Cruising the Red River

The Red River in Hanoi
The boat is the office of the Red River Tourist Company.
This shot was taken when our boat was leaving it.

This is my 50th blog and it's about the river that carries my name. In 1954 my father, who was a teenager from southern Vietnam, traveled on a Polish ship to Hanoi for training, hoping 2 years later he would go back home as a cadre. The American war started and the country was divided into north and south for 21 years. He met my mother, a Hanoian woman, in the early 1970s. They married and settled down in Hanoi, before he had a chance to return home to see his parents in 1975, when the country was reunited. My parents gave me the name “Red River” in memory of Hanoi, where they met and had decided to live together for the rest of their lives, while my sister was given the name of his home town in southern Vietnam.

Direction board

The river which originates in Yunnan province of China comes into Vietnam at Lào Cai province and runs through northern Vietnam (including Hanoi). It’s called “Red River” which is the chief river of northern Vietnam (1,175 km long). The river has red water due to alluvium (silt). It also forms a great delta, before entering the Gulf of Tonkin at Nam Định province.

When I was a little girl, my family lived near the river outside the dike system. We experienced many floods over the years, especially during the high water season from July to September. I still remember the day when we woke up to find all pots/basins floating around our beds and we had to walk around in the water. Power was cut off on those days and we had to move to our grandparents house or my father’s office for a few days. Nowadays, there are rarely flooding on the river, thanks to Hoà Bình hydropower plant built in the upstream.