bowls, because the deep lacquered colors, even on tourist goods, are pretty awesome.

Propaganda Posters

This was kind of a surprise. There are multiple shops in Hà Nói where you can buy either hand-painted reproductions or prints of the hand-painted reproductions, and there’s a museum with an impressive collection of originals.

This is what’s on offer in the shops.

And this is the museum collection. Captions courtesy of Google Translate. Most of them are fine, but the first one is kind of word salad. I asked our host’s daughter, An Binh, if she’d translate for me, and she didn’t do any better.

Mother Of Pearl

We didn’t see much of this in stores, but there was a museum that featured sumptuous use of mother of pearl.

Signage & Graphic Design

Don’t be like that. The commercial arts are still arts, and they offer entertainment and delight everywhere we’ve been.

Shoes

I made the mistake of mentioning to my sister Nef that Vietnam didn’t seem to be a shoe culture. Then we found these. I stand grievously corrected.

Bamboo carving

This guy was set up on Hoàn Kiếm Lake and we ran across him on Day Two. We didn’t know that the balancing hummingbirds were in every souvenir shop, but he was legitimately cutting the bamboo by hand.

Random Acts Of Art

The Plant (& Carved Wood) District

Shut up. Plants are art.

The plant district is a long stretch of road with plant stores, aquarium stores interspersed throughout, and carved wood shops at one end. It’s well outside the Old Quarter, at the foot of West Lake. We picked up a couple of lovely house plants. Maybe silly, since we were only in Hà Nói six weeks, but they brightened our apartment and we left them behind for our host.

Hanoi Ceramic Road

In 2010 Ha Noi celebrated its Millennial Anniversary, 1,000 years since its founding as Emperor Lý Thái Tổ’s capital, Thăng Long. The Hanoi Ceramic Road was started in 2007 and was completed in 2010 in time for the Millennial celebration. It runs four full miles, and includes work by both Vietnamese artists and friends of Vietnam.

Driving alongside it is quite the experience. It just keeps going.

Temples

Hà Nội is a festival of little temples and pagodas all over the place, and they are their own legitimate art form. While we didn’t get any good pictures of the exterior of Emperor Lý Thái Tổ’s Temple, there was plenty to love inside.

Here’s one of our favorites, the Little Spite Temple That Wouldn’t.

The Lý Triều Quốc Sư Pagoda is just another little temple along the shore of Hoàn Kiếm Lake. In case you’re concerned, I asked permission before taking pictures. As is my habit.

Here’s one more temple we didn’t even get the name of. These are just everywhere here. The critter in the middle is the Vietnamese version of the Cambodian Moon Eater. They’re all over the Angkor-era temples, and share a Hindu/Buddhist origin story. They tend to sit over doorways as protectors.

The altars are a major part of each temple. They hold offerings for the ancestors, and trend heavily towards packaged foods. There’s a street in the Old Quarter with nothing but shops specializing in snacks in fancy boxes suitable for altars.

This temple was in the botanical garden.

Architectural Detail

In addition to the temples, there is a metric buttload of carvings, friezes, and woodworking adorning buildings throughout the Old Quarter.

Places We Didn’t Go

Much like Oaxaca, Hà Nội is surrounded by a nimbus of craft-oriented villages. There’s the Bát Tràng Ceramic Village. The Quảng Phú Cầu Incense Village. The Ha Thai Lacquer Village. The Làng Chuông Conical Hat Village.

All of them sounded interesting, all of them were close to Hà Nội, and all of them were available on inexpensive tours, about $15/person for the whole circuit. We skipped them all.

We’re not a big fan of packaged tours with other folks. We did a few in Turkey and didn’t really care for them. We much prefer to be on our own cadence and follow our own interests. But the real problem was that all of these villages were curated tourist experiences. Make a ceramic bowl. Make a conical hat. Make incense. Make a lacquer bowl. Take your treasures home with you!

Pardon me, but eww. We’re interested in how artisans create art, and we’re interested in the art they create. We don’t see anything of value in the summer camp lanyard-making experience. Which is not to say we haven’t done any classes. Dorothy and my sister Nef took a two-day intensive course in Oaxaca on using natural materials to dye fabric. They took a class in Marrakech on traditional Moroccan cooking. But those aren’t the craft version of a ladies-who-lunch Mahjong game. That’s useful knowledge that can be applied in real life.

I contacted the main pottery collective in Bát Tràng and asked if we had to come on a tour or if we could just show up and look around. I was told that the actual production work was done in people’s homes, so there really wasn’t a tour available in that sense. The tour groups come in, do the hands-on thing, and then shop in the showroom. But you can’t just show up, even for that attenuated experience.

The whole thing seemed very EPCOT Center, so we passed. All of those crafts were available in shops in Hà Nội, without the tour group hassle and the playdate ambiance.

The journey is as much about having wonderful experiences as it is about avoiding those we know won’t work. Check.

The Ethnology Museum

The Vietnam Museum of Ethnology is unlike any ethnographic museum I’ve seen. Yes, it has a museum with galleries and explanatory placards, just as you’d expect. But the bulk of the grounds are taken up with houses brought in from all different ethnic groups and regions that have been rebuilt on site. Rather than just reading about how the different groups lived, you can go in their houses and feel it for yourself. Being able to enter all these different houses may well have been Hà Nội’s highlight.

What’s not obvious at first glance here is the extent of Vietnam’s ethnic diversity. There are 54 distinct ethnic groups in Vietnam, but the vast majority, 85%, are ethnically Viet. The next largest ethnic group, the Tày, is only 1.92%. Vietnam has a population of about 100 million, which, surprisingly, ranks it 16th largest in the world, but that’s still not a lot of people, divvied up into 53 groups. The smallest 45 ethnic groups account for only 3.7% of the total population.

The Vietnamese government values and supports the diversity these ethnic groups represent, which is the only reason many of them still exist as intact cultures and not just DNA fragments. It’s hard to keep groups that small discrete and unassimilated, so props to the Communists.

Ede House

A long house from the Ede tribe, this house was built for a powerful family in 1969 and relocated to the museum in 2000. The house is 140 feet long and 20 feet wide, and is oriented, as is traditional for the Ede, on a north/south axis, with the main entrance at the north end and the living quarters at the south. The extent and quality of the carvings speaks to the prominence of the family that built it.

Viet House

This Viet house is notable for the splendor and artistry of the wood carving. No mud house this.

Tay Stilt House

This is a multi-generational home built entirely on stilts. There are separate rooms for married children, a dedicated kitchen, and a master bedroom. The space underneath is multi-purpose, for everything from domestic animals to tools and a mill for pounding rice. It’s a playground for children and a place for elders to rest in the shade. The range and quality of weaving techniques is impressive.

Bahnar Communal House

Not housing, but a communal house from the Bahnar people, used for a variety of social and ceremonial activities, as well as serving as a guest house for visitors. As the largest, most impressive structure in the village, it was meant to communicate strength and power.

Every one of the houses at the museum had a video running inside documenting the reconstruction of the structure onsite, but watching this being built, with craftsmen climbing up the partially completed structure like acrobats, may have been the most impressive.

Khmer Junk

This Khmer junk is 84 feet long, and was built for racing during the annual moon worshipping festival. Also, not technically housing, but pretty fucking awesome. In 18 races, this baby came in first 14 times and second the other four.

The museum even has a water puppet theater.

Vietnam Women’s Museum

Well, the gals have their very own museum in Hà Nội, and you have to be just thrilled for the little darlin’s. I’m sure they’re all puffed up. There are exhibits on Women in the Family, Women in History, and Women’s Fashion, but the standout exhibit was on Đạo Mẫu, the worship of mother goddesses that dates back to the 16th century.

Central to Đạo Mẫu is the practice of hầu bóng, literally “serving the reflections,” a ritual involving dressing up and presenting as one of the deities. This is most often performance, but there are priestesses who act as mediums, allowing the goddesses to incarnate through them. Not unlike Santeria’s channeling of Orishas.

Either way, the ritual involves elaborate costumes specific to the individual goddesses, and the museum has an excellent selection. As well as videos of the performances, which may well have been nothing more than ritual performance but certainly had the ecstatic veneer of channeling spirits.

If you can, I strongly suggest zooming in on these pictures. The embroidery is breathtaking.

Đạo Mẫu rituals also involve paper representations of the stories being told, as well as fancy paper decorations. Paper seems to be an important part of many Vietnamese rituals, from altars to the streetside burning of joss paper for ancestors. The museum’s collection of the Đạo Mẫu paper goods was every bit as spectacular as the costumes on display.

Hoàng Thành Thăng Long – The Imperial Citadel

The Imperial Citadel is yet another box checked on our UNESCO World Heritage bingo card. It was Vietnam’s capital city from the 11th to 18th centuries, and was the very last thing we did in Hà Nội, the day before we left for Hội An. It is part monument park, part museum, and part active archeological site.

There were delightful details scattered throughout.

As beautiful as the grounds and buildings were, the standout was the museum, specifically the spectacular terra cotta collection. It’s hard to fathom how so much terra cotta has survived from the 11th century, especially given how much of it was rooftop decoration.

However, the highlight of our visit, for me, took place in one of the galleries. Two young boys, maybe ten years old, were loose from their parents, and one mustered up the courage to say hello to us. I replied Xin Chào, and he screamed like the family chicken had just politely enquired after his father’s health. Sometimes being a dancing bear is just flat-out entertaining.

Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum

Vietnam has been civilized for a long time, having had organized societies for at least 4,000 years. And organized societies have a penchant for creating art. Not that the National Fine Arts Museum has pieces going back 4,000 years, but there’s a rich heritage to mine, and the museum’s collection covers more than a thousand years of that history.

The Hall Of Wiggy Patriarchs

My favorite exhibit, it’s a series of life-size effigies of various patriarchs of the Tây Phương Pagoda near Hà Nói, all created in 1794. More than just life-sized, they are remarkably lifelike, each with its own personality. Unlike many of the Vietnamese figurative sculptures, they all look like very specific individuals, with nothing generic about them. Being in a room full of them, it was hard not to feel their presence.

Sculpture

I love how playful and spirited these pieces are, with an almost cartoony style. These wooden sculptures are all 17th century specimens.

The stone sculptures were just as entertaining.

Bodhisattva Avalokisteshvara

There were two of these in the sculpture hall, and they were both magnificent. This first one is from the 1500s.

The second one is from 1656, and is specifically referenced as the Thousand-armed and Thousand-eyed Avalokisteshvara.

Lacquer Paintings

Relatively modern, lacquer painting in Vietnam dates back only to the 1930s. We didn’t know you could paint with lacquer, so their collection, with pieces from the 30s to the 70s, was a lovely surprise.

Silk Paintings

Silk painting as a technique has a long history in Vietnam, but there obviously aren’t many ancient examples still intact. The museum has a thorough selection of modern pieces, though, which very much capture the range of expression that’s possible. Here’s a few from the 60s to the 80s.

Let’s do some of each.

Water Puppets

Like Cambodia’s shadow puppets, Vietnam’s water puppet shows have a rich, deep history. Unlike Cambodia’s shadow puppet shows, which suffered a genocide-induced time out and had to be recreated from scratch, Vietnam’s water puppet shows have been performed continuously since the 11th century, when bored farmers took to flooded rice paddies to entertain their neighbors.

Like many traditional performance arts that have survived to today, the water puppet repertory has hardened into canon. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We saw what happened when the Cambodian shadow puppets offroaded into farce. Or tragedy. It’s a fine line.

Hà Nói’s water puppet theater is the Thang Long, which has been in continuous operation since 1969, and in its current location right on Hoàn Kiếm Lake since 1991. It’s a lovely theater and a very professional production. Front row seats were a ridiculous $8 USD each.

There’s a live band, which also provides the dialogue, and the show opened with an instrumental piece. The band was really good, but the highlight was the woman on the left who appeared to be playing a theremin.

What she was actually playing was a Vietnamese instrument called a Đàn Bầu, a one-stringed zither. The notes are created based on where she plucks the single string, and moving the buffalo horn shaft on the right bends the pitch. It looks like a theremin, because it’s hard to see the single string, making it seem like her right hand is floating in air and creating the sound. And it sounds like a theremin because of the pitch bending.

Pictures, obviously, are not up to the task.

The other pleasant surprise from the band was locating the ringing, bell-like sound, which was coming from a woman sitting right in front of me wielding… tea cups. I was so close to her I was uncomfortable taking her picture, but I scraped this, so you can get the idea.

I’ll confess to some nerves after the Cambodian Shadow Puppet Fiasco, but there was nothing to worry about. The performances were charming.

Here’s some dragons dancing. And spitting.

Some spritely phoenixes dancing, without spitting. Dragons, am I right?

An agricultural fantasia, with plowing, planting, and the traditional slapping of the water.

And finally, a hapless fisherman.

The puppets are operated from behind the curtain on long bamboo rods, so you never see the puppeteers. Until the very end. A thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Plastic Dinoland

This was our big gallery experience. The Japan Foundation in Hà Nội staged Plastic Dinoland by Japanese artist Fuji Hiroshi. There was plenty of hoorah about the artist’s commentary on plastic waste and consumer culture, but mostly it was dinosaurs made from toys. Inherently, objectively, awesome. Not much to say. Enjoy.

Lotte Mall Aquarium

We had to go back to the hypermarché at the mall. It was hot. The mall had an aquarium. It was air conditioned. We went.

We went to the mall aquarium, and it was good. It was not the very best aquarium we’ve ever visited. But it was good. Well curated, well laid out, well maintained. But it wasn’t special, except that it was a surprisingly good aquarium in a mall, which is, I suppose, its own kind of special.

Other than a mind boggling fish feeding station, it was notable perhaps only in its obvious preference for painterly fish. Almost the entire collection looked like it had leapt off an Olde Style Asian painting, no matter what part of the world it actually came from.

So there’s nothing mind blowing or revelatory about the pictures or the experience. Except that aquariums are cool and fish are cool. Kind of like a slippery art exhibit.

No one has ever accused us of undersharing.

The main attraction: fish!

I mean, who doesn’t love they some Grooved Razorfish. But what is up with these guys?

The other primary feature of the aquarium was young ladies living the selfie lifestyle. On the one hand, the elaborate yet delicate posing was clearly an art form of its own.

On the other hand, Jesus fuck me, get over yourselves. The self absorption, the indifference to situational awareness, and the sheer, giddy vanity would be heroic if it wasn’t so sad.

The few remaining shabby pieces of our culture that Facebook didn’t destroy itself have been demolished for our overlords by Instagram.

Thanks, Obama.

The Hall Of Painterly Fish

Fish Feeding

There’s some kind of nutrient in the baby bottles that the koi clearly love. It’s not merely a bonkers sight, it’s quite the sound. You can hear the fish sucking from the bottle. I don’t know why we didn’t saddle up, but we were perfectly happy to watch the kids do the heavy lifting.

Sister Ray

A Smack Of Jellyfish!

Sometimes I think the internet doesn’t need AI to hallucinate. I searched for the collective noun for jellyfish and the internet returned smack. OK. Sure. Fine. Here’s an entire smack of jellyfish, all in one tank.

What We Missed

There were also experiences we chose to skip. Train Street was one of them.

Train Street is one of Hanoi’s iconic images. If you just Google “Hanoi” and click on images, Train Street will be right there. Since we didn’t go, here’s a picture I scraped.

So what’s the big deal? It’s a really narrow street fronted with coffee shops, where you can sit inches from a train as it zooms past. People have been injured. Stupid people, so it’s OK. But still. Hà Nội is such an otherwise placid locale, you need to jack up the adrenaline by having a near-death experience.

Pass.

The other experience we chose not to experience was the Hoan Kiem Extravaganza. It’s a multimedia retelling of the story of the Golden Turtle god and the theft and return of his magic sword, Heaven’s Will. We were at the lake one night during the performance, much of which occurs on the bridge to Turtle Island and is visible from the shore.

It was an attractive concept specifically because it would clearly be cheese-stuffed, but what we saw was plenty, without feeling the need to immerse ourselves in it fully. It was a little riper than we’d expected.