We walked out of the hotel into the streets of Hanoi and headed for St. Joseph’s Cathedral. We wandered past shop stalls serving their steaming breakfast bowls, lines of plastic chairs, and tiny tables where the shop patrons ate their morning offerings. The nighttime did not do this enchanting city justice, I thought as we turned the corner to the majestic Cathedral above.
It was a towering and beautiful site. It was only 140 years old, but like most things in Hanoi, it looked ancient. Worn by the Jungle rain and toxic smog, she had a weathered look that one might think was older than time itself. A Madonna statue holding the infant child stood in a fenced-in courtyard at the front of the Cathedral Mall. We enjoyed a quick photo op and started down the tree-laden streets. The verdant city behind us quickly swallowed the cathedral.
This is one of the greenest cities I’ve ever seen, and it gave it the feel of the jungle trying ever powerfully to hold back the encroaching march of modernization. We walked past the towering trees on the sidewalks and headed for Sword Lake. It was a beautiful lake in the heart of Hanoi surrounded by an enchanting park that kept the sprawling city at bay and gave the city center a real-life feeling of a city in a fantasy novel. It’s hard to describe the feeling a city gives you that’s both Jungle and a metropolis. It seduces you into an uncontrollable sense of tranquility like a siren on a rocky shore about to snare its next victim. Graham Greene writes in the Quiet American, “And then, Something just happens, as you knew it would. And nothing can ever be the same again.” That moment for me was right now.
We walked to the park that lined the lake, and I found a bench to sit and observe. This city is so lush and organic that it doesn’t feel like a city at all. It feels like a Jungle people happen to live in. I can not do the beauty of this city justice in words afforded by the English language. There simply aren’t words profound enough. I was falling in love with a place, an idea, a concept that was Hanoi. This city was so intoxicating, and I, in the one hour that I had been on her streets, had madly, deeply fallen for her.
In the center of the lake was a small island with a millennia-old temple perched at its center as the great keeper of the ancient lake’s shores. The other side of the lake was hard to see for the thick, polluted haze, but it was no matter. Nothing could break the spell this bewitching city had cast on me, no matter how bad. As I sat and breathed in her pheromones that still heightened my attraction, I watched people placing fish into her algae-dyed waters. Diễm informed me that it was part of a Buddhist ritual for the new year that represented freedom from one’s problems and renewal. I stared at the low-hanging limbs that seemed to massage the lake’s surface in the mild Jungle breeze.
After an hour, I got up, and we headed for a circumnavigation of the lake. As we walked, it became hard to believe what I was seeing. The city streets were covered with a Jungle canopy. I tried to catch the dusty sun rays as they penetrated in and out of the canopy in the soft tropical breeze and cast their light on the streets below. The giant African Mahoganies towered high above the rooftops, providing cover from the intense jungle sun. It is a sight one must see with their own eyes. Though some of the over 1 million trees in Hanoi are several hundred years old, the real story of its push to be the tree capital of the world starts with Hồ Chí Minh and the end of the Vietnamese civil war.
President Họ, as he was affectionately called, began the tree initiative during the war to replace lost forests from the ravages of battle. It was started in the capital as a symbolic gesture and continues every spring to this day. In the old quarter, however, the story begins farther in the past. Here, the same families have owned these homes for centuries. Each generation has appointed a caretaker for the tree in front of their home as if it were a family member—the resulting streets are lined with healthy centuries-old trees beautifully shading their grateful patron’s homes.
At one end of the lake, I came upon the statue of Lý Thái Tổ. He lived from 974 – 1028 and made Hanoi the Capital of Vietnam, then Dai Việt, in 1010. He sat towering over the south edge of the lake in the circular mall with its dragon-edged marble steps. We passed a Vietnamese courthouse in its simple yet grand communist style and walked into the Asian-inspired section with its local architecture and pagoda-dotted banks. The striking contrast between marshy backdrops, Pagodas, misty jungle parks, and euro-colonial architecture gives this city a feel, smell, and taste unlike any other place.
As I walk down Pho Hang Trong Street, I’m transported to 1920 as the worn French buildings remind me of scenes from old black and white movies of life in the jungle cities of a still colonized globe. As I approach the roundabout at a convergence of several streets, I step into a shadeless avenue. The hot tropic sun reminds me of where I am, and I head back to the Hotel to lose my sweater and find more appropriate clothes.
