Hanoi is a city of the high water mark.  The capital of floods, under siege from the nearby Red River that flows above it and which is scarcely kept at bay by crumbling, inadequate dikes that burst every few  months.  Throughout the year, as the river breaches the city walls, foul water rises out of Hanoi’s overflowing wretched underbelly and through the town like a Biblical deluge.

Rats, snakes and other subterranean vermin are flushed out of the sewers and thrown about on the filthy tide past the old colonnaded entrances of the grand French colonial villas and the crumbling Vietnamese shop houses.  When the waters eventually subside, the filthy, blackened streets are littered with rat corpses lying on broken pavements and in congealed gutters.  Meanwhile, the punch-drunk survivors cluster in sodden, panic-stricken hordes at the drains desperate to flee back to the forbidding underworld they inhabit.

Back on the half drowned streets the stoic Hanoians roll down their trousers, push back the water-logged sandbags that cover the entrances to their homes and once again go about their business with their usual nonchalant mania.  Within moments of the deluge stopping, motorbikes carrying trees, dead animals, live animals, mountains of packed ice, whole families, scythe through the receding waters drenching everyone in their wake.  Hanoi is the only city in the world where you get soaked after the rains stop.

Continue reading →