Danang is a big, sprawling, intensely commercial beach town — the city with the most vibrant economy in all of Vietnam, according to Binh, my local Vidotour guy. The thing to take pictures of is the remnant of the US air base here during the Vietnam War. And the beaches are very pretty but bleachy white. Everywhere you look it’s bleachy this and bleachy that. Baking heat, white sands…and last year at this time is was cool and rainy, I’m told.
But I’m staying in the five-star Palm Garden Beach Resort, which is right on Cua Dai Beach and close to the historical city of Hoi An, which is 2000 years old.
Huong of Vidotour met me in Hanoi’s Movenpick lobby at 7:15 am, and we left for the airport directly in order to safely catch my 9:20 am flight to Danang (which is where I’m posting this from). I forget the driver’s name but he’s as cool and smooth as Huong. Scooter traffic is heavy in Hanoi around 7:30 am, and it gets a lot heavier an hour later.
Vietnam Airlines flights from Hanoi to Danang take exactly an hour.
The Vietnamese Dong vs. the US dollar is about 20,833 to 1. Seriously. So a lunch that might cost $5 or $6 US costs about 100,000 or 120,000 dong. 500,000 Vietnamese dong are worth about $24 dollars, so 2 million dong is worth $96 clams, give or take.
Huong leading me out of the Movenpick before jumping into the van.
It’s relatively common on Japan Airlines flights (or at least it was on last night’s Tokyo-to-Hanoi flight) for passengers to wear surgical masks, presumably out of fear that circulated fuselage air contains high levels of bacteria. Incidentally, I sat in coach from Honolulu on and nobody leaned their seat back into my 18 inches of private space. In fact no one leaned their seats back at all. Do Asian people understand more clearly how rude and thoughtless this is? Or were they simply fortunate enough to be born without the American asshole gene?
It’s now 6:09 am Thursday in Hanoi (3:09 pm LA time, Wednesday) and I have 55 minutes before heading back to Hanoi airport and the 9:20 am flight to Danang. And by the way…
Downtown Hanoi, looking north from my 9th-floor room at the Hanoi Movenpick — Thursday, 11.22, 6:05 am.
I was feeling okay about missing this weekend’s early-bird Les Miserables and Zero Dark Thirty screenings because the embargo review dates were 12.11 and 12.5 , respectively, which would have allowed me to see them and file concurrently after my return on 11.30. But Sony has now changed the ZDT review date to Sunday, 11.25, or as quickly as reviewers can post after they see it at the Pacific Design Center. The ball is in Les Miz‘s court.
I fell in love with Hanoi almost right away. My flight from Tokyo arrived at 10:25 pm (or 7:25 am LA time) so I couldn’t see all that much, and I haven’t even walked around Old Town, in part due to relentless solicitations (full-body massage, blowjobs…”what do you want, man?”) from young guys on scooters and one 30ish woman in particular who wouldn’t give up) so I’ve really only seen the outskirts and the glistenings of the Red River and the immediate neighborhood near the Hanoi Movenpick.
But I live for cities like this. Cities with natural beauty, economic vitality and tourist appeal but with a fair amount of funk and native aroma on the fringes, side streets and outlying areas, and which haven’t been noticably affected, much less smothered, by corporate plastic enterprises and bad-taste architecture and franchises or any of that 21st Century flotsam that has infected almost every large or mid-size city in the U.S.
Older cities always look and feel and smell different than you might anticipate. I haven’t begun to digest any of the aromas but I love that the corporate plastic element is almost non-existent. I realize, of course, that in celebrating this I am convincing 90% if not 95% of the typical tourists who might read this to never visit Hanoi, but them’s the breaks. Most of the people out there want synthetic comforts when they go on vacations.
Hanoi reminds me of the less slick, less wealthy sections of towns between Nice and Cannes combined with a little Mexico here and there. Elegance and history and poverty and civic pride and corporate investment and squares and government buildings and the red lights covering the walls of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. It’s not some nouveau-riche uptown super-burgh looking to hook in tourists who want the same bland aesthetic they can get in Atlantic City, Cancun or Las Vegas, but a storied, richly atmospheric, agreeably down-at-the-heels atmosphere — not in the center of town, mind, which is fairly flush and bucks-up and well-tended but in the outskirts and along the four-lane, amber-lit boulevards coming into town. And I mean that in the most flattering way imaginable.
The air is heavy and humid in Hanoi, delightfully so. I was told to prepare for fall-type weather… wrong! I’ve seen no fast-food franchises and only one supermall, and it didn’t look like anything in the States. The occasional brick and cobblestoned sidewalks and streets and walls along the boulevards are old and imperfect and rounded down. Hanoi has been here for a thousand years. The agreeably runddown look of it is mixed in with occasional remnants of French colonial homes and the occasional soul-less hotel or office building. And in the daytime, of course, there are tens of thousands of scooters and bicycles.
It’s 1:45 am now (or 8:45 am in LA). I have to get up at 6:30 am to be at the airport (roughly a 40 minute drive to the northwest) for a 9:20 am flight to Danang. I guess I’m going to try and crash.
Ninh, a very sweet and thorough guy hired by Videotour, met me at the gate and facilitated my Vietnamese visa and passport situation.
The Honolulu-to-Tokyo flight was hell, but we landed on time. Now I’m about to board a six-hour flight to Hanoi leaving in 35 minutes. (I wrote earlier that it was a four-hour flight.) This is brutal. It’s now 1:30 am LA time and 11:30 pm Honolulu time. I can at least report first-hand that the Tokyo Narita wifi is excellent — significantly faster than any airport wifi I’ve ever sampled. I’d read that wifi was faster here but wow. Few things in life turn me on as much as top-tier wifi.
The Honolulu-to-Tokyo flight leaves at 1 pm local time (or 3 pm LA time). Eight friggin’ hours in seat #18D, and then a one-hour layover (4 pm to 5 pm Tokyo time, and not on Tuesday but Wednesday) at Narita airport and then right off to Hanoi — a four-hour flight leaving at…now I’m confused but I know I arrive at 10:25 pm Hanoi time on Wednesday night or 5:25 am Honolulu time or 7:25 am LA time. (I think.). And no wifi the entire time.
LA is either 15 hours behind Hanoi time or nine hours in front of Hanoi but a day earlier.
$51 bills for the charger (which had to be bought as explained earlier) plus a $15 cab ride — done. The nearly-three-mile walk along Nimitz Highway was grotesque. New Jersey’s Route 22 or the Long Island Expressway as it gets into Queens have nothing on the Nimitz. Honolulu used to be a nice town, I’m sure. But we’re greedy for stuff and we need big fat stores to supply us with that stuff and big trucks and big thruways…the US of A is not what God envisioned way back when. Or maybe he did.
Jessica Chastain‘s Zero Dark Thirty character is based on “Jen”, a CIA analyst whose five years of intel assessment and laser focus led SEAL team Six to Osama bin Laden‘s compound in Abbottabad. This is according to ex-SEAL and “No Easy Day” author Mark Owen (a nom de plume) in a 60 Minutes interview piece.
“I can’t give her enough credit,” Owen says. “She…in my opinion, she kind of teed up this whole thing…we’d always talk back and forth, you know, what do you think the odds of this are? What do you think? And she was always like, ‘100 percent, he’s there.’ SEAL Team Six just took care of the last 40 minutes.” (Hat tip to Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet.)
Here’s a report by CNN’s Fred Pleitgen about an iPhone app called Color Red that gives Israelis a few extra seconds to take cover before an impending Hamas rocket strike. The designer of this app is a 13 year-old kid named Liron Bar. The app “has been downloaded more than 130,000 times since the conflict began,” Pleitgen says. Hugely impressive. It’s during moments like these when weight issues just evaporate…gone!
I always leave something important behind when I go on a trip. Yesterday I forgot to pack the battery charger for my Canon Powershot Elph 110S. We all know that iPhone 5 cameras deliver better-than-decent photos, but they don’t have a wide-angle lens. I feel I can’t do Vietnam without the Elph, so I’ve decided to walk three miles (for the exercise and scenery) down the Nimitz highway to the nearest Best Buy and see about a battery charger.
I landed in Honolulu at 10 pm local time (or midnight LA time) after a 5 and 1/2 hour flight. My Tokyo flight leaves tomorrow at 1 pm so I’m staying at an airport-vicinity dump called the Pacific Marina Inn, which is located among a cluster of drab warehouses and small businesses with two ugly gas stations the only beacons (apart from the PMI) of people-friendly commerce.
Pool area of the Pacific Marina Inn.
Aloha! Good to be here! The skanky industrial regions of Oahu can be just as ugly if not uglier than the skanky industrial regions around LA or Newark or Orlando.
As soon as the bags were in the room I stepped outside and breathed in the Hawaiian night air with the idea of going for a nice walk. But about 70 feet away in the darkness of the parking lot there were two curvy, bordering-on-plus-sized girls leaning against a car and making out, and every time I stuck my head out they turned around and gave me this look that said “so are you going to stare at us all night, pervy, or do we get a little privacy here?” So I began to feel intimidated. Like it or not, the girls had laid claim to the parking lot and intruders were not welcome.
Then I told myself I had just as much of a right to enjoy the parking lot as these girls did. Then I asked myself, “What would Ryan Adams do? He’s a sensitive guy, writes for Awards Daily, stands up for gay rights. He’d know what to do. I’m fairly certain he wouldn’t call these girls ‘lesbos’ but would he just roam around and take pictures and do what he wants or would he hide inside the motel room like me, unsure of his next move?”
