I love this town.
The frenetic pace, the unapologetic culture, the dynamism of Hanoi. This is a city always 
on the move; horizontal, with scooters swarming through teaming streets; vertical, as mammoth yellow cranes raise buildings up from craters into towering apartment complexes; and spanning the air, as new bridges are built across the Red River.
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Always on the move yet anchored in its rich culture. Five thousand years old, this place. A rebellious, 
quarrelsome, and unbreakable city that weathered attack by the French, the Chinese, the Americans and the Japanese, ultimately defeating them all.
I’ve been across all of Southeast Asia; Hanoi is a city like no other. By that I mean: Saigon, Bangkok, these places often feel like they could be anywhere in the region. Same same, but different, as they say. Not Hanoi, never Hanoi. There’s only one place like this, so distinctly Vietnamese it’s impossible to imagine it being anywhere else.
I love these streets. I’ll miss these streets.
The gnarled, five-foot tall women carrying bamboo poles across their shoulders, right across the Old Quarter, laden with sufficient fruit or vegetable that an oversized Westerner would struggle to lift; thousands upon thousands of kilometres of thick black electrical wires, twenty or thirty or more cables 
bundled together, legal and illegal, twisted around trees and polls like some noxious native species trying to strangle the life out of competitors; the smell of coffee or fish sauce or street meat or sewer (usually all four) as I walk around this town.
Live and unshielded arc welding committed by men wearing no eye protection as they fit signs on stores, new shops that will last three weeks before going under and the arc welding starts again; speakers mounted on bicycles blaring exhortations to buy flowers or pho or government propaganda; crumbling Buddhist temples sandwiched between handbag shops and cafes; the popularity of double denim. These things I love. Especially the denim.
I’ll miss Hanoian locals treating 15 degrees Celsius like an arctic winter, and wearing the thick puffy jackets and woollen beanies to match. I’ll miss the summer months when the men roll up shirt to expose sun-drenched belly as some sort of cooling system, then squat next to the gutter in plastic thongs and smoke cigarettes as they watch the traffic. The same men who sit on 30cm high stools in sidewalk bia hois, downing beer from lunchtime into evening, their drinking songs rising in gusto and volume with each passing hour.
I’ll miss the 1-metre wide shopfronts that lead back to 4-story art galleries or silk shops, hidden back 
from the streets; the red-roofed Cyclos peddling with miserable-looking tourists around town (in three years I must have seen hundreds of tourists riding these things, every time they looked miserable).
This town and its national flags everywhere; its traffic cops wearing caramel uniforms and white batons soliciting bribes from taxi drivers; the six story-high karaoke joints; songbirds in bamboo cages that line the streets; the men on motor scooters walking their dogs, on a long leash, along main streets during peak hour.
And the noise: always the noise. I won’t miss that, but I may 
get nostalgic for it. The beeping and the speakers mounted on traffic lights and the hawkers and the engines and the shouted conversation: Ha Noi is called the City of Noise for a damn good reason. This makes the signs at regular intervals that display a red slash through a flugelhorn (mean to signify ‘no beeping’) all the more amusing.
I’ll miss those streets devoted to one product and one product only: toy street, silver street, leather jacket street, winter jacket street; the streets for bamboo ladders, pot plants, ceremonial objects (alters, temple flags), birdcages, electronics, bike repair, and myriad other items. The business logic of clustering all together 
was never quite clear to me; but I’ve a mind indoctrinated by dry western economics, so apparently successful alternatives always confound, at first.
I’ll miss those good cafes with great coffee, where the table on one side has six hip Vietnamese teenagers sitting on each other’s laps as they look at the other’s iPhone, and where the table on the other side has a single western tourist blogging on an Apple computer, taking up a table meant for four. Those tourists – blogging and tweeting and YouTubing, and googling the hippest place for coffee and Wi-Fi; all while the frenetic, vibrant world outside fades and is forgotten.
Travel ain’t what it used to be.
I’ll miss the Taxis. Ubiquitous, of massively variable quality, but so reliably present I wonder why any 
Westerner would get a car here. I’m told there are tourist trap cabs in the city that, when the driver presses a button, will make the meter run triple. In three years I’ve never encountered one of those.
But I have encountered a taxi with a no humping sign in the back (specifically, doggy style). Another had a young bloke with aviator sunglass and the trifecta of things he worshipped glued to the dashboard: cognac, a racing car, and Buddha. One-upping this triumvirate was a 30 cm TV he’d built into the dashboard running a program about Vietnamese lingerie models. I rode in a cab where the driver sung songs in praise of Ho Chi Minh, and in another where the driver applauded my son’s rendition of Let it Go.
Taxis with pineapples shoved into the spot where the cup holder should be, for luck and for their aroma. Taxi drivers with their little fingernails grown long (when I asked a female Vietnamese friend why so many men had long fingernails, she said: “because they’re lazy with nothing else to concentrate on but growing nails. Don’t marry a man with long nails.”) Good advice.
I’ll miss the barbers that set up shop on the side walk with nothing more than a plastic chair, a 
mirror propped up on a fence, and some scissors. One dollar for a haircut, and extra dollar if you want your ear wax cleaned out with a long, sharp metal skewer.
I’ll miss watching from my taxi the toddlers fast asleep on scooters, wedged between parents, one helmet between the three of them (dad always seems to be the one to wear it). I’ll miss the welcome I received, in every business, courtesy of having my son with me. Picked up and cooed over, delight blossoming on faces. This is a culture where family is central, and children are adored. When I return to Australia one of the things that always strikes me are the way people walk, angry, in expensive suits, ears
stuck to phones. At how our kids are either ignored or scowled at by overworked, selfish, angry large people.
Yeah, sure, Ha Noi overdoes it by making my son appear centre of the universe. Sure, it plays into the conceit every parent possesses – that their child is the cutest, most interesting, smartest creature to ever poop on a hardwood floor. I get that. But I’ll take a place that loves children over one that ignores them.
There are some things I won’t miss. The three months of the year when the sky remains unseen, hidden by 
heavy pollution. I won’t miss that. Nor will I miss the traffic jams, their chaos and cacophony, when my son is tired and we both just want to get home to sit on the couch and watch Miles from Tomorrowland.
I’ll be glad to see Australia, too, and all those things we take 
for granted. Inhale the clean air, walk around with bare feet on green grass, and lie on white sand beaches untouched by pollution. When you travel for long enough, especially in this part of the world, you realise just how rare these things are, just how lucky Australia is.
But Ha Noi, whatever its faults, is a place that gets under your skin. A mad, proud, and quarrelsome creature.
I miss you already.
