Hanoi
I did not travel that far
to look for what I already knew
You know me. When I travel, I want the local version of the place. Not the polished one made to make a visitor feel safe.
In Hanoi, that meant small stools in narrow streets, eating where local people were eating, watching what arrived at the table and adapting to it.
Chopsticks? Chopsticks.
No fork waiting on the side “just in case.” I have never liked travelling that way. If I go somewhere, I want to meet the place where it lives.
Rice, broth, noodles, herbs, bowls passed quickly, steam rising in front of you while scooters and voices move through the street. That was part of the richness of being there.
Two days, one night
Then came
Ha Long Bay
It was our first time in Hanoi, so for Ha Long Bay we did something sensible. We booked through an agency.
Two days. One night on the boat. Everything organised.
We arrived, settled in, and the boat moved out between those immense limestone shapes rising from the water.
A few hours passed.
And I started to notice something.
There were no tourists.
Or almost none. We seemed to be the strangers.
It was unusual, yes. But we had not come all that way to count tourists, so we carried on.
That evening
A table for two
in a room full of family
Dinner came. Everyone gathered in the centre of the boat.
And there we were.
Two foreigners. At our own little table. Surrounded by a group of perhaps twenty or twenty-five Vietnamese people who clearly all knew each other.
Then the head of the family came over.
He made room at their table and, in the way we managed to understand one another, explained something very simple:
They were one family.
We were not going to sit alone.
We did not share a language.
We shared a table.
Somehow, that was enough.
The table did the rest
Bowls moved.
Glasses went up.
Once we sat down, the distance disappeared quickly.
They served us from their dishes. We tasted what they were eating. Rice. Soup. Vegetables. Meat. Bowls and plates moving from one side of the table to the other.
Chopsticks in hand, of course.
They raised their glasses to us. We raised ours back. People tried to speak. We tried to understand. Somebody laughed. Then everybody laughed.
They spoke Vietnamese. I spoke Arabic and English. English was not going to save us that night.
Hospitality did.
Another language
Some things do not need translation
You learn very quickly that conversation is not only words.
A plate pushed toward you means something. Someone placing more food in your bowl means something. A glass lifted in your direction means something. A chair moved so you can sit closer means something.
I did not understand their sentences. They did not understand mine.
But we all understood: eat with us.
Dinner was not the end
Then came
the karaoke
After dinner, they asked us to stay with them for the karaoke they had organised.
At that point, whatever invisible line had separated “their family” from “the two foreigners” had disappeared.
We had eaten together. We had laughed together. Now apparently we were going to sing together too.
I am not sure a shared language would have improved the karaoke anyway.
The next morning
Still at
the same table
Morning came.
And once again, we ate with them.
Breakfast had the same warmth as dinner. Bowls, rice, broth, herbs, chopsticks. The bay outside. The family around us.
By then, it no longer felt strange that we were there.
That may be the most beautiful part. Nobody had made a speech about welcoming us. They had simply done it.
Only later did it make sense
The wrong boat?
We eventually understood what had happened.
This was not a normal tourist group. It was a family from a village who had rented the boat to spend time together.
And through an error by the agency, the two of us had somehow been placed right in the middle of them.
An administrative mistake, perhaps.
But I have never remembered it as a mistake.
The way I choose to remember it
The wrong boat.
The right reason.
Some people would simply say the agency made an error. And factually, perhaps that is all that happened.
I choose to see something else in it too.
At the other end of the world, in a country whose language I did not speak, Allah allowed me to find the thing I value most when I travel: not simply seeing a culture, but being welcomed inside it for a moment.
We had gone looking for Ha Long Bay. We found a family table.
Perhaps we were on the wrong boat
for exactly the right reason.
Ha Long Bay, Like Family
We arrived as two strangers.
By dinner, someone had already made room for us at the family table.