The country of a thousand faces: Vietnam

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Hanoi
We leave the hotel and we are immediately catapulted into the chaos of the old quarter. Salesgirls hawkers on pavements, especially the typical conical straw hats and baskets to provide balance improvised stalls and inconvenience the passage of pedestrians. If you add, then, the motorbikes and bicycles parked shops and stalls of the show really can not walk. But if you want to experience the essence of a last and still authentic corner of Indochina, a real step back in time, turn to this maze of streets and alleys that is the old quarter.
Away from the crowded streets full of life and the center is the Temple of Literature founded in 1070. This is a rare example of Vietnamese architecture. In Ba Dinh Square, however, there is the pilgrimage of the most important Vietnam, namely the austere mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh overlooking the staircase from the great square, empty and ghostlike, in the center waving a large Vietnamese flag. Every evening at the theater, one can witness the spectacle of the puppets on the water. Leave Hanoi without seeing this fabulous art, and typically only Vietnamese, would be a crime.

Montagnards - flower H'mong
The train departs from Lao Cai to Hanoi train station at 22.00 and takes all night to cover the 340 km route. The tracks follow the course of Red River and stretching to inaccessible slopes. The convoy will proceed to walk very, very slow. This is the region of the Montagnards, the term coined during the French rule was maintained and is still 'to indicate the ethnic groups (over 50) living in North Vietnam, on the border with China and Laos. From Lao Cai with other off-road vehicles are required 2h30 'Can Cau to reach the main reason to come right down here. Every Saturday morning we set up one of the more exotic markets of Vietnam. For this scenic location where held, in the midst of an incomparable ring of mountains, and because it is organized dall'etnia of h'mong flower, whose women are famous for their showy multicolored clothes. Wear skirts and aprons embroidered with floral designs, and a cylindrical headgear wear necklaces, earrings and bracelets of silver. Trading in the money is not always needed, yet resists the ancient custom of bartering. Red peppers, distilled from rice and tobacco are the most goods sold. Among the banks s'aggirano teenagers we would go to the school and, instead, are now mature mothers carrying on their shoulders, in a sort of bag, their children.
A four-hour trek to the village of Ban Pho, near Bac Ha, allows you to dive into the social reality and observe the lifestyle of h'mong bloom. Among the hills echo sounds ancient and rural people working in the fields. Cultivate rice, wheat and opium. They are very hospitable and seeing arriving for roads rarely beaten by tourists, you will invite to join in their own home. At the end of the day people leave the camps and return home with a full basket on his shoulders.
The Sunday market in Bac Ha, the largest of the area is already taken by storm early in the morning. Front of shops and stalls Sellers are eating breakfast pho bo, rice noodles in broth. In the area reserved for the exchange of animals besides chickens, pigs, oxen of water, affecting the baby dog, whose meat is considered a delicacy. The market is fellow, but not frantic.

The magical landscapes Vietnamese
From the mountain down in the plains, this time using the paved road No. 70 and no longer the rail, to admire the classic views that more identify Vietnam: the Pagoda of the Perfume and Tam Coc.
At the bottom of the valley, s'attraversano intensively cultivated fields where a piece of land hundreds of working people, elbow to elbow, men employed to drive a rudimentary plow pulled by oxen and women trying to rake the field. Farmers are paid by the state. Once in My Duc a branch from the main road leading to Chùa Huo'ng where in sampang, boat rowing, close and low, similar to a canoe, you leave at a time of the Perfume Pagoda, one arm going up the river Song Day, in midst of a spectacular rocky landscape. The boatmen are strictly women, as the Vietnamese government has given this work to the families who had fathers, husbands or sons killed in war. After about 2 hours you leave the boat and began the path that leads on top of the mountain. Along the ascent meet other pagodas, but it is the Buddhist altar on the summit, the most sacred places in addition to being the best since it is located in a huge cave that is reached after a long flight of steps down ... Now that the sampang , on the way back, leaving you to drag, but only just, the weak current, women martyr row without fatigue and conversations on the river by a passing boat to another. They feel wafts the sound of this strange language of monosyllables.
Before Tam Coc, a short detour leads to the park, Cuc Phuong, inaugurated by Ho Chi Minh in person in 1963, the last remaining unspoilt area of Vietnam where wildlife have been miraculously preserved. Along a circuit of 8 km you try the thrill of adventure in a lush tropical forest, gripped by the suffocating humidity and the incredible sounds of the forest. And if you really do not see the gibbon, monkeys endemic endangered, can be observed at the Center for the Rescue of World Records once case where rescued, cared for and are prepared to reintegrate into their natural environment.
A Tam Coc is followed, now back in sampang, surrounded by an incomparable landscape, the winding course, this time, the Ngo Dong river that occasionally disappears under the large green cucuzzoli which are the characteristic landscape of the place. Everywhere there are impressive rocky peaks above the ground, apparently insurmountable, but with excess passing under the boat. Here sampang, are pushed so curious: women lying half driving the oars with their feet.
Along the way to Halong City, the minibus, through endless expanses of rice dotted with thousands of colors. Are the clothes of women engaged in the collection, especially the characteristic cone hat.

Halong Bay
Geology in the bay's up is creating a surreal seascape consists of thousands of limestone pinnacles which emerge from the waters, emerald color, the Gulf of Tonkin. The landscape is unique in the world, it seems the result of a spell. Hiring a boat, go over the appropriateness of drug use caves, relax in the sun and make endless hot water baths in the sea of China, as it exploration of the bay meet real floating villages. As the craft of which reduces the speed to cross safely. Children are not playing in the street, but in water. Taxis are not cars, but boats. The houses, school, gas station, everything floats. In the Bay of Island Titop the moon is an almost perfect circle above us, in this lost world that seems impossible just 31 years ago 'we fought a terrible war.