An open invitation

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This was published 13 years ago

An open invitation

The quiet Parisian ... the Metropole, Graham Greene's old Hanoi haunt, still offers European elegance.

The quiet Parisian ... the Metropole, Graham Greene's old Hanoi haunt, still offers European elegance.

Dugald Jellie explores Hanoi through the ages as the bustling city prepares for its 1000th birthday.

'I can't say what made me fall in love with Vietnam," Michael Caine says in the opening scene of Phillip Noyce's screen adaptation of The Quiet American. Based on Graham Greene's 1955 novel, the film's introductory monologue is a wistful longing for lost innocence and faraway places - an elegy for the exotic pleasures of opium and young women and rounds of cognac, all of which Greene was so fond.

"They say whatever you're looking for you will find here," Caine says. "They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes. But the rest has got to be lived."

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Greene and so many foreigners have come to Hanoi, a city of lakes on a bend in the Red River, to be seduced by the elegance of old Tonkin. "It's a little Paris of the tropics," thought American travel writer Harry Franck, who in the 1920s considered its beauty without peer in Asia.

Another visiting American, former presidential contender John McCain, had an altogether different experience. He literally fell from its sky, shot down in 1967 during Operation Rolling Thunder, dropping into a lake where he was fished out by locals.

The airman spent much of his 5½ years in Vietnam as a prisoner of war in Maison Centrale, a French colonial prison known locally as Hoa Lo ("Hell's hole") but to interned Americans as the "Hanoi Hilton".

In cloying heat, the prison is our melancholy first stop in a city that in living memory has made headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Think of Hanoi and most think of the bombs dropped from B-52s or "Hanoi Jane" Fonda and anti-war protesters, or a domino theory that threatened to place communism at Australia's back door.

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We've come instead to see the city as imagined by Greene, who visited in 1951 on assignment with Paris Match to file copy on Indochina as France's "Crown of Thorns".

The author observed a steamy colonial drama in which bars filled with Americans courting Chinese "taxi girls", as the French played dice games and the band played La Marseillaise.

And it was in this world at war that Greene did as he had always done: sought pleasure for pleasure's sake. In London he put up at the Ritz. In Hanoi he took a room at the Metropole.

We book four nights at this five-star landmark of European hospitality. Opened in 1901 as the Grand Hotel Metropole Palace, it joined at once the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, the Galle Face in Colombo, Raffles in Singapore, the Majestic Plaza in Shanghai and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Bangkok as one of those feted stopovers on ocean cruises east of Suez.

Baronial in its Beaux-Arts sensibilities, the Metropole has stood ever since as a grande dame of French ambitions, where a high society has witnessed all the city's changed fortunes. "It was the focus of diplomatic life," says Philip Knight, who, in 1979, was posted to Hanoi as the Australian ambassador. "The Metropole held a reception every Saturday evening where foreign diplomats all gathered to dance the night away."

In the heady days of empire, this is where rubber merchants and bourgeois ladies shared gossip and glasses of nuoc-soda (cognac with soda); where William Somerset Maugham stayed on his travels east; where Noel Coward was marooned with the city under curfew; and where Charlie Chaplin spent his honeymoon in 1936 after marrying his Hollywood leading lady in Canton.

Fonda stayed here in 1972, joining folk singer Joan Baez and writer Susan Sontag, taking a room for two months as American bombs whistled above. Plaques along its corridors recall suites used as the embassies of Australia, Japan, Italy, Sweden and Finland after Saigon's fall.

"I didn't want to drink in the Metropole with the senior French officers, their wives and their girls," says Fowler, the jaded British foreign correspondent in The Quiet American. Greene had arrived in Hanoi dispirited, seeking refuge from lost love and looking for a story.

The country got under his skin. "The spell was first class," he says in Ways of Escape. "With the tall elegant girls in white silk trousers, the pewter evening light on flat paddy fields ... the Chinese gambling houses [and], above all, that feeling of exhilaration which a measure of danger brings."

Our rapport with Hanoi is no less immediate, though risk-taking these days is found mostly in traffic. Streets are overrun with scooters and motorcycles. It's a daily carnival of four-stroke engines; a chorus of honking horns. A World Bank report in 2007 counted about 1.8 million motorcycles in the capital; or nearly one for every two citizens. And each time we cross the boulevards around Hoan Kiem Lake, it seems all of them come at us at once.

"The spirit of Hanoi is strongest by night, even stronger in the rain," wrote Bao Ninh in The Sorrow of War, a harrowing account of loss and the darkest days of the "American War". But I think now the spirit of Hanoi is a two-wheel, four-speed Honda; with personal freedoms and social mobility embodied in its 110cc engine. I take a night ride on a single-cylinder Belorussian Minsk, steered by an expatriate friend who says locals consider his bike an automotive relic. As with the city's postwar Moscow infrastructure, it reminds them of Soviet mediocrity.

Our friends take us to what they call the "Bunker Bar", a converted concrete air-raid shelter where loud rock plays and young Vietnamese lovers canoodle in hideaways. On the rooftop we drink rounds of Bia Ha Noi beer and catch a cooling breeze off West Lake. We watch the flickering lights of the city and discuss the bureaucratic oddities of a socialist free-market economy known as "red capitalism".

It's the result of "doi moi", the "renovation" policy that was introduced in 1986 at Hanoi's Sixth Communist Party Congress and which reopened the country to the West. One friend says his elderly landlady speaks Russian, Polish and Czech and, only recently, English. We withdraw money from ANZ tellers, drink Australian wines and step aside as a black Porsche negotiates the narrow streets of the Old Quarter.

This great leap forward has raised consumer expectations. Take, for example, shoe street. It appears on the map as Pho Hang Dau, on the edge of the Old Quarter, where centuries ago these crooked streets were arranged according to trade guilds. Traditionally, Pho Hang Dau sold beans. Now it sells shoes, rows and rows of them. Never have I seen so many Burberry checked loafers and Dolce & Gabbana thongs and so many heels emblazoned with Dior and Valentino.

All this glittering faux footwear is our entree to the knot of streets the French called the Cite Indigene. Trade patterns here are as old as the city itself, dating from 1010 when this riparian marketplace was freed from its Chinese yoke and renamed Thang Long ("ascending dragon"). We get lost in its great uproar of commerce and, with other tourists, find ourselves slurping bowls of pho (noodle soup), licking iced confections and haggling for parasols, silk scarves and tickets for a boat trip on Halong Bay.

"Pho" in Vietnamese means street, "hang" means merchandise and the name is usually followed by a product sold. So Pho Hang Ca translates as Fish Street. Pho Hang Gai is Silk Street. Pho Hang Non is where hats are sold. And it's on Pho Hang Quat (a street of fan sellers) that we meet a television crew with an improbably blonde reporter who looks hot and flustered.

She's covering the city on the eve of its 1000th birthday, to be celebrated on October 10 with a millennium concert and much pomp and pageantry. A large digital clock by Hoan Kiem Lake counts down to the date, which in digital shorthand is read auspiciously as 10:10:10.

Film and water-puppet festivals will mark the occasion and authorities hope festivities will raise awareness of a city that was off limits for Westerners for most of the past century.

"There was no tourism," says Knight, who recalls Hanoi in the late 1970s full of bicycles and bullock carts, with diplomatic corps on food rations. "It was very dark at night. Children studied under streetlights. I'm only aware of one Australian tour group in my time."

Last year, a record 157,000 Australians visited the country; up from 10,200 in 1991. Australians account for about 6 per cent of Vietnam's in-bound tourist market, more than France, Britain and Germany and second only to the US among non-Asian countries.

Everywhere in the capital we hear familiar accents. Outside Ho Chi Minh's concrete mausoleum, a mother and daughter from Rockhampton share our disappointment that Ho's embalmed body has been removed for a touch-up. At the oldest Buddhist temple in the country, Tran Quoc pagoda, we meet a young English-language teacher from Phillip Island. And later I meet the Australian ambassador, Allaster Cox, for afternoon tea. "I like the style of the city," he says. "It has a very European feel but I couldn't say the climate's easy."

It's hot and sticky during our visit. Our friends put ice in their red wine. "In summer you see how a man looks in 100 per cent humidity," one says. My armpits become reservoirs. Tissue paper gets stuck to my brow.

Under the limbs of a tamarind tree, drinking glasses of iced cafe noir by St Joseph Cathedral, we introduce ourselves to a Fitzroy North civil engineer who has lived and worked in Hanoi for two years. We ask what he likes most about the city. "Everything finishes at 11 o'clock and everyone goes home to get a good night's sleep," he says. "But it all starts up again at five."

Church bells chime on the quarter-hour. It's here in the heart of the French Quarter, sitting on footpath stools by the neo-gothic cathedral built in 1886 as a facsimile of Notre Dame in Paris, that I succumb to nostalgia. Students drink coffee and play with mobile phones. Motorcycle horns honk. But I think only of a world stopped: of lost dreams and faded grandeur and the grand folly that was French Indochina.

On our last morning we take a taxi to Long Bien Bridge, the iron-trussed engineering marvel that for a few moments was known all over the world when the Americans attacked in 1967. It was an easy target, spanning nearly 1.7 kilometres across the Red River. About 90 tonnes of explosives were dropped on it. It was bombed four more times.

Built by the French in 1903 and originally named Pont Doumer after governor-general Paul Doumer - often described as the father of French Indochina - the bridge stills stands, misshapen, like a crumpled Eiffel Tower. We walk its deck at dawn and high above the silty water we look back on an awakening city.

What we see is an elaborate fiction: an imposed city laid out in the Belle Epoque, behind dykes and with electric street lights and tramways and public urinals that all conferred Parisian notions of order. It was a European way of life transported to the banks of the Red River. A racecourse, department stores, cafes, grand public buildings and a baroque opera house upheld French ideals of pleasure and artifice.

Back in the bosom of the Metropole, we meet the Mayos over breakfast pastries. They're husband-and-wife mango farmers from near Cairns, both in their 70s and at the end of a 19-day tour of Vietnam.

We talk about mango growing and fruit picking. They offer a mango recipe. I write it down, then ask for their Hanoi highlight.

"This hotel," Ken says. "And the traffic. I've not seen anything like it."

Dugald Jellie travelled courtesy of Singapore Airlines and Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi.

FAST FACTS

Getting there

Singapore Airlines flies to Hanoi for about $1250 low season return from Melbourne and Sydney including tax; flying to Singapore (7½ hr) then Hanoi (3½ hr). This fare allows you to depart from Ho Chi Minh City.

Australians require a visa for a stay of up to 30 days.

Staying there

Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi has rooms from $275 a night twin share in the hotel's new Opera Wing. To indulge in the nostalgia of French Indochina, book a room in the hotel's historical wing; luxury rooms are priced from $300 a night and are full of five-star pleasures (French bathtubs, pillow menu, silk robes, chaise longue, king-size bed). For those lodging elsewhere, the Metropole is a tourist attraction in its own right, best seen at its famous Sunday brunch (dress up, bookings essential; $52 plus taxes). See sofitel.com or phone 1300 656 565.

When to go

Summer in Hanoi is uncomfortably humid and in winter a bitterly cold wind blows from China. The best time to visit is in spring (April, May) or autumn (October, November) despite the chance of a late-season typhoon and its inevitable drenching.

Millennial celebrations

The Imperial Citadel of Thang Long-Hanoi was recently added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, adding to the city's 1000-year celebrations. The government website for the event (thanglonghanoi.gov.vn) is in Vietnamese; for an English-language run-down of events see the "Millennial Anniversary of Hanoi" page on wikipedia.org.

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