Padi..padi..and more padi
Just got back from my Hanoi trip.
I’m beginning to think that I’m pretty good at traveling alone. It helped me to be more independent… uh-huh…..hence the need to pack less and light so I don’t have to drag my luggage everywhere. I’ve survived almost 3 trips in solo-traveling. I can’t really count 3 though cos when I was in Japan, half the trip was accompanied later by the hubby.
Anyway, Vietnam to me, is like KL twenty or thirty years ago. Though Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam, it did not look anything like any other cities I’ve been to. The roads were practically decorated with all kinds of motorbikes and bicycles of colours and sizes.
Anyone could start a vendor business in the
street with just a stick and two baskets. Seriously! All sorts of
fruits, vegetables and even hard bread vendors were squatting at any
nook or corner.
Although this trip, I was mostly and conveniently traveling in the comfort of the tour bus, I tried to walk around as much as I could. The weather was cold and it’s still winter. When I first landed in the airport, I kept thinking why the locals were wearing thick winter clothes. A few hours later, I knew why. The weather was quite chilly with gusts of wind repeatedly blowing at our faces.
The landscape was a dull grayish picture, with lots of padi fields stretched across the flat lands of Hanoi. It was a long stretch, I say. I’ve never seen such flatter lands before, except the yellowish grasslands of the Australia bush.
Well, since Vietnam is still struggling from post-war years, I could see that the people are recuperating but the economy is still at a crawling pace. Many are still facing poverty and this was realistically dawned to me when I was besieged by a mob of ragged children, trying to sell postcards and old women who kept pestering me in Vietnamese, to have a look at some potato-look-alike vegetable.
Instantly, I recalled back my experience when I went to Shenzhen a couple of years back. The scene when I saw numerous beggars feeding their babies with the scraps they found in the dumps. I had a raw feeling of sadness then, that in some countries, the gap between the poverty-stricken and the filthy rich is so huge that it posed a big socio-economy problem and it doesn’t seem to improve through the years. Being in Malaysia makes me feel really blessed.
Here are some pics I would like to share.
One of the classy restaurants I went to dine. Brother’s Cafe provides an elegant ambience where we dined in the courtyard of a
refurbished ancient Vietnamese temple. Dining under the stars in the
open courtyard was a very romantic experience indeed. Sigh! Wished the hubby was with me to experience it.
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Water is very precious in Vietnam because tap water is not filtered and treated, thus the water is undrinkable even after boiled.
Therefore, in every restaurant we went, each person was only allowed a bottle and water was really expensive too!
I feel so lucky that we have proper water treatment in Malaysia 
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The endless fields of padi. This was the greener padi pic I took. Most of the padi field were now in dry yellowish colour.
