terse & at large – The Travel Log

It looks like I’ve finally decided on the direction this blog will take.

Interspersed with rants, raves and general silliness about living in Singapore, I’m going to use this to supplement my fotolog and as a record of the thoughts I had while travelling. Since I always have a journal when I’m out of the country, I don’t expect it to be too much of a problem transferring everything into this format.

So, without any more fanfare, here goes:

Hoan Kiem Lake
The Lake of the Returned Sword. There’s a local legend about how a sword was used by a hero to defeat his enemies and how, at the end of the hostilities, he’d returned it to the turtle who’d given it to him in the first place. Very Arthur and Excalibur-esque (except that in the Asian story, the hero returned the sword, and not hoard it for the rest of his life). What I was more interested in was how Hokkien the Vietnamese words looked. I know phonetically it wouldn’t be pronounced the same way but it was interesting nonetheless. To me anyway. For the rest of the trip I was making guesses at what the words meant in the Vietnamese. I know, very Rain Man of me, but it helped pass the time when travelling from point to point.

We liked this lake. One of the first photos I took of Hanoi was at this lake. In fact, by the end of the our trip, we’d visited or walked by the lake 9 out of the 12 days we were in the city. It helped that there was a café in the southwestern corner of the lake where we could rest from walking, which we had done a lot of too.

It’s also quite popular with the locals. We’ve seen families strolling along its banks, kids playing badminton in the mornings and generally people just enjoying the scenery – which is, come to think of it, hard to come by in the middle of a dusty, urban setting. What I liked? People. Enjoying. The. Scenery. No one stops in the middle of their workday to do something like that any more. What I also liked was teenagers coming down to the lake and spending time there. In Singapore, most kids would be seated in front of their computers by now, playing games and surfing for porn before their parents come home from work. The sunset there wasn't half-bad too. The only time we weren’t keen on the place was when the weather turned an unseasonal cold (forcing me to buy myself a USD10 Timberland parka) and there was a south-westerly wind blowing across the lake. The café turned into a not very fun place to be.

Within moments of arriving, YM exclaimed, “There’s kayaking on this lake?” It turns out that it was only a parks employee whose job it was to remove all the trash from the lake. Still it was enough to make me think about kayaking. Which we all did, but that’s another day’s entry.

In the middle of the lake, there’s also the Thap Rua (Turtle Tower) or the Tortoise Pagoda. Quite cool. No one has access to it (unless you have a boat) and it lit up most nights. I found it amazing that there would be something like that in the middle of its own island in the middle of a lake in the middle of a city.

I knew from the moment I saw the lake and the people around it that I was going to enjoy being in Hanoi.

Next entry: Van Mieu (the Temple of Literature)