Welcome Home

My plane lands late. I breeze through customs and immigration. Airport officials are super kind– a woman in uniform approaches to point out free trolleys as I struggle with my gear, and stands watch over my bags as I retrieve one. I’m so glad that Thanh, an Asia Outdoors staff member, has come to meet me at the airport, since I’ve arrived too late to catch the last bus of the day toward the island. Instead of cluelessly catching a cab to the hostel district and attempting to locate a place to stay, Thanh takes me to a friends place where we drop my bags, I get a shower and we dip around the corner for a meal before I return and crash for a couple hours. We then head to a health center where I pay $15, including tip, for multiple mineral baths, an epic massage, ginger tea and soup, taking the edge off my 30+ hour journey.

The minute I step into Vietnam my lifelong Kosher diet flies out the window. It’ll be hard enough to avoid wheat, dairy, eggs and soy due to allergies while I’m here. Over the past few years I’ve realized that, although I’ve kept to Kosher foods by habit after being raised in a practicing Jewish household, Judaism in my life has long been more about culture and identity than about literal belief and practice. Eating pork and shellfish doesn’t change who I am, how I grew up, who loves me, where I come from or what I believe. Ergo, when my hosts take me around the corner to a café that serves soup with pork balls, rice noodles and salad for my first meal in the country, I eat without worry.

Seeing whole roasted dog on a spit sold on the side of the street, however, will take some getting used to.

Roads are, for lack of better words, a free-for-all. On split highways, people usually drive in the right direction. Motorists obey signals in the few places they exist, although traffic resumes moving well before green lights appear. On the vast majority of streets, busses, motorbikes and a highly disproportionate number of Mercedes and Lexus disregard speed limits and lanes, winding around each other and honking pell-mell as they slow, twist and speed around cross-traffic in major intersections. As we wander down the street, Thanh instructs me to just keep walking– cars and motorbikes will miss me. If a bus comes up behind me though, I should probably take a step or two out of the way.

Saturday we take a bus from Hanoi to the coastal city of Hai Phong, travelling through rice fields interspersed with sprawling buildings probably housing various production factories. A cab whose driver assumes I’m Thanh’s wife transfers us to a harbor street where shops, cafes and booking booths back the river, separated from massive cranes by slim, single-story concrete walls.

The speedboat we catch takes us outward from the muddy waters of the river’s mouth, weaving between tankers and buoys toward Cat Ba. The island rises green from the sea, erratic, jagged peaks and valleys cloaked in trees and vines that spill down over limestone outcrops banded in black and white. Jungle-topped limestone karsts rear up from the ocean, sheer cliffs glowing golden in the afternoon sun as we round the south side of Cat Ba. And so we pull into the harbor, offload gear and make our way through a giant orange concrete arch. We cross the town’s brightly-colored hotel-lined waterfront main street and enter the first building we come to. We climb to the second floor where I flop down onto a sprawling woven box top full of beanbags in the office of Asia Outdoors, and I say hello to my new workplace.

Shortly thereafter, I sleep really, really well.